George Kao argues that passion and compassion aren't opposites. Passion is what you love; compassion is what the market needs. The trick is flavoring market-driven work with your authentic presence so you build income now and audience later.
There are two sources of energy when it comes to growing your business, especially your authentic business. The two sources are passion and compassion. Or you might say there's an internal source of energy and then there's an external source. Passion or an internal source is when you try to build the energy based on your, well, passion. So your peak experiences you want to share, your interests, your skills that you've developed, the product or services you're so excited to bring to the world. That's all passion led stuff. Or also your intuition, your divine calling, your purpose. Essentially it's your connection to the divine source that's internal and that's passion based business. Now a passion based business can work if you spend enough time educating the world about your passion. And as you keep doing it again and again, article after article, video after video, you eventually gather enough of an audience who finally understand why this area that you've been talking about is important. They now start to understand how it fits in their life and they now believe you and trust you enough where they can spend money with you. To be honest, it took me about 10 years of audience building before I got to this passion led business where I could basically make a great living just selling whatever I want to sell, whatever I come up with out of top my head and I have enough people who are just happy to buy it. That's a passion led business. Now let me tell you the other source of energy. If you want to earn an income faster, this is something you need to be aware of. The other source of energy is compassion or more of an external source of energy. Now when I say external, what I mean is that it comes from other people, right? And this is where I think it is important to understand. When you go to the external source of energy, two things happen. You make money faster, but you also have the danger of abandoning your internal source of energy and your internal connection to the divine. And so that's when people say someone has, you know, sold out or lost their soul because there's so much into, into just meeting other people's wants, right? And, and selling what people are buying. And, and so that's compassion. Now compassion doesn't, isn't a bad thing, obviously. What does compassion mean? It means to suffer with, look at the root of that word, to suffer with or empathy. It's like caring about the people you can, that you know that are paying attention to you. You have access to these people. What are they struggling with? What are they yearning for that you, something in your skills can meet their struggle or their yearning and so that's a compassion led business. And you tend to make money faster by leaning into that. Now, last thing I'll say is there is a way to integrate the two and integrate passion and compassion. And this is why I call this authentic business. Right? Authentic passion side business is the compassion side. When you integrate the two, it means that you do the market research, meaning you talk to the people that you are able to contact, that people who already know you, your friends, your colleagues. If you have an audience, try to talk to as many of them as you have time for to learn how they describe what they're struggling with, what they're yearning for as connected to something. You can provide some aspect of your passion. Okay. And when you find that connection between the what they're struggling with or yearning for and what you could provide, it's beautiful. Because now you're like, oh, I thought I was going to launch, you know, XYZ coaching program because I was so excited about, but now I understand that I could still take my skills and package into an ABC coaching program that you're actually needing right now or wanting and yearning for right now. Got it. So now that's what you sell. And then whatever service you provide, whatever program or package or product you provide, you know, that's meeting the market, you can always flavor it with your passion. You flavor it with your authentic presence. So as an example, I'm a business coach, so it's very market driven, you know, and yet I always flavor it with my, you know, my softer presence perhaps, or motivational presence sometimes. I flavor it with my thoughts about spirituality occasionally. And I kind of bring that in even though no one's really paying me for the spiritual things. Right. But I bring that in as much as possible to make things meaningful for me and to make it more unique to the people that I that I talk to. So you can always flavor your compassion led, market driven product or service with your authentic presence, style and interests. So I hope that this is helpful for you to understand how to create a truly authentic business that can thrive. Thanks for watching and always open to your comments and your questions below. Thanks for joining me.
