Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort

The great philosopher Mark Cuban shares this…

I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion.” Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion.”

What a bunch of BS. “Follow your passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.

Why? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.

Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there? Why did you bounce from one to another? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company?

If you really want to know where your destiny lies—look at where you apply your time.

Source: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort [BLOG] « Positively Positive

Me? I think Cuban’s binary perspective that is BS. I am fond of saying it’s not either/or — it’s both/and. In this case, it’s not passion or effort — it is both harnessed and combined effectively. Go to the source if you’d like to read the rest of his perspective, but it seems to me he comes around when he says “When you are good at something, passionate, and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.” imho, passion is the fuel that makes the effort possible; without one you don’t have the other…

Bad advice from Mark Cuban: “Ignore your passion” (positivesharing.com)
Create The Day – With Passion (createabeautifullife.com)
Career & Life 2.0: Find Your Purpose and Passion and Experience Peak Performance (timesunion.com)

March 22, 2012 2

Chris Brogan cut through all the Pinterest crap with a great reminder this morning. He said…

It’s Never the Medium. It’s the People

We seek to connect with people. We want to reach them for whatever our goal might be. It’s our effort to connect with them in a meaningful way that benefits our mutual needs that should be the goal. It’s never about the delivery mechanism.

We want what we want. Can you listen to Dr. Stephen R. Covey on cassettes? Absolutely. But if I leave those cassettes in my car (well, if my car had a tape deck), then I’m out of luck, aren’t I? With Audible.com, I can download the audio file to whatever device I want, as often as I want. It’s not the medium. It’s the information.

The People Are the Goal

Who follows whom on Twitter isn’t all that interesting. What we do with those connections is why it matters. How we take our access and make something interesting happen-that is the goal.

Again, it’s not whether I follow you or not. It’s whether something I do can improve your business or goals, and it’s whether you can share something or introduce something, or riff on something, or whatever. It’s how we use the network to build a system. It’s how we make our platform shine to help others, to grow our business, and more. That’s the magic.

Is Pinterest The New Amazing Network?

It will be, for those who use it to build a relationship that goes beyond the pins. Any network is serviceable, if you learn how to interact and help people satisfy their needs.

Now, let’s make mix-tapes together, shall we? Let’s make songs of love: a love of doing better business by building stronger human relationships over whatever medium we want.

You in?

Source: Never Fall In Love With the Medium

No, I’m not into Pinterest. I’ve played with it, found a few shortcuts [like use the Pinterest extension from Shareaholic in Chrome], created a couple hundred pins. It’s fun, but it’s not as useful for me as Evernote! I thought I’d use Pinterest to share the infographics that I love [I’m a huge fan of infographics!] but I ran into a couple of shortcomings that make Pinterest less that useful for me…

Ask yourself this question: If a picture is worth a thousand words, which of the thousand words will I use to describe the picture so that it can be found by anyone, anywhere at any time. Pinterest doesn’t really give you the ability to describe or search for what you are looking for very well. Pinterest would be really cool if it had a powerful advanced search feature or better yet, visual search. As it is though, for me it’s just a cute little toy at the moment. Those words may come back to haunt me someday but for now, that’s my take…

Here’s a little riff I did comparing Pinterest and Evernote focusing on some of the features that are important to me. I’ll let you decide what works best for you…

http://youtu.be/UzGbEY3KiD8

Here are some of the best reads I’ve found on Pinterest lately:

It’s fun and cute, but not very useful to me…

http://storify.com/e1evation/am-i-the-only-one-that-doesn-t-love-pinterest

6 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing (hubspot.com)
Pinterest for Business: 9 Tips From Superuser PediaStaff [CASE STUDY] (socialfish.org)
Cool Pinterest Infographic (abbeydufoe.wordpress.com)
Posting From Pinterest To Your Facebook Fan Page (marketaire.com)
Pinterest is What YOU Want it to Be (cc-chapman.com)
Sorry, but I’m just not that Pinterested (newhope360.com)
7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest (hubspot.com)

February 21, 2012 0

Things are getting Pinteresting in social media — Pinterest is the hottest, latest trend to rock the social media world. I spent a good chunk of the weekend working alongside local Pinterest goddess Kerry Geocaris of MarketingSavant and had the chance to consume massive quantities of Pinterest Kool-Aid. This morning, however, my jury is still out…

Don’t get me wrong! Pinterest — like Kerry — is very cute and cool and I can see why she likes it so much. It’s a great, fun place for digital hoarders to collect their social media treasures. Despite the trends — Pinterest is the fastest growing platform in social media right now — I’m not convinced it’s the best tool for me…

I’m currently weighing Pinterest against the a combination of Evernote + Twitter. I can grab graphics using the Evernote clipper in Chrome and send clipped graphics to Twitter from there. Evernote may not be as sexy as Pinterest right now, but I can tag my multimedia so that it’s easier to find later. At first blush, Pinterest doesn’t have very robust metadata or search functionality. Although I’m a digital hoarder like Kerry, I need my hoarding tools to fit into my social media workflow and Pinterest is lacking in that regard…

One trick we learned? The Pinterest extension for Chrome from Shareaholic adds some nifty functionality to the pinning process. After ‘pinstallation’, I can select descriptive text for my pin on the page before pinning a graphic to a board. I’m going to continue to test it and I’ll report back from time to time…

In the meantime here’s the best of Pinterest that I’ve found in my travels around the internet recently…

http://storify.com/e1evation/pinterested

Here’s an infographic I posted using the embed function in Pinterest. It was underwhelming in that the width of this column is 633 and I like my infographics to cover the entire width of the column. Pinterest would not allow me to enlarge it beyond the 553 pixels in Pinterest…