What are you truly passionate about ?

People will tell you in their bios on LinkedIn or on their websites that they’re really passionate about marketing or about metrics, or about “B2B communications through social media” — whatever that even means! They’ll swear that all of these things are their deepest, most abiding passion. 

And it always makes me stop, because I think, who is really passionate about any of that? And do they have the same definition of passionate as I do?

Who is passionate about tweeting? Or about closing deals? Who is passionate about growth metrics? It’s a shorthand for when you just don’t know what to write but you want it to sound important, and we’ve started using the word passion as something that belongs in a job description, instead of in our hearts. 

It’s a long way from what passion used to be.

I believe it's like the word love or friendship. It’s a word that is used very often but not meant in the right way. 

When I think about passion, I’m thinking about the love you can have for another person, for your friends and for your family and for your community, for your mission and for what you believe in and for the changes you want to make in the world. 

When I think about passion, I’m thinking about the need to create products that can transform lives, a need that keeps me up at night working on making myself and my companies better, long after the rest of the world is asleep.

I wouldn’t want to be stuck at a party talking to someone who feels ”passionate” about a sales tool. That doesn’t sound like a conversation I would come out of alive. But I would want to talk to someone who is passionate about how they’re using that sales tool to share an innovation with the world that has the potential to reinvent the way we live. 

And I try to embody that way of thinking. I don’t tell people that I’m passionate about broadband technology.

I say I’m passionate about connecting humans. And that’s the truth. 

The whole point of passion is that it gives us purpose. When we throw the word around, we lose some of its power.

The other night, I caught up with an entrepreneur I’ve known for a while . I’ve been working with him to try and lock down what he really wants to do next, and commit to it.

He told me that he’s passionate about building a new CRM product. And I just had to stop him, and ask him if he actually meant to use the word passion. The more we talked about it, the more he came to realise that when he said he was passionate about a CRM, he really meant that he was passionate about relationships, and finding ways to make them stronger.

I think that it’s more and more important to question what you’re really passionate about. To question what you mean when you apply that word, and to make sure that there are areas of your life where that passion belongs, where it can live and breath and grow and thrive. It might be a passion that drives your work, or a passion that drives you to carve out time with your kids, or a passion that keeps you focused on helping others. Whatever it is, I hope it’s enough to get you onto your feet every single day. 

There are going to be times when you have to do what you need to do, in order to get your financial freedom and get by, to allow you to focus on or do what you are actually passionate about. It can take time, if your passion doesn't put food on the table, and there’s nothing with pushing through it to get there. 

But we’re creative people, right? As entrepreneurs, we have to be. That’s what we are, it’s what we’re all about. But a big part of that is our passion. Our passion gives us everything we need to grow, and we should never sell it short. 

Ask yourself this. What are you really passionate about?

This article first appeared on Sambashiry.com.au where you can find out more about me and listen to my brand NEW podcast, 'From Thousands to Millions'.