Why You Should Leverage Your Passion for Unlocking the Path to Success

Why You Should Leverage Your Passion for Unlocking the Path to Success

Miracles might happen when you leverage your passion!

To leverage your passion happens when you jump into your sneakers and start running at 5 AM? What motivates a guy to go out and run 30km on Sunday morning instead of staying in bed and resting? How come that a 62 years person quits his corporate job to start his own business?

All this type of questions boils down to one single word: Passion!

So far, so good, but what is passion?

How do you define it? In my opinion, the answer I found on Quora explains it all in a condensed and appropriate way.

You can take advantage of most passions in life. In my case, to leverage passions of marathon running and entrepreneurship works perfectly well.

First, both activities have their foundations on long-term goals. You can impossibly start training for a marathon and successfully execute the race two weeks later. Entrepreneurship works the same way.

There doesn't exist any business where you start today, and two weeks later, your business is complete and profitable. Also, see my previous article, "Why Running A Business Is A Marathon And Not A Sprint."

As an Entrepreneur You Leverage Your Passion Every Day

What happens in the mindset when you start to train for marathons? We are talking about 42,195 meters or 26.2 miles. For sure, a lot of things, but passion is one of the ingredients.

You cannot execute a marathon plan in a sprinter race speed, but it takes time. The confidence you get will be tremendous. When lining up for the first marathon race ever, you'll know that you have trained according to your plan. Everything is prepared correctly for success.

To train and run a marathon, you need to have: A Passion, a Challenge, a Decision, and a Plan.

Think about any successful entrepreneur you know, and for sure, there is a real passion for their mission. Indeed, a weighty decision was taken before the whole business project launch, with a detailed plan to reach the goal. And here we go! Challenge every single hurdle during the race towards the final destination.

The "Wall"

It is more likely to be a rule than an exception that some barriers turn into severe obstacles.

For a marathon runner, this can be represented by the famous "Wall," somewhere around kilometer 30 (18.5 miles) when the body is empty of all energy.

The immediate feeling is that here it all ends. You often associate the "wall" with a whole range of symptoms, such as dehydration, nausea, dizziness, headache, a lack of coordination and muscle spasms, flawed thinking, poor decision-making, and so on‌.

Even if we are suffering hitting the wall for all fighters out there, it is also a trigger, a trigger to manage the challenge. After a few races, you know exactly what happens when it is time to hit the wall. The good thing is that you can train for it and take measures to prevent and minimize all adverse effects.

The professional runners, the best regularly coming from African countries, also have to pass through this more challenging part of the race. However, they keep a tremendously even pace throughout the whole race.

When the world record was set in Vienna, Austria in October 2019 by Eliud Kipchoge from Kenya, at the fantastic finish time of 1:59:40, he had only a two-second pace difference between the slowest and fastest kilometer.

How did he deal with the wall?

Training, experience and more training‌..

You cannot find a single biography of great entrepreneurs without talking about their failures. Talking about real "hitting the wall" events, the first one popping up is when they fire Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, the company where he was the co-founder.

How did he act when he hit the "wall"?

He continued his "race" as planned, started new companies, and acquired other companies to continue his mission. At that time, he had enough money to retire and live a peaceful

family life for the rest of his life. However, his agenda was different. When back again to Apple, he reinvented the company's image to a new level, and the rest of the success is a well-known story.

A true entrepreneur with a burning passion is unstoppable!

The same goes for marathon runners, especially when hitting the wall. What do entrepreneurs and marathon runners then have in common?

Trying to find the key attributes, the first one coming up as the most obvious is that the approach towards the "wall" in both cases never includes complaints. It relates to a negative attitude, and both entrepreneurs and runners are searching for solutions.

Research even shows that exposure to as little as 30 minutes of negative material peels away neurons in the brain's hippocampus, an essential part of your brain for problemsolving. With a real passion and a serious plan on how to reach the goal, you can more easily overcome the "wall."

The same goes for real entrepreneurs as for serious marathon runners. It's a combination of activities where you continuously leverage passions, passion for your running, and love for your business.

The freedom and the privilege to practice this fantastic marathon running sport requires a lot of coordination to materialize. One part of the coordination is the other activities in life and a move compatible with the marathon training.

Time and flexibility Entrepreneurship, in any form, fits nicely into a passionate runner's agenda. Adding on Internet-based entrepreneurship makes it even more compatible, as you can easily leverage your passion. Time is always a limited resource, but in this case, you need maximum flexibility. Both entrepreneurship and marathon training are time-consuming activities.

There are tons of similarities in entrepreneurs' and marathon runners' characters, making this analysis fascinating. Different studies show that marathon runners are better entrepreneurs.

The willingness to take calculated risks and the ability to live outside or on the edge of your comfort zone are essential characteristics to have.

Among us enthusiastic and passionate marathon runners, there is an expression going like this: "You don't need to be crazy, but it helps."

What people outside our group view as craziness are "mandatory" activities based on our total focus on the plan. For example, during summertime, you need to start your long run training sessions very early in the morning (5 AM or earlier) to avoid the heat after the sunrise.

Was it craziness or passion when Bill Gates and his team were to get ready with the first embryo to what later should be the first version of Microsoft Windows, and literally were working around the clock feeding themselves on pizzas and Pepsis?

The nuance between craziness and passion is hard to see unless you are an entrepreneur ‌‌or a marathon runner.

How to Leverage Your Passion if You Have More Than One Passion?

On different occasions, I have tried to motivate and pull friends into my marathon "craziness." Yes, people have run along with me a couple of times, but that's it. You just have to accept that not everyone is sharing your particular passion. Maybe they have other interests that don't appeal to you.

For a long time, I built my business based on an audience having marathon running and entrepreneurship in common with my own combined passion package. It took me some time to find that this group of people is quite a tiny audience.

It doesn't mean that you have to abandon your passion mix but creating an additional kit of passions.

As a senior citizen (69 years within three months), I notice that people of the same age group face the same retirement problem. You need something to do to make your life as retired meaningful. In many cases, the reality of a radically reduced income compared to your active working life hits as a surprise.

Whatever case you can identify yourself with, there is a considerable need for support to get rid of these typical retirement issues. Thus, a new passion for me is to reach out to likeminded seniors to turn around a problem into an opportunity.

After investigating the market, you will notice that the principal obstacle is the mindset. As a senior, there is an almost default belief that online businesses are reserved for younger generations. Once that false assumption is gone, the number of openings is practically infinite.

Leverage Your Passion Without Knowing What it is?

When challenging people about their passion, it happens that they don't know what passion they have. Telling someone to follow their passion is not the same as following your dreams.

Often passion is a combination of skills, talent, and good luck. The list can be long and even though, and even that could result in not being enough.

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." – Lewis Carroll There are many famous inventions with entirely different expectations than the final result.

Coca Cola is one good example of this.

Let your upbeat feeling guide you and just do what you feel is fun or useful. Once on the road, you'll go from clarity to clarity.

Thanks to the online business I'm running, you can keep your freedom, the passion gets another dimension. You can go on forever, being "crazy." Leverage your passion, or should I say passions, give entrance to another lifestyle, the life of freedom.

Conclusion - Leverage Your Passion and Find Your True Lifestyle In the beginning, for many, the search for a true passion could look like a headless hen chasing a needle in a haystack. Don't worry! We have all been there in some way or another.

To identify your real passion, something you love to do can sometimes take time. The worst thing you can do is do nothing but wait for that "passion" as a magic flash from the sky.

Most likely, you'll be waiting forever!

Instead, let every single day be a new experience, and believe me, you will find your passion‌ Next step: start the leveraging process!

When are you going to leverage your passion?

If you think that being your own boss, reporting to no one else but to yourself, then an online business could be what you're searching for. Maybe the scenario to live a life entirely on your own terms is already a dream you have.

A dream is usually the starting point for a passion. If you can relate to this, click the banner below and get access to our workshop video series showing you exactly how to get started.