AttentionMax

I recently wrote that:

I’m more convinced everyday that passion is the ultimate competitive advantage in business.

Competency is expected. Only flawless execution is tolerable.

But when you enable passion, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots can connect, clarity can emerge.

The result is extended and accelerated value creation that otherwise would never have been possible.

Since then, I’ve been thinking more about this idea and have decided to begin an ongoing series — examples and commentary, really — explaining why passion really matters.

Building on my opening above, I’d like to consider insight from Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. The passage below is from the transcript of a recent podcast interview with Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk (via Fred Wilson).

Biz says:

Something we learned when we were working with Odeo was that we weren’t as inspired as we should have been when we worked at Odeo. We weren’t really super into podcasting. I think that was a problem because at the event that we were working on something…where our passion is 100%. I think that ends up showing up in everything that you end up doing. So with Twitter, it was something that we created from scratch and we were super enthusiastic about it. We were using it. Like I said, we were literally giggling when we first started working. We just really enjoyed it and loved it. From that point, it translates to everything you do. It translates with management and it translates to coding. It translates to just sending out…I send out an email every couple of weeks or I try to, to the folks who have signed up on Twitter. And I love sending out email. I love sending “Here’s what we’ve been working on and here’s what’s new and stuff.”

So, I think, really the biggest thing is to ask yourself: Do I love this product? Do I personally want to use it everyday? Because that ends up just being what makes you want to wake up and run in to work and work on your stuff. It sounds sort of silly because it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people find themselves doing something for money or doing something because they think it’s a really good idea. They just don’t necessarily want to use it themselves. I think that’s a bad scenario to be in.

Well said.