Truth. Growth. Repeat.

Chapter 14 exercise b: protest

This is a simple exercise, but it can be incredibly powerful because it can help you bring to the surface the angry passion that’s driving you deep down inside. You may think you started a business for logical reasons, like money and independence, but more often than not we humans start enterprises to make the world a better place.

Somehow.

Find that somehow and you’ll find an almost inexhaustible fuel to power your dreams. You see, changing the world — or even one little part of it — requires us to go up against convention. And that’s hard. Ask any of history’s true change-makers, such as Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jnr, or for that matter Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. You need to find new reservoirs of energy and resilience and self-belief. And I believe we humans acquire those attributes more readily when we’re spurred on by passions born of anger rather than joy.

In my experience, people who are driven by an anger about an injustice that’s happening in an area of human endeavour that they relate to — that is, in their line of work, their particular category of social enterprise, and so on — seem to have more energy, be more action-oriented, be more resilient to setbacks and be less likely to procrastinate than those driven purely by optimism.

Don’t get me wrong; I love optimists. I love people with a can-do attitude and an almost bulletproof relationship with failure. But I hate lazy positivity. I hate positivity that crawls towards ...