Are You Disgusted With Losing The MLM Game?

Is Your Business Cause Driven?
by Bryant Sandburg

When you study business successes, you find a number of elements that they have in common. One of those is often referred to as "passion."

I don't remember ever hearing a business school professor mention the word, but home business coaches use it a lot. They tell us it's something we must have. I've always been troubled by this admonition.

When I started my first home business, my product was a commodity: long distance phone service. The company was well established, the service was reliable and competitively priced. But it was just long distance. How was I supposed to get passionate about that?

They told me I should be passionate about making money, and helping others to do the same.

The trouble is, money is not itself capable of sustaining passion.

So it had to be something else. I could clearly see the need to have a passion for what I'm doing. What I needed was to find something that would light a flame of passion in me in and then build a business around it.

"Do what you love; the money will follow," is not just a saying. It's a corollary of the law of attraction.

I think we become passionate about causes, not things, products, or services.

Alexander Graham Bell became passionate about his cause: to make instant communication available to every person on the planet.

Thomas Edison had a passion for his cause: to harness the power of electricity to light the world and deliver energy for industry.

Henry Ford had a passion for cars, certainly. But that passion was driven by his vision—cause—of making it possible for every wage earner in America to own a car.

Notice that each of these causes was based on the marketing principle of meeting a need, want or desire. Business success always starts with people: the market.

Bell's future customers never told anyone they needed a telephone. What they needed was to communicate faster, more easily. Bell saw a way to meet that need with technology that was already available. (Bell didn't invent the telephone; he was the first to publicize it, and he positioned himself as the father of the telephone. But that's another article.)

Edison saw the need for a better, cheaper way to light the streets and people's homes. That was the cause that drove him to find a way to use electricity to make that happen.

Ford was fascinated by cars, but what fueled his passion was the cause of putting this new form of transportation within reach of the masses.

Passion may be needed for success, but I challenge you to find passion without a cause.

Do what you love. The money will follow.

What's your cause?