Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.
Sometimes there’s no other explanation than the most basic one of all: I just had to do it. No logic. No rationale. No pros and cons list. No SWOT analysis. No postmortem afterward. Instead, a personal, from-the-gut or from-the-heart decision that answered a calling, put out a fire, or fulfilled a dream. And it’s the lucky ones among us who come to those forks in the road and have to make that decision to either follow their heart or listen to their head. It’s emotion versus intellect. They either step off that cliff or they spend their lives wondering what could have happened.
Joe Moglia earned his bachelor’s degree from Fordham University and his master’s from the University of Delaware. He spent seventeen years at Merrill Lynch, serving on the executive committees for both the institutional business and private client business. He was also responsible for all Merrill Lynch’s investment products, its insurance company, its 401(k) business, and its middle-market business. He left Merrill Lynch in 2001 to become chief executive officer of online broker and financial services company Ameritrade, founded and based in Omaha, Nebraska. In his seven years at the helm, Ameritrade’s client assets grew from $24 billion to more than $300 billion, while its market capitalization grew from $700 million to $12 billion. He engineered two significant Ameritrade acquisitions: Datek Online Holdings in 2002 and rival TD Waterhouse in 2006. The price tag on that second buy was $2.9 billion. The company’s name became TD Ameritrade. In 2008, the year the world economy nose-dived, TD Ameritrade recorded its sixth straight year of record profits. Needless to say, its leader was doing something right. How’s that for a résumé?
Then came that fearless and crazy moment. In March 2008, Joe Moglia, CEO of TD Ameritrade and one of the most respected, successful businessmen in the country, announced he would be walking away from his corner-office life in six short months. He would give up all the perks, all the prestige, and all the money to pursue his passion.
In September 2008, the first day of the rest of his life began. Moglia became an unpaid voluntary assistant coach and mentor for the University of Nebraska football team. His official title was executive advisor to the head football coach, Bo Pelini. Moglia worked 70 or more hours a week doing the mundane grunt work of a Division I football program, including studying playbooks, watching film, attending meetings and practices, and taking notes. He wasn’t much more than a glorified intern.
But there was a bit more to it. Moglia’s stellar corporate career and his charismatic personality made him an ideal mentor for both the coaches and the players. Said Pelini, “I knew Joe was a proven commodity, but after talking with him it was ‘Why not bring him in, and get a different perspective?’ He wanted to learn from me? Well, I wanted to learn from him.”101
Moglia was no stranger to football, of course. As a young man, he had coached several high school teams and small colleges back east. He was defensive coordinator at Dartmouth from 1981 to 1983, when he decided to pursue a financial career and entered the Merrill Lynch training program. The rest would have been business history, except for that fearless and crazy decision in 2008.
Throughout those corporate glory years, the football flame burned brightly in Moglia’s heart. When he took the Nebraska position, some of his friends and family members told him he was nuts: “At this point in your life, you’re working seven days a week, living in a hotel? Grow up!” Others were supportive: “When you can do anything with your life and you’re willing to sacrifice like this, it’s passion! Go for it and follow your heart!”102
To Moglia, his life-changing decision wasn’t all that crazy. “Honestly, to me it’s not that strange,” he said in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I’m not some business guy who gets his rocks off associating with collegiate sports. I’m a coach who wants to get back to coaching.”103
In fact, Moglia wasn’t planning to do the unpaid intern thing forever. He hoped to become a college assistant coach and maybe even a head coach. But then in 2010, almost out of nowhere, his football career took another lucky bounce. The pros—in the form of the fledgling United Football League—came calling. The five-team league offered Moglia the head coaching job at its expansion Virginia franchise. Moglia readily accepted and prepared to move back east.
The story got even stranger. The Omaha franchise of the UFL—the league’s most successful, with a completely sold-out first season in 2010—fired its head coach. The UFL, which owns its teams, offered the job to Moglia. He would be staying in Nebraska after all.
As of this writing, there continues to be questions about the viability of the UFL, but the new coach and his Omaha Nighthawks are pressing on. In fact, Moglia, who continues to serve as chairman of the board of TD Ameritrade, has been hinting that he may purchase the Omaha franchise himself and bring more financial stability to the team and the league.
One thing is certain: the Omaha Nighthawks will continue to play before sold-out crowds, especially because their home is now the brand-new ballpark built in downtown Omaha primarily for the annual College World Series: TD Ameritrade Park.
Her motivation was simple: she didn’t like visible panty lines, she didn’t like uncomfortable thongs, and she didn’t like the feel and fit of pantyhose. Yes, we’re talking about women’s undergarments. And we’re talking about a young woman who took a passion for everyday style and comfort and parlayed it into an incredibly successful clothing line and her own celebrity career. We’re talking about Sara Blakely and Spanx.
Today Spanx is a multimillion-dollar clothing business, both online and in stores, and its young creator and founder is riding that incredible wave of fame and fortune. But fame and fortune were nowhere to be found in the company’s early days. There was just Sara Blakely’s relentless passion, her fearless drive to make it happen no matter how hard the work and how discouraging the results.
Blakely, now 40, was born and raised in Clearwater, Florida. She earned a degree in communications from Florida State, failed the law school entrance exam, and went to work selling copy machines. She was on a ho-hum path to nowhere. But her passion and energy needed an outlet. She had $5,000 in savings and found something near and dear to her—underwear—to focus on. She didn’t like the way her pantyhose fit and looked on her, and she was determined to invent a new way of dressing up underneath.
She did the research every time she had a few spare minutes to get online. She kept her day job for a while and even worked evenings as a stand-up comedian. She read books on patents and trademarks at a Georgia Tech library (she had relocated to the Peach State), zeroing in on the pantyhose industry. She met with lawyers to go over her plans and schemes. Some of them, she reports, thought her idea “was so crazy that they later admitted thinking I had been sent by Candid Camera.”104
But Sara Blakely wasn’t fooling. She wrote the patent herself, got it approved, and successfully trademarked the name “Spanx” online. Her research about brands had told her that a k sound was often effective. She came up with “Spanks,” which had an obvious cute twist in the context of undergarments. Her research had also told her made-up words for brands do well, so she dropped the k and replaced it with the x, giving her a name that met both criteria.
So she had a name, but she still didn’t have a physical product. She took a week off from her day job and drove to North Carolina textile mills to pitch her underwear idea directly to hosiery manufacturers. Most just shook their heads and sent her on her way. But one manufacturer didn’t (“I have two daughters,” he told her) and began working with Blakely to create the prototype for Spanx—a footless, body-shaping, sheer, comfortable undergarment for the women of today and tomorrow. The Spanx slimming technology “provides graduated compression throughout the leg for improved circulation and all-day support.”105 That’s the promise and the Spanx prototype delivered.
Blakely came up with bold packaging for her Spanx—bright red with an illustration of three women on the front and the sassy tagline, “Don’t worry, we’ve got your butt covered.” So she had the prototype and the packaging. Now she needed an outlet, a place to sell them. She went big, calling a Neiman Marcus buyer, flying to Dallas to meet with her, modeling a Spanx garment herself, and closing the deal. Neiman Marcus said yes and stocked Blakely’s creation. She made similar trips to other giant retailers, including Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s. At each stop she was both model and pitch person. They all said yes. Her passion had paid off.
But she didn’t take a breath; she didn’t slow down. She had no budget for advertising, so she hit the road, visiting store after store to pitch Spanx to sales associates and customers. “I became notorious for lifting up my pant leg to every woman walking by,” she remembers. “My mom always said that as long as I lifted my pants up and not down to show my product then I had her blessing.”106
Blakely and her friends and family members relentlessly pitched Spanx to news outlets, hoping to get some free PR. And did they ever. Spanx and Blakely were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, The View, The Tyra Banks Show, and countless local TV programs. Her list of print coverage is just as impressive: Forbes, Fortune, People, Entrepreneur, InStyle, The New York Times, USA Today, Glamour, Vogue, and many more. Then reality television came calling. Blakely appeared on The Rebel Billionaire: Branson’s Quest for the Best, even having tea in a hot air balloon with Richard Branson. The three-month Rebel Billionaire gig took her to China, London, and South Africa, where she spent an afternoon with Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Mandela.
Again, Blakely showed her relentlessness and passion. Not only did she use her time with Branson to tell him all about her company and herself, she also shared her dream of helping the women of Africa as they struggle against the cultural forces that keep them down. Branson was impressed. At the end of the show, Branson handed Blakely a check for $750,000—his pay from Fox for the series—so she could pursue her dream. Branson was there in Atlanta in 2006 when Blakely launched the Sara Blakely Foundation, dedicated to helping women globally through education and entrepreneurship.
Meanwhile, her company continues to grow and expand the product line, adding Assets (created exclusively for Target), Spanx Power Panties, and Spanx High-Falutin’ Footless Pantyhose. And there’ll be plenty more where those came from—all because a smart, creative, passionate woman from Florida didn’t like the look and feel of her underwear.
Our third and final example of a person in the fearless and crazy pursuit of a personal passion is not a famous celebrity, politician, sports star, or CEO. It’s not someone from the history books or the Forbes list of the richest. Yet it’s someone you are quite familiar with. Look in the mirror. It’s you.
Like Joe Moglia and Sara Blakely, you have personal passions you’d love to pursue. You have dreams, you have ambitions, and you have things you’d like to do, things you’d like to try.
In his book Turn Your Passion into Profit, business writer Walt F. J. Goodridge, himself a fearless and crazy “nomadpreneur” who travels the world for work and play, uses a clever acronym, LIFE PASSION, to show the qualities of passion, be it personal, professional, or a mix of both.
| L | LOVE: Your passion is something you love to do. |
| I | INTEREST: Your passion is something that interests you. |
| F | FULFILLING: Your passion gives you a sense of fulfillment. |
| E | EMPOWERING: Your passion usually empowers and energizes you. |
| P | PERSONAL: Your passion has personal significance to you and you alone. |
| A | ABILITIES: Your passion capitalizes on your assets, attributes, and abilities. |
S |
SERVICE: Your passion will usually provide a service or fulfill a need. |
| S | SPIRITUAL: Your passion and its pursuit represent an area of spiritual growth. |
| I | INSPIRING: Your passion is inspiring to you and therefore will inspire others too. |
| O | OBVIOUS: Your passion, once found, is usually something obvious to you. |
| N | NATURAL: Your passion is often unstudied and comes naturally to you.107 |
That all makes sense, but maybe life keeps getting in the way of your passion. Sure, some people can just drop everything and run off to join the circus, but you have obligations and responsibilities. Maybe you have a home and family. Maybe you have an office or a warehouse filled with hardworking employees dependent on you. Or maybe it’s just that you’ve got bills to pay—every month, every day. Those aren’t going away, and you should never shirk your moral obligations.
So the passion, the dream, is set aside, pushed into the corners of your mind. You most likely won’t ever open that restaurant. You most likely won’t ever climb Mt. Everest. You most likely won’t ever join the Peace Corps.
But don’t throw your passion away, ever. You can chip away at it; you can work on it on the side. Maybe your dream was to be a Hollywood screenwriter, but life got in the way. Well, get in there and do some of it anyway. Buy a screen-writing how-to book. Take a screenwriting course at your local community college. Join a writers group. Start writing. Keep writing. Maybe just a half hour or an hour a day, late at night or early in the morning. Enter your script in one of the many screenwriting contests. Should you rehearse your Oscar acceptance speech? No. And you most likely won’t sell a script. But you will be answering the siren’s call of your personal passion.
Maybe you’ve always wanted to cook, to be a chef. You wanted to open your own little bistro in an upscale part of town and have some amazing and unusual specials of the day to write on your chalkboard at the front door. But then life got in the way—spouse, kids, bills, bills, and more bills. You don’t have to shoo the dream away. You can dabble in it, as time and circumstances permit. Take a culinary course at a local college. Host a series of dinners at your home for special friends and family members. Join a club of like-minded chefs. Maybe create a blog for recipe sharing or local restaurant news. Will you have your own show on Food Network? Nope. But you will be answering the siren’s call of your personal passion.
You will be experiencing the rush that comes from writing, cooking, setting up shop, forming a partnership—any creative endeavor. And because you are at least engaging with your passion, your entire frame of mind and your confidence will improve. You’ll feel better about yourself. Your friends and family members will notice the difference. You’ll perform your obligations and responsibilities better and will enjoy them more. Following your personal passion, even if only part way—even if it’s only a toe in the water—is good for the soul.
Someone might say, “You get up at five A.M. and write stuff every day? What are you, crazy?”
Or they might say, “You’re going to a cooking class on Monday nights when you could be watching football? What are you, crazy?”
Writing, cooking—whatever that passion is—you’ll answer, “Yeah, a little.” And then you’ll smile.
MY TAKELet’s talk about courage—the courage to pursue a personal passion, the courage to accept and perform your personal responsibilities, and the courage to be fearless and crazy. Aristotle called courage the first of human qualities “because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” What follows may sound a little preachy at times, but it’s important. It’s very near and dear to my heart. In fact, if I had to say in one word what this book is about, that word would be courage.
In animals, fear is the key to what scientists call the fight-or-flight response, which is necessary for survival. In human beings, too, fear is a natural response to a perceived or real threat. Being conscious of fears, and subsequently of any threats, is a good thing. The advantage of being fearless, though, is that you don’t exactly ignore your fears but instead act to bring them under control and keep them in check. Your ability to do this—to control your fears—is one of the things that makes you human. It is part of living consciously; you make decisions based on rational thought rather than allowing your instincts to govern how you act. And in business, for obvious reasons, this is crucial.
By living consciously and investing in every decision you make—by planning ahead—you put yourself in a position to achieve. You have a choice: either exercise your human courage and consciousness or admit that your fears are too much for you and embrace a life on the sidelines. But make this choice deliberately and with full awareness of its consequences.
Courage is the very essence of life-wealth. It is necessary at every step—vision, planning, execution, marketing, networking, and dealing with the unknowns. If you decide to be courageous and embark on a life-wealth path of personal development, a path that will see you on your way to living consciously and achieving your goals, you should also keep in mind, for the long run, that you may endure dysfunctional relationships, you may be broke at one time or another, and you may even fail completely. It’s impossible to predict what will happen, even if you work hard and plan hard. But don’t be put off. Even the most devastating failures are all just obstacles along the path of a life lived courageously. You’ll always have your private victory as a conscious person, with an abundance of joy, happiness, and fulfillment in your life.
Courageous people are still afraid, but they work to prevent their fears from paralyzing them. Giving in to your fears causes the long-term, unintended effect of strengthening them; similarly, when you avoid your fears and feel relieved that you don’t have to deal with them for now, you accept a psychological reward that reinforces the avoidance behavior. You are all the more likely to avoid the fears in the future. You condition yourself to become timid and to ignore challenges that might lead to success. Unless you nip this behavior in the bud, you block yourself from ever achieving your goals.
Avoidance behavior causes stagnation in the long run, and as you get older, it becomes harder and harder even to imagine yourself standing up to your fears, let alone actually doing so. You cocoon yourself in your life, whether it’s in an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying job, or a too-low income bracket. You’re smothered and not living the life you dreamed of. So you accept it, and you give up.
But don’t do it. There’s a voice in the back of your head telling you every day that you can be successful, and it’s time that you heeded it. It’s like the unmuffled voice you heard when you were a child or a teen and had your whole life in front of you—seemingly without limits, wide open. Like most people as they grow older, you settled into avoiding your fears and accepting a pattern for your life that doesn’t require any effort. You switched off or drowned out the little voice. And you still try not to hear it as it tells you that it’s still possible to make a fortune or rebuild a relationship, that it’s not too late to learn new skills or start your own business.
Perhaps you drown out that voice by watching television, working long hours, or drinking alcohol or caffeine. Some drown it out by overeating or undereating. Whatever your drug of choice happens to be, it’s important to identify it and, if you’re serious about achieving any of your goals, put a stop to it right away. Whenever you muffle that little voice telling you to do better, you’re lowering your level of consciousness. You’re moving closer to becoming an instinctive animal and further away from becoming a conscious human being. You react to life instead of proactively going after your goals. You fall into a state of learned helplessness.
Putting an end to the vicious cycle means summoning your courage and confronting that inner voice. Sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. You’re going to make a list. Use your computer if you wish, but I prefer doing it the old-fashioned way—ink on paper. Writing something out can more easily bring a spiritual release of your feelings. Think about what the little voice in your head is saying now and what it has been saying for years. Write down everything about your aspirations and your dreams. Be general or specific, write a long list or a short one—it doesn’t matter. Just so you write something down. You are at the first stage of life-wealth: vision.
As you’re looking over your list and mulling your possibilities, think of these words from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”108
And consider this from writer Steve Pavlina: “Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing you to the areas where you need to grow. So when you encounter a new fear within yourself, celebrate it as an opportunity for growth, just as you would celebrate reaching a new personal best with strength training.”109 As author Erica Jong writes, “Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.”110
After you realize exactly what your fearless dream is, after you accept and embrace that wild and crazy dream, it’s time for the planning phase, the second step on the life-wealth path. Planning is fundamental because it gives you a relatively stress-free context for working out many of the problems you are likely to encounter as you execute your idea. As you plan, you are conscious of those problems, you are analyzing them, and you are prepping yourself for them. In fact, you are incrementally developing the courage you will need later.
You develop courage gradually, just as if it were a muscle in your body. You’ll be able to take on increasingly bigger challenges because your courage will become conditioned like any other muscle you decide to train consistently and conscientiously over time. If you don’t work your muscles regularly, you become weak both physically and mentally. If you don’t regularly exercise your courage, you strengthen your fear by default, and your courage decays.
But remember, being courageous, planning, and then living your fearless and crazy dream doesn’t give you the right to be foolhardy, irresponsible, or harmful. Sometimes the best-laid fearless and crazy plans turn out to be disasters—flat-out dangerous for you or others. If that happens or you even see it coming, then put on the brakes. Being fearless and crazy is not a license to do harm. Put another way, regardless of who you are and where you are in your own life, you have a responsibility to take care of, at the very least, your own basic needs. You need a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, and the means to maintain your health. Most of us carry even greater responsibilities in that we have families and loved ones who rely on us.
Now you have created a life-wealth road map for every waking minute of your life from now on. You have set goals for yourself and established a plan of action so that you know how you are going to pursue your fearless and crazy vision. Next, you take that first step, and the fun begins.
As Dale Carnegie put it, “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”111
Well, you heard the man. Get busy!
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101 Jon Wertheim, “Nebraska’s Billion-Dollar Assistant,” Sports Illustrated, September 30, 2010, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/jon_wertheim/09/28/nebraska.asst/index.html.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 “Sara’s Story,” spanx.com, http://www.spanx.com/corp/index.jsp?page=saras_Story&clickId=sarasstory_aboutsara_text.
105 “Apparel,” spanx.com, http://www.spanx.com/category/index.jsp?categoryId=2992556&ab=Apparel_Nav.
106 “Sara’s Story,” spanx.com, http://www.spanx.com/corp/index.jsp?page=saras_Story&clickId=sarasstory_aboutsara_text.
107 Walt F. J. Goodridge, Turn Your Passion into Profit (New York: Passion Profit, 2010), 101.
108 “Emerson: Quotes,” transcendentalists.com, http://www.transcendentalists.com/emerson_quotes.htm.
109 Steve Pavlina, “The Courage to Live Consciously,” StevePavlina.com, http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/courage-to-live-consciously.htm.
110 Erica Jong, “The Artist as Housewife,” in The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Klagsbrun (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973), 113.
111 Dale Carnegie Quotes, quotes-clothing.com, http://www.quotes-clothing.com/inaction-doubt-fear-action-confidence-courage-get-busy-dale-carnegie/.