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Passion

In business school, people talk a lot about their goals. Goals for classes. Goals for their careers. And goals for life after Kellogg. And it’s often the case that we assume our classmates have the same goals we do. That they’ll  end up in similar types of jobs and work in the same types of industries. But sometimes there are people that want to do something different, and do what they love. They find something they are so passionate about that they skip all the MBA opportunities to go after.

There’s no doubt that most of us have some level of drive and passion. After all, we would have never made it this far without it. We would have never made it through all the classes, got through all the interviews, and figured out how to be successful.

But for most of us, we speed up in the face of competition. In law school we ask, “how’d the rest of the class do?” In business school, we ask people how many cases they’ve done. We listen for someone breathing down our necks. And we discover that those breadths scare us to work hard and perform at our best. So we leverage it to do better. And sometimes even rely on it.

On the other hand, relying on that stuff can be exhausting.  And more importantly, relying on it means you’ve surrendered the ability to be a leader and an entrepreneur.

I propose that passion to achieve should not come competition but instead from Finding A Way. From moving forward when no one else sees a path–and holding back when the herd isn’t going where you want to go.

The great thing about passion is that it makes you do that.