Entrepreneurs are regularly praised as the beating hearts behind their business creations. The fiercely driven, enthusiastic and determined individuals who simply couldnt stand to see their ideas fail. Passion is always a positive trait. You can never have too much of it. But passion has a twisted cousin that can be super harmful in equal measures to your business. Its called obsession.
Obsession, disguised as passion, clouds our perfect judgment and can be traced to any of these negative habits:
Failure to learn from mistakes.
You can tell a lot about an entrepreneur by the way he or she reacts to failure. We are groomed through the education system to fear the idea of making mistakes. You wouldn’t dare submit a paper littered in errors for fear of being marked down several grades. This fear hurts the process of creative thinking, which an entrepreneur must learn to harness for the greater good.
It’s important to both welcome and learn from mistakes. They are the only way of knowing that our days are being spent productively.
Passion wills us to adapt and refine our ideas until we find suitable solutions to our problems. Obsession refuses to yield the same lessons. Obsession drives an entrepreneur towards the wrong business decisions, time and time again, as he stubbornly refuses to embrace changes – or to make mistakes in the first place.
Refusal to delegate decision-making processes.
Are you obsessed with micro-managing every tiny detail of your business? It may seem like a passionate bid for perfection, but its usually an unhealthy addiction to control.
Imagine your business fully developed and world-renowned with thousands of employees. When that day comes, will you still be making every single decision from your company HQ? I should hope not! Trust in the decision-making skills of others, particularly if you sought them for being experts in their fields.
Obsessing over every last decision prevents the freedom of mind that comes with outsourcing and modularising your business. This is absolutely necessary for growth. By all means, become the brains behind the core strategies of your business. But don’t become the brains behind which type ink cartridge is most suitable for the IT department’s printing needs.
Delegate anything that somebody else can handle just as well for maximum efficiency of your time.
Unhealthy lifestyle with little satisfaction.
If youre experiencing insomnia, seismic mood shifts, or a constant feeling of restlessness, its likely that your passion has spilled in to the realms of obsession.
Do you find yourself jumping out of bed at 3am to answer an email that could have waited until the morning? This is dangerous territory because it slowly eats away at the very reason we become entrepreneurs in the first place. No business is worth the price of your long-term health and sanity.
The conspicuous lack of an end goal.
People often run businesses for the wrong reasons. Sometimes as a form of spiting the ex-employer, who cast doubt that a lowly cubicle minion could succeed on his own. This illusion is created in the entrepreneurs own imagination.
Striving for business success without a long-term goal, or a vision of where you hope to end up, is as good as asking a stranger to determine your fate. You must have an end goal, something you want to achieve above all else. Passion defines this goal with the best intentions. Obsession creates it for all the wrong reasons.
The most interesting difference between passion and obsession is the daily satisfaction you get from setting your work agenda. The obsessive entrepreneur tends to pack as many tasks as he can in to a to-do list that creates dizziness at close inspection. The passionate entrepreneur has a concise work plan, defined by clear objectives, that never become so interfering as to get in the way of life and happiness.
Does your business inspire passion or obsession?
Look carefully at your workday and the answer should reveal itself. Even if the overwhelming influence reveals itself to be obsession, theres no need to be alarmed. Most obsessive ways can be killed at the source by re-addressing your motivations and creating a plan. That plan should be to make passion the driving force behind every decision you make.
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