Using your skills or dying with passion

One of the greatest things about running a business is that you do it with passion. In those beginning days where you set up your products and services, you work your butt off to make sure everything turns out the best that it possibly can for the skills that you have at the time. The process continues on a rinse and repeat cycle for as long as you have a business, I’ve been loving this for the past 4 and a half years. In fact, it’s this raw passion that separates the ‘everyday job’ from entrepreneurship for me, and its why I can happily choose to start my workday at 10 pm and work for 6 hours after an entirely chilled out day or why I have been happy to stay in so many nights that others were going out.

In 2007 when I finished University, I was full of buzz and excitement. I had completed four years of study and was now a fully qualified senior and middle schooling teacher in Queensland. I couldn’t wait to teach PE; help inspire children to write creatively in English and positively impact those children who really needed a great role model. It was this raw passion that would leave me to work super long hours, create extremely intricate and engaging lessons for students, and for the most part say goodbye to my evenings and weekends.

With a huge desire to help enhanced by a placement in a challenging school with significant needs, I felt akin to the role played by Michelle Pfeffier when she had to help affect positive change in trouble teenagers in Dangerous Minds. I had met students who had completely different backgrounds from me, far more challenging backgrounds than myself and I felt a social duty to help them in any way that I could. This dedication and passion led to chasing down extra-curricula activities which continued into my teaching career.

In my second year of teaching, I was leading up appropriate assessment and learning and ensuring the differentiation of special needs children was occurring across all of the year 8 English classes. It was a busy task but it was important to me. I also continued my work signing up for Behaviour Management committees, running sports teams, and supporting others at charity events. I was highly involved. I always had a passion to help.

As the years through the teaching career continued nothing much changed, to be honest. I kept trying to make a positive impact wherever I could, but I did notice one thing. Something that was like a whisper of certainty that hung in the air that all new professionals knew.

If you are new to your profession you should just float along with the masses, get your experience up and leave the leadership roles to someone else that has been in it for longer

This belief that was often reiterated across a multitude of professions and trades really bothered me. Here you have new, young professionals with an insane eagerness to positively impact the culture, to bring new ideas to the table, to make things bigger, better, bolder and companies and organizations were saying NO.

I didn’t understand it. Much of mainstream media would make it out to be a generational attitude that somehow suggests that the Gen Y (and younger) generations were an entitled class that left University and felt that they deserved to become leaders straight off the bat. To me I never saw it like this, what I always saw was:

COMPANIES AND ORGANISATIONS DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE A RISK THAT SOMETHING COULD BE DONE BETTER.

It really intrigues me (then and now) how entrenched this belief is because the worst that could ever happen from taking a risk that didn’t pay off would be that some time and money would be wasted trying a new idea out for a limited time. But as a result of NEVER taking the risk often, companies and organizations spend up to 10x the amount of money doing things in an inefficient and ineffective way all the while disempowering bright minds who are eager to share their new ideas now.

This is why whether you work for a company, organization, or run a business yourself I believe it is imperative to understand the culture you create for your staff and yourself.

Are you and your staff using your skills or are you dying with passion and wasted potential?

Since I’ve been in business I have made countless mistakes, often played trial and error, and been as passionate about the desire to see a new strategy, team member or service succeed in the vision that I have for it and it doesn’t always pay off but I can say with 100% certainty that I have not left any passion on the table nor have I refused to try as my skills have not only been completed used, they’ve also been consistently reinvented for the better of my business and myself as a person. It’s this constant passion for the pursuit of being better than I was yesterday that keeps me loving the entrepreneurial ride and why I don’t want to squish it in the mind of any of my staff or clients.