Why The Main Driver In Today’s World Is Your Passion.

“If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you - like a fever.”

Sam Walton

The 80/20 Differential, (shortened down from the bulkier 80/20 Rule of Almost Everything), states quite clearly that anywhere from 80 to 90% of all working people hate what they are doing, but continue doing it because they have to earn a living.

I find this to be one of the saddest statistics in our culture. And this is mainly because it’s one that I consider myself fortunate for never having fallen prey to.

For the vast majority of my adult life, I have never had a job. That’s because I have been in advertising and marketing. And it’s also because of the attitude I have toward work.

Oh sure, I have been employed by many companies large and small. I have had what you might call bosses, although they never really thought of themselves that way. And I have certainly had to show up and do stuff.

The difference is that none of this stuff I had to show up and do was anything I considered to be work.

Advertising is not like a lot of other businesses. In fact it really is like no other business I know.

After my apprenticeship at a small family run agency called Butler MacKenzie, where I was taught the ins and outs of marketing from strategy to creative to finished product, I entered the world of big time advertising as a writer at a large Canadian agency called Vickers & Benson.

Terry O’Malley, Mentor #1

The Creative Director and part owner of the company, Terry O’Malley, was the first person to explain to me that advertising wasn’t a job or work or anything like it. It was a calling. It was a game. It was a series of puzzles that needed to be solved. But it was not work and it was not a job. Period.

This attitude threw me off a bit and it took a little while for me to shake off that ‘inside the box’ attitude about work. But I was fortunate to have an art director partner and a group head who had come to Toronto from the car business in Detroit and these guys had it down.

After a relatively short time of working with them, I found myself actually getting it too. And it really did shape my entire attitude going forward in my agency career and especially after I went on my own.

Work Is Like A Layer Of Skin That Can Be Shed

Shedding the notion that whatever you are doing is work is one of the most exhilarating experiences you will ever have in your professional life.

Sadly for a lot of people, they become ensconced in an ‘employee’ attitude, and never manage to rise above that.

As I went through my agency career, seven agencies in all, I realized that there were a lot of creative people like me, who never really believed they were working for anyone.

They, and I include myself here, believed that they were a key part of the machinery that powered the consumer economy. Our allegiance was to the industry and to the brands we marketed. Everything else was a moving target and subject to change at any moment.

Nobody thought small back then. Everybody I knew was working to a higher purpose, serving an industry and not doing a job.

It’s Always Been About Attitude

The people who get things done in this world are people who don’t really think about what they do as work. It is their passion. It’s a big part of their psyche. It’s an addiction. A religion. And it’s the thing that drives them.

To call it ‘work’ is to demean it somehow. To put a fence around it and contain it within a 9 to 5 day or to a set of fixed goals or the completion of a step in a process is almost a sin.

And believe it or not, the opportunity to break out of the ‘work/job syndrome’ exists for a lot more people than those in advertising and marketing.

For some it’s more difficult than for others. But honestly it’s worth the effort to change your attitude towards what you now call work. And if you do manage to pull it off, you will be amazed at the new vistas that open up on the other side.

Over the course of the Onwords & Upwords, or independent stage of my career, I have had many encounters with people who are driven by their passion and their need to prove things to themselves and the world.

They never talk about what they do as work, and they like the fact that I never do either. We talk about what needs to be done to get where we want to go and how best to do that.

We are very much in it together and the people I work with not only appreciate it, but come to count on it as we move their businesses forward in a totally work-challenged way.

The Big Finish

And that’s best advice I have for any of you who have read this far. Quit working. Turn what you call a job into a passion. Let your passion be the thing that you follow.

If you do that you will find that, with very few exceptions, you will get better at whatever it is you are doing. You will like it more. And you will become more innovative because you are not working within self-imposed or conventional limits.

And, most importantly, you will feel much more fulfilled and be able to move out to the 80 to 90% that I mentioned in the first paragraph of this piece.

I know this all sounds pretty much like pie in the sky for a lot of you. But, then again, where the hell do you think all the big ideas that happen in this world come from?

They come from people who are following their passion. Pretty much without exception.

We no longer live in a worker bee/queen bee culture. We live in a gig based world. If you want to make the most of your experience in this world, you need to be chasing your own dream, not someone else’s.

And if you’re doing that within a large company or corporation you need to be much more that just another employee. You need to be an intrapreneur, a source of ideas and inspiration for others, all driven by your passion.

So there you go. The Secret, 21st century edition. You can throw away that other book now. LOL.

Jim Murray is an experienced advertising and marketing professional and former professional photographer. He has run his own business (Onwords & Upwords), since 1989 after a 20 year career in Toronto as a senior creative person in major Canadian & international advertising agencies. He is now specialized in creating communications for businesses working to make a positive difference in the world.

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