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Why “Finding Your Passion” is self sabotage 

Passion is misunderstood.

Entrepreneurs LOVE to be passionate. We don’t consider someone to be truly successful unless they’re making (a ton of) money by following their true love in life.

“Finding your passion” is practically a spiritual quest. What could be more important?

If you’re unfulfilled by your work – or disillusioned by your lack of results – you might just need to find your passion to fix all that! Or so the saying goes.

But what if the search for your passion is insidiously sabotaging your potential as an entrepreneur?

What if Passion is actually crippling your progress, making you stuck and overwhelmed?

Over the last two years, my company Commit Action has conducted over ten thousand one-on-one phone conversations with small business owners and entrepreneurs.

We’ve worked with a professor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. We’ve brought in a professor of Positive Psychology from New York University.

Together, we’ve crunched the numbers of thousands of entrepreneurs to answer this simple one question:

Why is it people can’t get the results they want in business?

Almost 99% of entrepreneurs we surveyed are hugely dissatisfied by their progress. They feel as though they’re spinning their wheels. That their best intentions for their own business’s growth keep stalling.

Everywhere we looked… Passion was the problem

Turns out the entrepreneurial brain has a toxic tendency. A knee-jerk reflex that’s triggered when a business owner just can’t find their motivation. It’s so simple and seductive… but so, so dangerously wrong:

When you’re struggling to find the will to take action, you blame (a lack of) passion for making you feel stuck.

You have things you know you need to do. Critical things. Work ON the business, not IN it… type things. They’re difficult because they’re at the very edge of your comfort zone.

If you can actually do these things you’ll reap enormous rewards. You just can’t seem to summon the mental drive to actually get started…

An entrepreneur stares at her CRM on Monday morning. She’s been telling herself for weeks that cold-calling is essential for success, but she just can’t bring herself to pick up the phone.

A small biz owner knows he needs to hire. Every day is manic, full of customer interaction and fast paced action. The word doc on his computer titled “New Role Job Description” remains blank… day after day.

An e-commerce founder knows his web funnel is bleeding traffic – that the homepage alone needs dozens of basic tweaks to capitalize on the ad-spend he’s throwing at it. Day after day he finds other things to do, ignoring the critical task of diving into the metrics and seeing how bad it really is.

All these people are stuck in a cycle of procrastinating the important actions that will grow their businesses. 

They’re all going to eventually blame a lack of passion for the fact that they can’t.

Months go by. The struggle continues. Critical business tasks gather dust on the whiteboard. The urgent stuff never seems to end and you’re good at doing it, but the big stuff – that would actually grow your biz – just isn’t happening.

You’re frozen, slapping yourself in frustration, asking:

Why is it so hard to find the mojo to take action?

This is the question that leads entrepreneurs to the lie.

You ask yourself what the hell is wrong with you! Something must be fundamentally broken for you to be so stuck.

If you keep running into the same brick wall – getting stuck on the same core fundamental actions of business growth – then something must be deeply, DEEPLY wrong? Right?!

This is how people convince themselves they have a passion problem.

They ask these questions again and again and eventually settle on the fact that their business is wrong for them.

They think:

  • I don’t have motivation because I don’t have passion
  • If I ever DID have it, now I’ve lost it
  • This is why it feels like I’m wading through molasses
  • I need to get out of this business, or pick a new niche or market or something
  • I have to find my passion and follow that… it’ll fix everything!

Passion is the bright shiny unicorn that crippled entrepreneurs dream of

CA_unicorndreamsThey fervently believe it’ll save them from their problems.

They hear all over – from articles, books and gurus – that passion is the key to success. They tell themselves if they can just FIND IT … everything will transform for the better.

Finding passion will be the lucky break you need!

But science tells us Passion won’t help you at all

And worse, searching for it can set back your progress by years.

The work we’ve done at Commit Action has uncovered a horrifying truth:  

Entrepreneurs who believe they have a “Passion Problem” correlated almost 100% with those who are handicapped by a learned behavior problem they’re not even aware of.

There’s one simple psychological advantage that is present in super-successful entrepreneurs – many of whom have this thing “from birth”.

These megastars have an unfair blessing. They benefit from a totally unconscious behavior installed by childhood conditioning.

It’s learnable for adults, for sure… but because so few people are even conscious of the problem they don’t realize they’re deficient in this area. They’re off chasing their passion instead.

If you’re not getting the results you want, it’s NOT because you lack passion.

You don’t need to find it… in fact, you don’t even need to think about it.

You simply need to know THE TRUTH that’s causing you to erroneously search for your passion in the first place.

That overwhelmed, stuck and demoralizing feeling is REAL – even though the Passion-Problem isn’t – and it has a very real cause that needs to be addressed. Before it’s too late.

In the fifth video of my free seven part training series, I deep dive into the science and research that shows you the flabbergasting truth about passion. When entrepreneurs learn what we’ve discovered, their jaws have to be scraped off the floor.

If you’ve ever felt stuck and thought a lack of passion was to blame, you owe it to yourself to fix the problem right now.

The seven part training is totally free and available over at Commit Action (click here) – just hit the big red button on the homepage and you can grab all our best stuff right away.

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