As you may have read in our last article on the Art of Entrepreneurship: The Power of Execution, there are many traits that differentiate a successful entrepreneur from an unsuccessful one. The second one of those traits is their ability to differentiate passion from emotions and drive results home based on logic rather than emotions.
Passion and emotions are very closely related and to some people might even be considered the same but there is a significant difference between the two as one can lead to success while the other to total destruction. Differentiating the two and enabling your mind to use passion rather than emotion around your decision making process will enable you to become a successful entrepreneur.
How can you do that?
Before we discuss how we as entrepreneurs effectively use this concept, lets define for ourselves what the meaning of each is as well as it plays of in real life.
Passion = Belief
Emotions= Feeling
I like to think of passion vs emotion as belief vs feeling, as it makes it easier to differentiate the two and differentiates the definitions a bit as well.
Acting with belief is natural as it is important that we believe in ourselves and our ability to accomplish any task prior to taking it on. The belief that we will do great creates a confidence felt by others that in some cases might even be so intimidating as to draw attention to what we are doing. In most cases, confidence and assertiveness are the traits that are exhumed in our decisions and work very well. We use this system when we are trying to convince someone of doing something and find ourselves talking of our project with confidence and belief in yourselves as well as their ability to help our growth.
An emotion on the other hand makes us human but also makes us weak. Emotions such as fear, anger or content make us act away from a logical approach but rather in haste and in an unlikely manner. The feelings we experience with emotions often cloud our judgment and makes us vulnerable to mistakes. An easy interpretation of that is limiting who we hire (despite them being the best we need) because of how we feel towards them or even perhaps choosing to not terminate an employee that brings no value to our team because we feel bad. Emotions despite making us human are simply dangerous.
In your quest to becoming the ultimate entrepreneur, remember that differentiating the two is very necessary and is the difference between victory and failure. When making decisions around your business, remain passionate and continue to believe in your idea and yourself, therefore remaining open to change and ideas that help you improve your overall product or service. Remain flexible for the sake of victory. If you choose emotions, you will find yourself in a very bad place with a series of bad decisions that will force you into a corner you may not be able to recover from. Emotional entrepreneurs will usually not budge from their main idea, or will not welcome external sources as they have fears that others will harm their work and exhume too much LOVE rather than passion and as they say “love is blind” even in the business world.
