Passion Meets Purpose

Business is too hard of an occupation unless you are passionate about what you do. Shoot, having any job is exponentially more difficult if you aren’t having fun. There is great truth in what Confucius said:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

This is where passion meets purpose: when you are doing what you love doing, serving whom you love to serve, and getting paid to do that, it’s not really work. It’s like getting paid to play baseball when baseball is your favorite hobby. Can you make a “job” out of your hobby?

Transcend the “find a need and meet it” advice and find a way to monetize your passion. You’ll make the world a better place if you do.

I have.

The road to purpose

Long story short, I started a blog in 2005. I enjoyed customizing my WordPress website so much, I dove into learning both the programming language CSS and all of the options WordPress had. I must have broken my site 200 times in my first year. I wrote over 500 posts, tried over 20 themes, and (before I knew it) I had logged over 500 hours and learned enough to freelance and consult.

Fast forward 8 years and I’ve been running a successful WordPress business helping people improve their websites, businesses, and lifestyles for over 4 years. It was a lot of work to get to this point, but it hasn’t been “work” in the traditional sense of doing a j.o.b. to get a paycheck and just going through the routine day in and day out. It’s like getting paid to play baseball – if I was independently wealthy, I’d still be doing the same thing, only for people and organizations who can’t afford the services I render for pay now.

Shift your focus

“Success in business” is too broad to allow someone to have a one-step recipe, but the foundation of building something that can last is to base a business on a passion. That passion will find an avenue to express itself to others and fill a need. Do what you love and find a way to make money doing it. Money, in this sense, is in its purest form: compensation for a job/service well done — it is an avenue to help yourself and others.

Earn. Save. Give.