The 12 factors of Business Success: Discover, Develop, and Leverage Your Strengths

Chapter 5. Passion

Passion: (noun) Driving forces that compel us to act. This is not a singular term. You might want to think of it as passions.

Motivational author Napoleon Hill called this emotion "a burning desire." On the surface, that's an important part of passion. But there are far more components of passion than simply a burning desire.

Where do you see passion? Turn on the news. Take a look at the newspaper. Almost every headline. Almost every day.

Passion, of course, wires into all the fears in the brain as well as the drives. Example: One man perceives another man as a threat and adrenaline flows. The competitive (and sometimes deadly) nature of man kicks in. It becomes a focal point of consciousness, a point where nothing else matters. That's true passion.

Notice that the threat doesn't need to be real to invoke passion. Maybe the man didn't pose a real physical threat but a threat at work for a job, or to his relationship with his spouse, or to his intellect. But the first man's mind went where the fear was in his brain. How fascinating. The fear can be real or imagined but the ensuing behavior is powerful and passionate. Failure to keep that fear under complete control keeps doctors' offices and jails at capacity.

Where does passion come from? There are several sources.

Passion and your genes. Your genes are preprogrammed to try and keep you alive. They are preprogrammed to replicate. Those two things tell you much of what you need to know about the core of human behavior. ...