Find Your Passion - Among the Things You re Good At

Find Your Passion—Among the Things You're Good At

While earlier in the book we discussed the need to find your talents, we did not discuss the need to find your passion. And there is a reason why I saved the part about finding your passion for the end of the career path section of the book: because everyone says "find your passion" as if that's all you need to become a great success. I did not want the passion part to overshadow the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of the invincible career path, so I saved it for the end of this part of the book.

So, yes, you have to find something you really like, but finding that passion must be put in the context of everything else that you need to do to become the invincible executive. Passion alone gets you nothing. You need to acknowledge at the outset that just because you are passionate about a career or skill does not mean you are good at it. In fact, it is better to be talented and hate your job than to lack talent and like it. There are a lot of people who get pretty far in the world doing something that they absolutely despise. There are very few people who get far in a field they love but for which they lack ability.

However, every invincible executive I interviewed—dozens of them—said that you will never get to the very top of a profession that you do not like. "You can get pretty far," an air force general told me, "but you'll never get the star." The upper echelon requires both talent and passion.

There are skills that you have that you do not like using. I know, for example, many people who are good at math but do not like it. A couple of them were so good that they allowed teachers, parents, and bosses to commandeer their careers—pushing them into engineering and software design. One of them had tears well up in his eyes when he confided to me that he knew he would be the best literature professor in the world, but instead he is designing hydraulics systems for cars. You cannot become this person.

Find what you are good at; then, only within that skill set, do what you like.