I love Alicia Keyes! She is smart, beautiful and passionate. Her song, Girl on Fire, is my mantra.
To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be on fire! You need passion. It is the only thing that will sustain you during those many weeks and months ahead of you as you conceive, launch, build and grow your business.
Being on fire, to me, is one part emotion and one part energy. A few years ago, an executive coach told me, “you are too emotional”. I thought long and hard about that comment, and ultimately disagreed wholeheartedly (no pun intended). When it comes to being Dilbert, maybe emotion is a bad thing. But, when it comes to being an entrepreneur, you need emotion to fuel the fire. Steve Jobs expressed it beautifully in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address (full transcript in the Huffington Post):
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
The other key ingredient in entrepreneurial fire is energy. I learned long ago, while moderating hundreds of focus groups and strategy sessions, that energy can light up a room and infuse a conversation. If you channel your energy productively, and consciously, you can literally make things happen. More on that later…
Changing the Way the World Learns 