1.2.1.19 The proof of passion is pursuit

You’ve got to get passionate in your pursuit of prosperity. A young man who doesn’t get passionate in his pursuit of a young lady will never win her heart. Without passion, you will never possess what you pursue. Pursuit and passion go hand in hand. The proof of your desire to prosper is in your passionate pursuit.

There is no such thing as emotionless vision. Even the most lifeless, routine activities feel good when you have a dream fuelled by passion. Life is so much more rewarding if you have passion. I’m Italian—I was born with passion! I get passionate and emotional about everything. I’d cry at the opening of a shopping mall!

I am involved in many third world programs. My wife and I help to feed and educate children in some of the most desolate areas of the world. It is my conclusion that these children’s discontent with their current status pushes them to excel in the midst of the poverty that surrounds them. It is amazing and inspiring to see that many of them see themselves as prosperous in their own culture. They don’t wear Rolex watches. They don’t drive Mercedes Benz cars. They don’t even own television sets. But what they do have is an abundant prosperity mentality. They place a high value on what they already have, and on what is given to them. They keep their clothes and their home very clean. They value a gift when it is given to them. And they have a driving, contagious passion to move out of poverty into prosperity.

During a meeting in South Africa some years ago, I heard the brilliant author and speaker Robert Kiyosaki define passion as the tension that exists between something you love and something you hate. I’m passionate about seeing people become wealthy. I love seeing people prosperous and succeeding in life. I also equally hate seeing people broke and struggling to get by. I hate seeing people cornered and imprisoned by poverty. My passion exists in the tension I feel between the things I love and the things I hate.

You have to get emotional about your dream. You have to feel something about your dream. I get emotional about the way people become addicted to drugs. I get emotional about the different strategies governments employ to deal with drugs. I passionately do not believe in harm minimization because it doesn’t work.

I remember a time when I had to confront a very senior political figure in my home state about the issue of drug addiction and I was spitting mad. He could see it in my eyes. I was running a drug rehabilitation program with an 86 percent success rate and the state government was opening shooting galleries for drug addicts. I couldn’t believe it! I was so mad. But I directed my anger toward a positive and productive end by deciding to prove them wrong.

I also get passionate about young kids being dealt antidepressants at six and seven years of age. As far as I’m concerned, that’s wrong. Maybe they just need a friend and a mentor. I get passionate about shifting people’s mindsets away from poverty to prosperity. I find myself thinking, If you could just see what I see!

The soul can’t think without a picture

Do you get emotional about what you believe in? Do you get emotional about your wealth? Do you get emotional about your business? Are you emotionally attached to what you do? You see, you cannot be emotionally detached from what you do and expect to be successful. Your soul is the seat of your emotions. Remember Aristotle’s dictum: The soul can’t think without a picture. The picture in your soul should stir you emotionally. When you are in love with someone and that person isn’t present, you can still see that person in your mind’s eye.

If there’s no emotion attached to your dream, it remains lifeless. When someone is passionate about what they do, their passion rubs off on the people around them. The difference between being bored and excited by something someone is telling you has less to do with your interest in the subject than is has to do with how passionate that person is about what they’re telling you.

I’ll say it again: Dreams and vision have to involve emotion. The clearer and stronger your vision, the stronger your emotions will be. As teenagers, we fall in and out of love all the time and there is always a certain amount of emotion attached to that. But when you find the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with, the emotion becomes a lot stronger because the vision in front of you is clearer and more long-term.

Vision is always emotional

You’ve got to do what you love and love what you do. If you will learn that simple key, your life will prosper. Why? Because you will never prosper in something you don’t love. If a husband and wife don’t love each other, how can that relationship prosper? If you don’t love creating wealth and abundance, how can you prosper? An emotion such as love is a powerful motivating factor for every human being on this planet. Get in love with what you do and you’ll never work again. When you love what you do, it’s no longer a job—it’s a love, a passion and a pursuit, and success will follow that passionate pursuit.

When it comes to developing a millionaire mindset, you have to love your dream and love what you are doing to make your dream a reality. If you don’t love what you are doing, then do something else! Vision is always emotional. Everyone has a different vision because everyone gets excited by different things. I have friends who have a great vision for their computer business. I have no vision for computers—I don’t even like the things! But when my friends speak about what they can do with computers and technology, it is almost as though they are speaking about the person that they want to spend the rest of their life with. (Unfortunately, most of us do spend too much time with our computers!) They are passionate about their vision. It stirs them, it enthuses them, and it motivates them.

There is usually a strong correlation between what you are passionate about and what you are good at. That means your prosperity is more than likely going to flow out of your strengths and gifts. You’ll never create wealth out of projects you’re not good at or projects you don’t enjoy. I’ve yet to meet a wealthy person who got wealthy doing stuff they don’t enjoy. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing in your business or your work right now, you probably won’t become prosperous doing that. You can’t have two diametrically opposed thoughts about the same thing and expect to be successful.

In his book Cure for the Common Life bestselling author Max Lucado claims most people are sick of the way they live their lives. He says that one-third of Americans say, “I hate my job.” He also reveals that 70 percent of Americans publicly admit no enthusiasm or passion for their work. A similar percentage of people are in the wrong career because it doesn’t match their abilities and preferences. If you don’t enjoy the job you’re in right now, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever become wealthy from it. My advice to you is to do something else. It’s often said, “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work another day in your life.”

Your prosperity is more than likely going to flow out of your strengths and gifts.

I know I will never get wealthy doing administrative work or developing computer programs. I don’t know a thing about them and I have no passion for them. Singing is not my gift either. I was in the car with my wife Andrea one day when Michael Bolton came on the radio singing ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?’ I started singing along with Michael Bolton, directing the words of the song at Andrea. But I quickly stopped when she said, “Shut up or you’ll find out!” My gift is definitely not singing. My gift is speaking, teaching, inspiring and motivating people. There are days when I get tired of doing what I do, but I love what I do. I love speaking. I really enjoy it. (Whether people love listening to me is another matter!) I love producing books and CDs and putting them into people’s hands and saying, “Okay, go get rich!”

Create wealth from your position of strength

What is your gift? You will create prosperity out of your gift. You will always create wealth from your position of strength. How many times have you heard someone tell you that you need to figure out your gift and work on your weaknesses? What a load of nonsense! Michael Jordan was a great basketball player who retired from basketball to try his hand at baseball. But no matter how much he focused on baseball, he was never going to be great. On the basketball court, though, he was a superman. If the Bulls were down by two points with only five seconds to go, the coach would call time out and no matter what instructions he might have been giving the team, everybody knew that there was one guy who was going to get the ball—Michael Jordan. Focus on your gift. Don’t expect prosperity to come from outside of your area of giftings. Work on your strengths instead.

Vision has to involve passion and motivation. You can always identify motivated people because they are passionate. The Collins Dictionary defines passion as ‘eagerness, excitement, fervor, fire, heat, intensity, rapture, joy, spirit, zest and zeal’. Does that describe how you feel about creating prosperity in your life? Does that describe how you feel about the vision you have for your life?

Passion is not nebulous; it is always directed at something. It is generally directed at a vision of how things can and should be. Vision is born out of concern. What stirs you up? What moves you? What drives you to action? For many years I have been passionate about helping people become self-managed and self-motivated. I am passionate about helping people discover and release their capacity to create wealth. Why? Because I believe in the power of free enterprise. I am passionate about being a compassionate capitalist! In other words, I have prosperity for a purpose. My money, your money, our money can accomplish great things. With money, we can make the world a better place.

Passion is born out of concern

All my passion is born out of a concern for something. I am even passionate about food—especially Italian food! I become greatly disturbed and concerned when people don’t cook Italian food the way it ought to be cooked! Some time ago I was dining at one of my favorite Italian restaurants in Sydney. The owner, who recently celebrated his 50th year in business, told me how he had recently been to another Italian restaurant in another state. His words were, “How could they cook food like that?” He was disgusted at how some Italian restaurants produce the great dishes that come from Italy. He was passionate because he was concerned; passion and concern are two sides of the same coin.

A dream can transform even the most tedious and repetitive task into purposeful, goal-directed activities.

When your dream is infused with passion, even the most mundane aspects of fulfilling your dream become meaningful. Everybody has to do mundane things on a day-to-day basis. No dream becomes a reality without a considerable amount of routine, menial work. But a dream can transform even the most tedious and repetitive task into purposeful, goal-directed activities.

Imagine that you work in a factory that produces sandbags. Imagine if all you had to do all day, every day, was fill bags with sand. Imagine how boring that would be. Now imagine that your home and everything you own is under threat from rising flood waters and the only way you can save your home is by building walls around your home with bags of sand. Under those circumstances, filling sandbags would become your obsession. You’d throw everything you had into it. What’s the difference? The difference is that now your emotions are engaged and you have a vision—to see your home survive the flood. Vision gives significance to the mundane. You do whatever you have to do to get you to where you want to go. You do it with enthusiasm because it is all about fulfilling your personal dream.

One of the things I find mundane is flying. I really hate flying, whatever class of ticket I might have. But when I get to my destination, it’s a different story. I’m thinking about who might be in the meeting. It could be the next Bill Gates. There could be someone there who is going to change the world. I remember one day a man invited me to come and speak at an event he had organized with about 7,000 people attending. When I got to the event, I was impressed.

“Who inspired you to do this?” I asked him.

“You did,” he said.

I was surprised. “But I’ve never met you before,” I said.

“Yes, you have,” he replied. “I was at a youth camp years ago and you were the speaker. I came up to you during the camp and asked you, ‘How can I build a big organization like you have?’ And you looked at me and said, ‘Son, get a dream and work your butt off.’ And that’s what I did. And that’s why I wanted you to be the speaker at my first big event.”

Mundane tasks are mandatory to your success

Recently I was working with a group of real estate professionals and I asked them to identify one of the most mundane activities that they had to do in the course of their jobs. Someone replied, “Answering the phone.” Now, I would have thought that answering the phone is quite important in real estate, as in any business. I pointed out that one of the great lessons in sales success is that if you don’t ring, your phone doesn’t ring. Another basic axiom of business is this: When the phone rings, answer it. It may seem a mundane task, but it is mandatory to your success and the profitability of your organization. That makes it meaningful.

Of course, the potential downside of being passionate is that it leaves you open to disappointment when things don’t go according to plan. If there’s no passion, you rarely get disappointed because you don’t really care. But when you care, you can experience the downside of passion. All of us have disappointments in our lives. The answer is to ensure that your vision always exceeds your disappointment quota. If your disappointment quota exceeds your vision quota, then your disappointments will overtake your vision.

How do you ensure your vision quota always stays above your disappointment quota? It’s largely a matter of managing expectations. Disappointment comes from unmet expectations. Don’t get disappointed with yourself by putting unreasonable expectations on yourself. I expect a high standard of myself in a lot of areas, but I also know there are some things I’m not good at, so I don’t put unrealistic expectations on myself in those areas. I don’t allow myself to be disappointed about certain things. Above all, you have to keep believing—no matter what. You have to believe that dreams come true.

CHALLENGE: Develop a passion to prosper

What are you concerned about? What flicks your switch? What makes you angry? What makes you exuberant? What makes you feel a sense of drive? What makes you burn with fervor? This is not about feelings—this is a disposition you need to have. You need to develop a passionate disposition about creating wealth for yourself and for others.