WHEN PASSION IS NOT ENOUGH

Last Saturday, my professor texted me, enjoining me to listen to the radio where he is being interviewed for his prize winning and critically acclaimed masterpiece, “Setting Frameworks: Family Business and Strategic Management”. I did turn on the radio and listen to him briefly before being interrupted with work. During that short time, I heard him saying that “Passion and dreams aren’t enough to make a business succeed (for entrepreneurs). You need good management in terms of planning and control.” I had to agree wholeheartedly with his statement for I personally experienced the truth of such words. I grew up listening to elders (not only my parents) that the secret to success lies in hardwork, determination, patience, perseverance, and most importantly, dedication. “You only reap what you sow” was the popular phrase of that ethics of hardwork. In fact, the Chinese has a word that embodies all the aforementioned noble qualities and that is, “Pha Phiyaa”, meaning to fight and struggle. They even immortalized it in the Fookien pop song, “Ai Phiyaa Jia eh Ya” (Success can only be attained through struggle). Passion is the indomitable spirit that drives people to excel, to achieve feats deemed miraculous, to sustain their effort in spite of reverses and to continue down a path that many laughed as foolish, crazy, and impossible. And for some people, passion is what they lived for. Passion and ideals are so many times that seized me when I was a lot younger but often times things don’t turn up what you hoped for. And the rewards received seemingly don’t commensurate with the amount of effort you’ve poured into. That is when I realized that there is more to success than simple passion alone. Wisdom gathered through learning and experience is equally critical to success. As my professor pointed out in his interview, 90% of start – ups eventually fail not because of the lack of passion, or the lack of hardwork and perseverance neither was capital an issue. Rather it is the lack of foresight and planning that ultimately did them in. In life as in business, passion is important but not the only ingredient to success. If we compare passion to an adventurer who took his boat to the unknown ocean in search of El Dorado, then wisdom is the sun of the day and the moon and the stars of the night that tells our journeyman the time of the day (therefore the tide), the season of the year (and correspondingly the direction of the wind blowing), and the direction we are to take. To possess only passion is like going to the sea without a map or a knowledge of the stars. Though valiant and heroic in facing the perils of the unknown, one often either ends up at the ocean floor or in a distant land far, far away from the paradise that one sought. Conversely, to wield only wisdom without passion is like a landlubber looking at the moon at night in the safety of the shore speculating what the moon looks like at it’s other side from a place beyond the horizon where the sea meets the sky. A landlubber can’t go to places even if he wishes to. Passion is not enough nor is wisdom. You need both to succeed.