For many years the phrase “follow your passion” was one of the top pieces of career advice that was offered to everyone who was thinking about going down the entrepreneur route. There’s a degree of romance associated with being a holistic entrepreneur, offering a life where your business and your passion are perfectly blended so that you get well paid to do what you love.
Unfortunately for the majority of people who go down this path, this romantic dream often ends up in burnout or bankruptcy, and sometimes both, as they just can’t get it to work.
In a recent interview with Luis Condon, the host of the popular podcast Thriving Launch which has been ranked at the top of New & Noteworthy and has featured now over 200 very notable guests, he talked about his own journey and how in order to be a successful holistic entrepreneur you need three things and these are Passion, Purpose, and Profits.
Passion
Luis said it all starts with passion if you start with profits, you can make money, but it’s hard to develop a true passion for something just because it generates a profit, and ultimately that just ends up as a job that someday you will resent.
Sadly, most entrepreneurs just have passion, but lack profits – or they have profits but the passion and purpose are missing.
When you follow your passion not only do you love what you do, but it will help you to keep going through the tough times. Being an entrepreneur demands so much, it’s about giving everything you have, and so if there isn’t passion, it’s likely going to be hard to push through the hard times. Luis shared with me that the word passion actually comes from the Greek word for suffering, and if we’re all willing to suffer to some extent in order to follow our passion, then we’ll have something truly worth creating and sharing.
But no one wants to suffer forever, and this is why we need to associate our passion with a purpose.
Luis has a passion for people. He loves meeting and speaking with people and this is why using Podcasting to make an impact, and spread his message, was a great idea.
But he struggled initially to convert this into a business because just following passion and sharing his message wasn’t enough.
Purpose
That all changed when he found his purpose, which he realized was helping people.
Before becoming a holistic entrepreneur, Luis taught marriage education to low-income couples as part of the nation’s largest research project on marital success. He loved the work.
Using his passion for speaking to people and understanding their challenges, put him into a position to be able to offer advice and help them find solutions, which he then offered through his podcast, which became very popular, which was great.
Now he was serving his passion and his purpose, giving immense value, and building a large following.
Unfortunately, those results didn’t include enough money to live on, and for the best part of a year, he slept in his car, and on several occasion slept in the cold parks of Seattle, WA during the winter.
It wasn’t that he didn’t provide a much needed or valuable service, it was that Luis lacked knowledge. He didn’t understand the essential element of business survival – and the vital ingredient that keeps the boat afloat: Profits.
Profits
After around 12 months of struggling following his passion, and serving his purpose, Luis met his partner Kamala Chambers.
Kamala could see the value and benefits of the services that Luis offered, and she worked with him to put the systems and processes in place which allowed them to not only continue to serve and have passion but to also monetize the Podcasting and the teaching that Luis often did completely free of charge.
With the ThrivingLaunch podcast, Luis felt encouraged to reach out to some of the biggest names such as Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, and JP Sears and it was this same passion that persuaded them to be guests on his show.
Having created a successful podcast and now a profitable business, Luis has been able to go from homeless to being able to enjoy a life where he can live abundantly, travel, and still give his services to people who truly need it, as he now has passion, purpose, and profits.
The route to becoming a holistic entrepreneur often starts with following your passion and giving more than you get, but at some point, it needs to generate a profit.
Too many holistic entrepreneurs see profit as a dirty word, but without profits, their businesses die. Luis said that now that his business is profitable, it allows him to be able to give even more back, and work with those who cannot pay for his services. But in order to be able to do that you need to have profitable clients too.
If you want to be a successful holistic entrepreneur then you need to follow your passion, but make sure that you can turn it into a purpose that can serve others, and that it is something that you’re going to be able to charge for.
You start with passion, but you have to have your eyes on profits too otherwise you will end up with an expensive hobby, that’s just not sustainable long term.
Source: Inc Asean