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Synopsis

What you should do is what you like to do. You can’t achieve sustained success if you don’t love what you do. More and more businesses are based on hobbies and personal interests.

Rather than finding out the hard way that you can’t stick it out at a job you hate just for the money, think about what you really love to do before starting a business or choosing a profession. Loving what you do is no guarantee of being successful, but if you’re not happy at what you’re doing, you can never achieve sustainable success over time.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 093 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you?

Ivan:
Doing great, Priscilla. I’ve got a topic that’s near and dear to me. I really love this topic, and it is, as you said, “Do what you love, and you’ll love what you do.”

As an adjunct university professor for almost 20 years, I’d often have students say to me, “Well, Dr. Misner, what kind of business or profession should I consider going into right now?”

And I’d always tell them, “Well, what do you like? What do you really enjoy doing?”

And they’d say something like, “No, no. You don’t understand. I’m asking what I should do.”

And I’d say, “No, no. You don’t understand. What do you like to do? What are you really interested in?”

And they’d look at me like I was from outer space. They were perplexed. They’d stutter out something about trying to figure out what a good profession to go in would be rather than what kind of business that they like.

And I’d go on to explain to them that you cannot achieve sustained success over time. You cannot achieve sustained success over time without doing something you love. Therefore, I would tell the students, “You need to think about what you really enjoy doing and then look for opportunities in those areas.”

I don’t know if you know this, but according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, it’s estimated that 60 percent of all businesses started in the late ‘90s were based on hobbies or personal interests. More and more you see people turning their dreams into their livelihood.

I saw a great example of this really in action when I attended a fundraiser at a local university here in Southern California, it’s Azusa Pacific University, and I was there at an evening fundraiser that the BNI Foundation was supporting. And the program highlighted a graduate from the Physics Department, and his name was Steven. He graduated in 2001 from APU, and after graduation, he went to work at NASA’s JPL in Pasadena. He had a great job. And while he was working at JPL, a close family member passed away in a really tragic accident, and Steven and his wife, she had also had a very successful career, sat back and really evaluated their lives. And they decided that they were going to make a major change, and they chose to pursue a hobby that they had for some time and to walk away from very, very successful jobs that they had. And their hobby was making all natural body care products, and they wanted to turn it into a full-time business, because they just loved it, and they loved what it did throughout the world. And I’ll explain.

One of the reasons they did it was, it enabled them to, of course, work from home. They had a new family; they could spend time with the kids. The name of the company is Anti-Body, A-N-T-I hyphen Body. Here’s the interesting thing is, it not only offers all natural body care products, but it promotes global Fair Trade. That’s what really interested them, was to have some product that was natural but to also help those in need. And so what it does is it sources out all its raw materials directly from workers in developing countries creating sustainability for those who might be exploited in those very same markets.

And to me, this was a classic example of doing what you love and loving what you do and the impact that it has on the community or on other communities throughout the world. This decision really changed Steven’s life; it changed the course of his life. And now he’s really happy doing what he’s doing. He loves working every day, and his business is thriving, and I think it’s because – and by the way, he gets to do what he was trained. You may not think it, but he basically runs the physics department of the company, which is what he was training – and although it’s not aerospace – part of his training was in physics, and so he is able to use some of that training in the labs to help create the products. And I think that’s an incredible story.

I understand that loving what you do is no guarantee that you’re going to be successful. That’s important. Some people say, “I love what I do, but I’m not successful.” However, I’m equally confident that if you’re not happy at what you’re doing, you can never achieve any sustainable success over time. And that’s important.

So if you’re thinking about starting your own business, you’ve got to find what you love to do. I use the crazy story, but it’s almost like what I used to tell my kids when they were really small and we’d go to an ice cream shop and they just couldn’t decide what they wanted to have for ice cream. I’d say, “Well, what do you feel like?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Stick your tongue out, wave it around. What’s it feel like?”

They would laugh and stick their tongue out and wave it around and say, “Well, it feels like chocolate chip.”

“All right. Well, pick chocolate chip.”

So what I tell business people and certainly what I tell college students now, “Stick your tongue out, wave it around. What do you feel like doing? Pick something you really want, something you really want to be doing, and you’ll be a lot happier in life.” And I’m not just talking about picking ice cream.

Priscilla:
Yeah, you keep talking to us about that hidden ingredient, the secret ingredient of passion and how it affects the energy that you bring when you talk about your business, and I think that this topic is an example of that.

Ivan:
Yeah, if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you not going to be successful in the long haul. You can get by for a certain period of time, but certainly, when times are tough and the economy is a challenge, that’s when it really hits if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing. And that’s really important. I think if you can find something where you’re doing what you love, you’re going to love what you do and the chances of you being successful are much, much greater.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Priscilla, but I love what I do.

Priscilla:
I have noticed that, Ivan.

Ivan:
This is a fun business. I really feel like BNI is absolutely my calling. It’s the greatest business in the world. I’m able to help hundreds of thousands of business professionals in dozens and dozens of countries all around the world to build their business through a really great way. To me, BNI is not only a great way to get business, it’s an even better way to do business, and so I certainly have found what I’m passionate about. And anybody who’s out there that’s able to find theirs is going to achieve a much higher level of success.

Priscilla:
Well, thank you, Dr. Misner. That was wonderful.

I think that’s it for this week.

Ivan:
That’s it. Thank you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
I’d like to remind all of the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you will join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.