Where Passion Comes From | Simon Sinek

Passion is not an input. Passion is an output. Passion, you know, we're all passionate. We're just not all passionate for the same things. And we will feel what we call passion when we are involved in something that is deeply personal to us, that is helping us advance some higher purpose or cause. Then when we go to work, what we experience is passion. But if you make us do something that we feel no personal connection to, that is not as helping advance any kind of bigger ideal than what we feel is stress. Now, passionate people work many hours. They don't come home, they miss their families, they take business trips, they don't sleep. And yet it feels worth it. People who are stressed go on business trips, they miss their families, they work long hours, they don't sleep. But it doesn't feel worth it. Passion is an output, not an input. Like stress is an output, not an input. So you don't. You can't do what you're passionate about. You find something you believe in, and what you will experience is passion. So then it begs the question, how do I find what I believe in? Right. I think society, especially our society, and especially for a younger generation, puts overwhelming pressure on us to have a vision. What's your vision? Or find your bliss, or all of these, they're all the same thing, right? And the problem is, we're not all visionaries. It's unfair. It's an unfair standard. That's like telling everybody to be creative. But we're not all creative or everybody be good at math. But we're not all good at math. We're not all visionaries. Only a small percentage of our population are actually visionary. You don't have to have a vision. You have to find a vision. Right? If you hear Martin Luther King say, I have a dream that one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children, you go, that's what I want. You choose to follow Dr. King. When you hear the words of visionaries, and if they appeal to you on some visceral level, they give you goosebumps. They make you excited, they make you want to sacrifice, be a part of it, stand in line to hear them pay money, whatever it is, follow that. Make that your vision. Take it and say, that's my vision too. You can adopt someone else's vision and make it your own. That's what we call a following, is we have taken the visionary's vision and we have chosen to follow that vision ourselves. We are followers. That's a good thing. There's no difference between the Visionary and the follower. We both see ourselves in service to something bigger than ourselves. Whether you are the originator of that idea or not is irrelevant. What it does is fuel passion. What it does is fuel conviction. So we don't have to have a vision, but we do have to find one. And so read books, watch TED talks, read articles, be in life, watch videos, you know, go out, seek, find, listen. Listen to leaders, corporate, political, whoever. And when something resonates with you, even if you don't know why, that then you can adopt and you can take it upon yourself to use your own talents, your own gifts to help advance whatever that cause is, right? So I have a cause. I have a crystal clear vision of the world I want to live in. I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work, and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. The gift that I have committed to help advance that cause is the ability to put some of these ideas into words that other people can relate to. You know, when you do a jigsaw puzzle, the first thing you do is lean the box against the wall, right? We all have a piece of the puzzle to help build this vision. My piece of the puzzle is I'm the guy that points at the box, but I'm not the guy who builds the business.

Because there are other people who are better at that. The entrepreneurs and the business leaders. I want them to embrace the same picture on the box. The people who work for companies who say, I want to work for a company that does that, that's their piece. The one who's a gifted, natural leader, who cares. We all have at least one friend who for whatever reason, love us and care us, even when we're horrible people that for some reason they still believe in us and they see the good in us, that's their piece of the puzzle. And so we have to commit our gifts. The reason they call them gifts is because they're forgiving. That's what gifts are. They're for giving away. It's. If you have a gift, it's not something you take, it's something you give.

So I think we have to find a vision and commit our gifts to help advance that vision. And the great leaders, the ones that can put that vision into words so clear that we can then recite that vision as if it were our own.