The Pursuit of Success
Simple Ways to Cultivate Energy, Enthusiasm, & Positive Outcomes
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Passion, Energy, and Success — What’s the Relationship?
In business and career, passion is a tricky commodity.
Passion is a compelling enthusiasm that’s associated with motivation and persistence. People refer to passion as something one finds, a secret sauce of some type, or an edge that one either does or doesn’t have. It’s true that passion often correlates to motivation, creativity, and momentum. There are additional truths to note about passion as well:
First, research confirms that passion is not something one finds, but something one develops. Studies by University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth’s measure the development of passion and how passion contributes to grit and self control.
Second, it’s relatively easy to feel passionate when things are working out. When things fall apart and roadblocks are never-ending, motivation, and consequently passion, can be harder to summon.
Third, passion tends to grow with success — passion increases as one successfully progresses toward a goal or an end. A loop is created, a cycle that looks like this: SUCCESS generates PASSION, which together generate ENERGY, and energy paves the way to success.
The circle then is this — energy helps move us toward success, success generates passion, and success and passion both generate energy.
Energy Moves People and Ideas. Energy Generates Success.
Time is limited, but energy is different. Our personal energy can be actively cultivated, renewed, and expanded, and cultivating our personal energy is time well-spent. Cultivating personal energy is a risk-free investment that correlates with numerous positives. Energy steers us toward success, success drives passion, and success loops back to increase our energy and passion. In a word, successful people pursue success, and they tend to do so systematically. How? By cultivating their personal energy, and by actively developing their passions.
Using Energy to Gauge How, When and Where Time is Spent
Image by Alexandra Kirr from Unsplash
To pursue success in a consistent and effective way, research recommends the cultivation of well-considered habits, habits that automate over time and join together to create systems. A simple system that all of us can invoke in our pursuit of success is this: make choices that maximize your personal energy.
Making choices that maximize energy is a system worth considering. Using energy as a metric to gauge where and with whom we spend our time is powerful. Energy lifts people and causes, spurs ideas, and helps move us uphill. I run and work out, study, pursue credentials, write, and travel because these pursuits energize me. When my energy is solid, I’m more at ease, more motivated, the quality of my work improves, and I’m better company to my friends, family, clients, and co-workers. The same is true for everyone — better energy makes people happier, healthier, and more prone to reach personal and professional milestones.
To maximize and use energy as a system to pursue personal and professional success, consider the following:
Exercise — Physical exertion clears the mind, zaps fatigue, and over time will build a storehouse of energy you never knew you had. Start where you are and move bit by bit toward rigor, exertion, and pushing yourself a few days every week. Develop an uncompromising attitude about exercise. Schedule it. Prioritize it. Dress and show up for it.
Manage Your Attitude — Controlling your attitude rather than allowing circumstances or environment to dictate how you receive and frame people and events is a superpower that is always one decision away.
Make room for what brings peace, rest, and renewal. Time to rest, reflect, and renew is critical for body, mind, and spirit. Rest and renewal refresh and energize.
Arrange opportunities and experiences that excite and move you. A can’t-miss way to maximize our energy is to arrange things in life that excite us about getting up, about work, about people, places, meeting the day, and facing challenge.
Studies show that maximizing our energy is a wonderfully effective system and tool for pursuing success and navigating our work lives and personal lives. Think about what charges and energizes you. Then, make time for and move toward those things.