How Passion For Your Job Can Lead To Success

If you want to be successful at your job and move up the company ladder you need to be passionate about your work. You need to be motivated and driven to be the best you can be regardless of your job or your work.

Passion, drive, motivation, zeal, call it what you want it is the self-driven attitude about your job and your work that can help lead you down the path to success.

Over the weekend while doing research for another blog I ran across a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

For me this jumped out as examples of both passion and success. Our success comes not so much from what we do (our job), but how well we do it (our passion for our job). It also illustrates that regardless of your job or your position on the company ladder, you can be successful if you have passion for your work.

Passion Is Important

You may ask how can you consider a street sweeper as being successful. I am sure the street sweeper would rather be a CEO, but at this point in time his job is a street sweeper. He is a street sweeper, but each day he goes to work giving it his all to be the best street sweeper he can be. He is passionate about being the best that he can at what he does. This makes him successful at his job.

Regardless of your current job bringing passion to your work can lay a foundation for success. Not just success in your current job, but success for every rung you want to take up the company ladder. You may hate your job now, but the attitude you take towards it can play a pivotal role in your career.

Passion is an emotion that comes from within you. It is your enthusiasm, your zeal, your drive and your motivation. You don’t want to just feel passionate about your job, you want to put passion into it. You want to apply all of your skills and all of your energy into your work.

Passion does not go unnoticed. People will see how well you do your job and your attitude towards it. They will see even if a task is hard you don’t give in, you apply yourself even more to overcome it. They will notice your drive and your motivation and consider how you would do in another position.

Which Worker Are You?

A company has all sorts of workers, each with their own attitude towards their job and their work. Let me show you two types of workers as examples.

First there are the ones who know their job, they do it well, without complaint and are always looking to help out for the greater good of the team, the department or the company.

Do you look forward to Monday? Are you fired up and ready to get back to work? Do you often work late not because you intended to, but because you were so caught up in your work you lost track of time? Does the day seem to fly by because you are engaged in your work? Is this who you want to be?

The other kind I call clock watchers. The clock watcher muddles through their work just waiting for the clock hands to strike break, lunch and time to go home. These people dread coming to work, they hate Monday and are fired up on Friday, but not for their work. Is this who you want to be?

Which worker is successful? Which worker has a better chance for promotion, recognition or a higher than average pay raise? Which worker has a bright future ahead of them and which one is likely to be in the same position five years from now?

How To Get Your Passion Back

So you find your have answered the question and you are a clock watcher. You want a better job, different work, more pay, more recognition and a promotion. You probably started out with passion for your work, but along the way maybe you were passed over for promotion, or you have just given up.

So how do you get your passion back? Remember passion is an emotion, a state of mind so the first thing you have to do is motivate yourself. Turn to another emotion to find the motivation that you need. Anger. Whether you are mad at yourself, your boss or just your situation take that and turn it into motivation to do whatever it takes to improve your situation.

Once you have the motivation you can apply the passion. Remember it is not about how you feel about your job. It is about putting passion into your work. Maybe you need to learn new skills or you just need to fully engage yourself in your work.

Passion also brings energy to your work. Instead of getting the work done just in time, turn it up and deliver it ahead of schedule. Instead of watching the clock for the time to go home, stay later and use that energy to drive yourself to do more.

Ultimately it is about your attitude. You may have heard if you change your mind you can change your life. This is a perfect example. To be passionate about anything you have to care about it. Change how you look at your job. Remember the street sweeper? He was “oh I hate my lousy job”. He was driven to be the best street sweeper he could be.

This is how you should approach your job and your work. To be passionate about your work you must be motivated to be the best that you can be. Over time people will notice, how you feel about your job will change. Who knows you might even look forward to coming to work on Monday.