Meet Lori Collins
Lori is the Founder of Startup Café, the blog where entrepreneurs get to know each other, share war stories and make friends and business partners. She built new businesses at American Express, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, and LendingTree and has led two financial services startups. Focusing on social entrepreneurs, Lori blends her passion for social impact with a love of startups.
Lori currently serves as a strategic adviser and coach for emerging ventures. Her writing has been featured in Ventureprise.org/blog/, DetailedBlock.com, and Examiner.com.
WHAT LORI SAYS ABOUT WordPlay:
Maureen has been such a great
supporter and coach, helping me tap into my "inner writer". I've kept a journal since I was 19, so obviously writing is an outlet for me. Maureen has helped me connect with that outlet for my personal enjoyment and, on a professional level, with my blog, which has grown from a trickle to as much as 700 viewers per month (and growing). I've also very much enjoyed attending WordPlay seasonal writing retreats -- one day get-aways that spur an outpouring from the pen.
You can connect with Lori here:
www.startupcafe.org - please subscribe!
www.Facebook.com/StartupCafeOrg - please "like"!
Featured Writing
"Passion is Over-rated"
by
Lori Collins
Your passion is a pipe dream. Best focus on your abilities. So goes the advice of Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can't Ignore You. Taking a contrarian view of the popular mantra to "follow your passion," Newport pans this advice as dangerous and cites case after case of people who followed their passions with no skill or business plan to back them up, finding quite little of their dreams.
I was relieved to read Newport's view. I was starting to think it was just me who felt like smacking every person who asked me "What's your passion?" Well, I tend to be passionate about many things. I love modern dance. I collect art. I adore my nephews. Cooking and foreign films make a hot date. I get apoplectic on a ski slope. No dust settles on my passport. My house is a virtual shrine to Africa. Can I make money on any of this?
So let's review where I've actually made some money. The mortgage business: not a passion. The mutual fund business: sort of a passion, once I figured out 12b-1 fees. Flight insurance: definitely not a passion.
Competency First, Passion Follows
Newport argues that passion follows competency -- once you're good at something, you start to love it. This sounds like the mother of an arranged marriage saying to her daughter, "He's good for you. You'll learn to love him." As passionless as this sounds, sometimes those kinds of mothers are right. I wasn't in love with finance. I was always good at finance, but loved marketing. I got into financial services marketing to solve the dilemma. But mostly I was good at staring into the unknown and making it rain money. Diving in and learning new industries, making clients happy, getting people who hated or feared my company to come around. The product was almost an after-thought to the challenge. Finance paid the rent and got me those stamps on my passport....
Case in Point: Steve Jobs
As Newport tells the tale, Steve Jobs wasn't particularly passionate about computers before he started Apple. He majored in Western history and dance, with Eastern mysticism on the side. He teamed up with Wozniack for a while, but then disappeared for several months to hang out at a commune. When Jobs finally saw an opportunity in technology, he got Woz to build it in his free time. Jobs just liked to sell. His dreams were small until his products started generating cash. Then passion began to set in.
The Path to Success
Here's Newport's advice in a nutshell: Figure out what works for you, what you can offer the world, and put in the hours needed to develop your skills. The idea that the world will conspire to support your dreams just because you commit to them doesn't always work. Look around at folks scraping by. Don't they have passions? Look around at folks succeeding wildly. Are you emulating people who are passionate or those who know what they're doing? Choose the latter.
(Don't miss her counterpoint perspective here: http://startupcafe.org/?p=445.
