At the end of the 20 years, 101 of the 1,500 had become millionaires.What carries people to the top? What makes them take risks, go the extra mile, and do whatever it takes to achieve their goals? It isn’t talent. It’s passion. Passion is more important than a plan. Passion creates fire. It provides fuel. I have yet to meet a passionate person who lacked energy. As long as the passion is there, it doesn’t matter if they fail. It doesn’t matter how many times they fall down. It doesn’t matter if others are against them or if people say they cannot succeed. They keep going and make the most of whatever talent they possess. They are talent-plus people and do not stop until they succeed.
LOOKING FOR DIRECTION
What does a boy like Rueben Martinez do in a place like Miami, Arizona? Miami is a small mining town of two thousand people in the southeastern part of Arizona that has changed little since its founding in 1907. When Rueben was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, most of the town’s jobs came from the copper mining industry, as they still do. Rueben’s parents, who were Mexican immigrants, worked in the mines. There wasn’t much to do in Miami. But Rueben had a curious mind, and he found his passion in books—not necessarily an easy task when your parents aren’t big readers and your town is so small that it doesn’t even have a public library.
“My mother always wanted me to put down my books and clean the yard,” recalls Rueben. “So I would hide in the outhouse and read because no one would bother me there.”1
The child was so desperate for reading material that he became very industrious. “Every morning at 6:45,” he says, “the newspaper boy would deliver the newspaper and, when it hit my neighbor’s side of the house, I would wake up, go out the back door, lean against my neighbor’s house and read the newspaper every morning thoroughly. Then I’d fold that newspaper and put it back as neatly as I could.”2
Eventually Rueben got caught. But his neighbor didn’t mind and encouraged him to keep reading. Rueben was also inspired and assisted by two of his teachers. They continually encouraged his love of reading and loaned him books.
NEW DIRECTION
When he was seventeen, Rueben moved to Los Angeles to find greater opportunities. The moment he saw the Pacific Ocean, he knew he’d never live in Arizona again. He took whatever jobs he could. He worked as a grocery clerk, crane operator, and factory worker, including at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Maywood. But then one day he saw an ad for a barber college, and he was captivated by the idea of attending. “I saw those smocks they wore, so white,” says Martinez. “It was the opposite of the dirt of the mining world. I wanted clean.”3
In the 1970s, Rueben Martinez opened his own barbershop and became his own boss. He was making a better life for himself. But he never lost his passion for reading, a passion he wanted to pass on to others, especially young people in the Hispanic and Latino communities. According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey, the reading level among Hispanics is half that of non-Hispanic whites.4 Martinez wanted to change that.
He started out by lending volumes from his two-hundred-book collection to people waiting for a haircut. The books ranged from Spanish-language masterpieces like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Don Quixote by Cervantes, to American books by Hemingway or Silverstein translated into Spanish, to a signed autobiography by actor Anthony Quinn. But often his patrons forgot to return the books, which frustrated Martinez and diminished his supply for other patrons. His solution? Start selling books. In 1993, Martinez offered books for sale for the first time. He started out with two titles. But it didn’t take long for sales to increase, and he started carrying more titles. He became an advocate for literacy. He talked to parents about reading to their children. He talked to young people about diving into books. And he contacted high-profile authors, such as Isabel Allende, and invited them to his shop. Martinez recalls Allende’s reaction when she showed up. “When she came into the barbershop bookstore, she said, ‘Is this it?’ And I said, ‘This is it.’ Because I only had two book shelves. I had art. I had a barber chair . . . And she said, ‘I like it.’ And we had a good time. But we also had one of the biggest audiences that ever came to see an author in the city of Santa Ana. We had quite a few people . . . about 3,000.”5
A few years later, the barbershop with books became a bookstore with a symbolic barber chair. Martinez called his store Librería Martínez Books and Art Gallery. “We started out with two books,” says Martinez, “then 10, then 25. Little by little, we’ve sold over 2 million books. That’s what happens if you dare to dream.”6 The store now stocks seventeen thousand titles and has become one of the country’s largest collections of Spanish-language books. Martinez opened a second store in 2001 and also a third store just for children. He tells parents, “Do you want your child to be ahead of the line or at the back of the line, moms and dads? You have to support, endorse, and read to your kid . . . if you do that, your kid will be at the head of the line . . . and be someone special in this world. Reading does it.”7
MOMENTUM
Rueben Martinez’s talent for promoting literacy has blossomed as he has allowed his passion to explode. He started hosting a weekly cable show on Univision. He cofounded the Latino Book Festival with actor Edward James Olmos. And he started speaking at schools and to other groups to promote literacy. He advises his audiences to read twenty minutes a day so that they consume one million words a year. One of his favorite sayings is that books can take a person all over the world—a library card will take you farther than a driver’s license.
“I started reading at a very, very young age,” says Martinez, “and I still do. I read a lot every day. I look forward to that. I love literature.”8
People are starting to recognize Martinez’s talent. In 2004, he won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship—often called a “genius grant”—for “fusing the roles of marketplace and community center to inspire appreciation of literature and preserve Latino literary heritage.” He became the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2004 Minority Business Advocate of the Year. He received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Whittier College in 2005 and was also named one of Inc.com’s twenty-six most fascinating entrepreneurs. Carlos Azula of Random House points out that “Rueben isn’t just selling books; he’s selling reading.”9
Martinez isn’t stopping. In his midsixties, he has no intention of resting on his laurels. He is energized by what he does.
“I made more money cutting hair than selling books,” notes Martinez, age sixty-four. “But the joy of my life is what I’m doing now.”10 Martinez wants to create a bilingual Borders-style chain of bookstores across the nation, hoping to establish twenty-five stores by 2012.
“If I had stayed with my factory jobs,” observes Martinez, “I would have been living a comfortable retirement now. But I chose to go on my own as a barber. Now with the bookstores, I’m going to work for the rest of my life. My kids think I’m crazy.”11 No, he’s not crazy. He’s just filled with passion!
YOUR PASSION CAN EMPOWER YOU
Passion can energize every aspect of a person’s life—including his talent. Have you ever known a person with great passion who lacked the energy to act on what mattered to her? I doubt it. A passionate person with limited talent will outperform a passive person who possesses greater talent. Why? Because passionate people act with boundless enthusiasm, and they just keep on going! Talent plus passion energizes.
Authors Robert J. Kriegel and Louis Patler cite a study of 1,500 people over twenty years that shows how passion makes a significant difference in a person’s career:
At the outset of the study, the group was divided into Group A, 83 percent of the sample, who were embarking on a career chosen for the prospects of making money now in order to do what they wanted later, and Group B, the other 17 percent of the sample, who had chosen their career path for the reverse reason, they were going to pursue what they wanted to do now and worry about the money later.
The data showed some startling revelations:
At the end of the 20 years, 101 of the 1,500 had become millionaires.
Of the millionaires, all but one—100 out of 101—were from Group B, the group that had chosen to pursue what they loved!12
The old saying is true: “Find something you like to do so much that you’d gladly do it for nothing, and if you learn to do it well, someday people will be happy to pay you for it.” When that’s the case, then true are the words of a motto that Dr. Charles Mayo kept on his office wall: “There’s no fun like work.”
THE POWER OF PASSION
There really is no substitute for passion when it comes to energizing your talent. Take a look at what passion can do for you:
1. Passion Is the First Step to Achievement
Loving what you do is the key that opens the door for achievement. When you don’t like what you’re doing, it really shows—no matter how hard you try to pretend it doesn’t. You can become like the little boy named Eddie whose grandmother was an opera lover. She had season tickets, and when Eddie turned eight, she decided to take him to a performance of Wagner—in German—as his birthday present. The next day, at his mother’s prompting, the child wrote the following in a thank-you note: “Dear Grandmother, Thank you for the birthday present. It is what I always wanted, but not very much. Love, Eddie.”
It’s difficult to achieve when you don’t have the desire to do so. That’s why passion is so important. There is a story about Socrates in which a proud and disdainful young man came to the philosopher and, with a smirk, said, “O great Socrates, I come to you for knowledge.”
Seeing the shallow and vain young man for what he was, Socrates led the young man down to the sea into waist-deep water. Then he said, “Tell me again what you want.”
“Knowledge,” he responded with a smile.
Socrates grabbed the young man by his shoulders and pushed him down under the water, holding him there for thirty seconds. “Now, what do you want?”
“Wisdom, O great Socrates,” the young man sputtered.
The philosopher pushed him under once again. When he let him up, he asked again, “What do you want?”
“Knowledge, O wise and . . . ,” he managed to spit out before Socrates held him under again, this time even longer.
“What do you want?” the old man asked as he let him up again. The younger man coughed and gasped.
“Air!” he screamed. “I need air!”
“When you want knowledge as much as you just wanted air, then you will get knowledge,” the old man stated as he returned to shore.
The only way you can achieve anything of significance is to really want it. Passion provides that.
2. Passion Increases Willpower
One of my roles as a motivational teacher is to try to help people reach their potential. For years, I tried to inspire passion in audiences by going about it the wrong way. I used to tell people about what made me passionate, what made me want to get out and do my best. But I could see that it wasn’t having the effect I desired—people just didn’t respond. I couldn’t ignite others’ passion by sharing my own.
I decided to change my focus. Instead of sharing my passion, I started helping others discover their passion. To do that, I ask these questions:
What do you sing about?
What do you cry about?
What do you dream about?
The first two questions speak to what touches you at a deep level today. The third answers what will bring you fulfillment tomorrow. The answers to these questions can often help people discover their true passion.
While everybody can possess passion, not everyone takes the time to discover it. And that’s a shame. Passion is fuel for the will. Passion turns your have-to’s into want-to’s. What we accomplish in life is based less on what we want and more on how much we want it. The secret to willpower is what someone once called wantpower. People who want something enough usually find the willpower to achieve it.
You can’t help people become winners unless they want to win. Champions become champions from within, not from without.
3. Passion Produces Energy
When you have passion, you become energized. You don’t have to produce perseverance; it is naturally present in you. It helps you to enjoy the journey as much as reaching the destination. Without it, achievement becomes a long and difficult road.
For many years my wife, Margaret, has called me the Energizer Bunny because of the commercials where the battery-operated rabbit keeps going and going. I guess she does so with good reason. I do have a lot of energy. There are always things I hope to do, people I want to see, and goals I want to reach. The reason is passion! We often call people high energy or low energy based on how much they do, but I have come to the conclusion that it might be more appropriate to call them high or low passion
During a Q-and-A session at a conference, an attendee once asked me, “What is the secret of your passion?” It took me only a moment to be able to articulate it:
1. I am gifted at what I do (strength zone).
2. What I do makes a difference (results).
3. When I do what I was made to do, I feel most alive (purpose).
I believe all passionate people feel that way. Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh observed, “It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you’ve wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane.”
Some people say that they feel burned out. The truth is that they probably never were on fire in the first place. Writer and editor Norman Cousins said, “Death isn’t the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” Without passion, a part of us does becomes dead. And if we’re not careful, we could end up like the person whose tombstone read, “Died at 30. Buried at 60.” Don’t allow that to happen to you. Be like Rueben Martinez who is still going strong beyond age sixty. People often describe him as acting half his age. What gives him such energy? His passion!
4. Passion Is the Foundation for Excellence
Passion can transform someone from average to excellent. I can tell you that from experience. When I was in high school, I wasn’t a great student. My priorities were basketball first, friends second, and studies a distant third. Why? Because playing basketball and spending time with friends were things I was passionate about. I studied, but only to please my parents. School held little appeal for me.
Everything changed when I went to college. For the first time I was studying subjects that mattered to me. They were interesting, and they would apply to my future career. My grades went up because my passion did. In high school I was sometimes on the principal’s “list” (which was not a good thing), but in college I continually made the dean’s list. Passion fired my desire to achieve with excellence.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. asserted, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” When you find purpose, you find passion. And when you find passion, it energizes your talent so that you can achieve excellence.
5. Passion Is the Key to Success
People are such that whenever anything fires their souls, impossibilities vanish. Perhaps that’s why philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm.”
I read about two hundred executives who were asked what makes people successful. The number one quality they cited was enthusiasm, not talent—80 percent of them recognized that there needed to be a fire within to achieve success.
The most talented people aren’t always the ones who win. If they did, how could anyone explain the success of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, which was depicted in the movie Miracle, or the Hall of Fame careers of basketball’s Larry Bird or football’s Joe Montana? Of Montana, teammate Ronnie Lott said, “You can’t measure the size of his heart with a tape measure or a stopwatch.” It takes more than talent to create success. It takes passion.
6. Passion Makes a Person Contagious
Writer and promotional publicist Eleanor Doan remarked, “You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning within your own.” I believe that’s true. One of my favorite subjects is communication. I have studied and taught it for years, and I always enjoy observing great communicators in action. I believe that people are instructed by reason, but they are inspired by passion.
Even a brief review of effective leaders and businesspeople throughout history illustrates that their passion “caught on” with others. One of my favorites is Winston Churchill. In the 1930s, Churchill was beginning to fade from view in British politics. But with the rise of Hitler came a rise in Churchill’s passion. Long before others did, Churchill spoke out against the Nazis. He had a passion to protect freedom and democracy. And when Hitler declared war and sought to conquer Europe and crush England, Churchill’s passion for resistance became infused in the people of Britain and eventually the United States. Without Churchill, the fate of the free world might have turned out to be quite different.
TALENT + PASSION = A TALENT-PLUS PERSON
PUTTING THE TALENT-PLUS FORMULA INTO ACTION
If you don’t possess the energy that you desire, then you need to fire up your passion. Here is how I suggest you proceed:
1. Prioritize Your Life According to Your Passion
People who have passion but lack priorities are like individuals who find themselves in a lonely log cabin deep in the woods on a cold snowy night and then light a bunch of small candles and place them all around the room. They don’t create enough light to help them see, nor do they produce enough heat to keep them warm. At best, they merely make the room seem a bit more cheerful. On the other hand, people who possess priorities but no passion are like those who stack wood in the fireplace of that same cold cabin but never light the fire. But people who have passion with priorities are like those who stack the wood, light the fire, and enjoy the light and heat that it produces.
In the early 1970s, I realized that my talent would be maximized and my potential realized only if I matched my passion with my priorities. I was spending too much of my time doing tasks for which I possessed neither talent nor passion. I had to make a change—to align what I felt strongly about with what I was doing. It made a huge difference in my life. It didn’t eliminate my troubles or remove my obstacles, but it empowered me to face them with greater energy and enthusiasm. For more than thirty years, I have worked to maintain that alignment of priorities and passion. And as I have, I’ve kept in mind this quote by journalist Tim Redmond, which I put in a prominent place for a year to keep me on track: “There are many things that will catch my eye, but there are only a few that catch my heart. It is those I consider to pursue.”
Prioritizing your life according to your passion can be risky. For most people, it requires a major realignment in their work and private lives. But you can’t be a talent-plus person and play it safe. Advertising agency president Richard Edler stated this:
Safe living generally makes for regrets later on. We are all given talents and dreams. Sometimes the two don’t match. But more often than not, we compromise both before ever finding out. Later on, as successful as we might be, we find ourselves looking back longingly to that time when we should have chased our true dreams and our true talents for all they were worth. Don’t let yourself be pressured into thinking that your dreams or your talents aren’t prudent. They were never meant to be prudent. They were meant to bring joy and fulfillment into your life.13
If your priorities are not aligned with your passion, then begin thinking about making changes in your life. Will change be risky? Probably. But which would you rather live with? The pain of risk or the pain of regret?
2. Protect Your Passion
If you’ve ever built a fire, then you know this: the natural tendency of fire is to go out. If you want to keep a fire hot, then you need to feed it, and you need to protect it. Not everyone in your life will help you do that when it comes to your passion. In truth, there are two kinds of people: firelighters, who will go out of their way to help you keep your fire hot, and firefighters, who will throw cold water on the fire of passion that burns within you.
How can you tell the firelighters from the firefighters? Listen to what they say. Firefighters use phrases like these:
“It’s not in the budget.”
“That’s not practical.”
“We tried that before and it didn’t work.”
“We’ve never done that before.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“The boss won’t go for it.”
“If it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it.”
“That’s not the way we do things around here.”
“It’ll never work.”
“But who will do all the extra work?”
“You’re not __________ [smart, talented, young,
old, etc.] enough.”
“You’re getting too big for your britches.”
“Who do you think you are?”
If you’ve heard one or more of these phrases coming from people you know, you may want to create some distance between yourself and them. These firefighters focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s right. They find the cloud that comes with every silver lining. They doubt. They resist change. They keep people from reaching their potential by trying to put out the fire of their passion. Stay away from them. Instead, spend more time with people who see you not just as you are but as you could be; people who encourage your dreams, ignite your passion. I try to schedule a lunch or two with firelighters like these every month. They really fire me up and energize me to do what I know is best for me.
3. Pursue Your Passion with Everything You’ve Got
Rudy Ruettiger, upon whose life the movie Rudy was based, observed, “If you really, really believe in your dream, you’ll get there. But you have to have passion and total commitment to make it happen. When you have passion and commitment, you don’t need a complex plan. Your plan is your life is your dream.”
What do you want to accomplish in your lifetime? How do you want to focus your energy: on survival, success, or significance? We live in a time and place with too many opportunities for survival alone. And there’s more to life than mere success. We need to dream big. We need to adopt the perspective of someone like playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wrote,
I am convinced that my life belongs to the whole community; and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in the life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before turning it over to future generations.
Shaw had passion—for life and his work. Your passion has the potential to provide you energy far beyond the limitations of your talent. In the end, you will be remembered for your passion. It is what will energize your talent. It is what will empower you to make your mark.