The Link Between People, Passion and Profit
Posted in The Passion Test on March 19th, 2010 by admin – Comments OffMany years ago Janet was working in a job she hated. Her office was filled with recruiters making tens of thousands of dollars every month. Each time a placement was made for another disk drive engineer, the bell would ring in the office. But it never rang for Janet.
One day she saw a poster for a success seminar. Something about it struck a chord.
Sitting up front at the seminar she listened as a beautiful, articulate woman spoke about how easy it can be to enjoy success. The speaker said you just have to find those things that light you up inside, your passions.
As Janet listened to this remarkable woman, she felt a growing excitement inside. This
was it! This was her passion, her purpose in life, to be a speaker like this amazing
woman.
The next day when a friend casually asked her how she was doing. Janet answered with excitement, “I’ve found my calling! I’m going to be a speaker.”
Knowing this was her destiny; Janet left her job at the recruiting company. She travelled across the country attending each of her new mentor’s seminars and was finally hired by the woman, Debra Poneman. Today, Janet and Debra are best friends, and she’s living her passion of being a speaker and transformational leader.
Along this long and winding road she learned there is one key secret to living a happy, fulfilling, rewarding life:
“Whenever you are faced with a choice, a decision or an opportunity,
choose in favor of your passions.”
There are two parts to this. First, you have to know what you are passionate about, what it is that matters most to you in your life. That’s why Janet and her business partner, Chris Attwood wrote The Passion Test – The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Destiny. The Passion Test is a simple, yet powerful way to clarify your top passions in life.
The second part is to choose in favor of those passions. When you do this consistently with every significant decision, you will be guaranteed a passionate life.
Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson and Jerry Porras wrote a fabulous book called Success Built to Last – Creating a Life That Matters. They interviewed over 300 people who have enjoyed enduring success for more than twenty years. People like former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Senator John McCain, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Lance Armstrong and many others.
All of these very successful people had one important characteristic in common: when faced with a major decision in their life, they always made their choice based on what held deep meaning for them. This is what we mean by choosing in favor of your passions.
Sometimes, when you listen to all the advice that’s available about what is necessary to create a happy, fulfilling, successful life, it can be a bit overwhelming. When you boil it down, if you are able to do nothing else, clarify your passions and then choose in favor of them, and you will discover your life unfolding in exciting, new, unexpected ways.
Now the principles of The Passion Test have been adopted by leading edge companies. These companies have found tremendous value in helping employees discover their own work passions and core passions and then aligning job roles with these passions. As people do work that is meaningful to them as individuals and that is aligned with the organization’s core passions, employee engagement, productivity and profitability skyrockets. That’s the link between people, passion and profit.
