What it takes to ‘rule’ the business world

What’s passion got to do with it? Martha’s Rule
Build your business success around something that you love — something that is inherently and endlessly interesting to you.

It is great to love one’s work. Doing work that you enjoy gives you energy. You are imbued with enthusiasm. Your senses seem sharper. You wake up with new ideas every day and with solutions to conquer the challenges that cropped up the day before. You are always confident that goals are attainable, that creativity and ingenuity and hard work and passion for the work will make “it” all come together. This “passion” for one’s work is just like an all-consuming love affair — something that all of us crave to experience but encounter only once or twice in a lifetime if we are lucky.

Knowing your passion, working hard to keep it alive, enjoying it every minute of every day, even when the going gets difficult — these are the hallmarks of an entrepreneurial enterprise that you build and develop and maintain and evolve. You expend this extraordinary energy so that others may benefit from it, may learn from it, and may even profit from it.

I have always found it extremely difficult to differentiate between what others might consider my life and my business. For me they are inextricably intertwined. That is because I have the same passion for both. Simply stated, my life is my work and my work is my life. As a result, I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I am excited every day: I love waking up; I love getting to work; I love focusing on a new initiative.

I am not alone with this passion for my work, for my life. Other entrepreneurs that I know have the same type of passion, and their excitement for their work and for their lives is electric and palpable. Whether they work for a large company, run their own business, are raising a family, or are organizing a fund-raising event for a charity, they are tuned into anything and anyone that can help them make their plans unfold and their dreams come true. They are positive and optimistic. They always find a way to get the job done better, faster, and more energetically than those around them.

Passion is the first and most essential ingredient for planning and beginning a business or for starting and satisfactorily completing any worthwhile project. Without passion, work is just work, a chore. Without passion, quality, the cornerstone of all businesses, is simply about minimum standards. Without passion, the people who will benefit directly from your efforts — the customers — seem incidental.

It was my passion for teaching and for easing the challenges of the homemaker’s everyday life that helped me turn my homegrown catering business into a successful omnimedia company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and with hundreds of similarly creative and driven employees designing and producing thousands of exciting and useful products for America’s homemakers.

When work is based in passion, it does not feel like work — it feels fulfilling and empowering, far more about creating, building, devising, initiating, leading, and serving than about simply moving through one task and on to another. I often use the following example: For me, planting and maintaining a garden is not, is never, working in the garden. Instead, it is gardening. I never have to do housework. I have furniture to polish, I have vacuuming to do, I have ironing to finish.

Excerpted from “The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Grow, or Manage a Business” by Martha Stewart. Copyright © 2005, Martha Stewart. All rights reserved. Published by Rodale Books. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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