Love what you do!

Dear readers,

in this discourse I want to add a valuable endowment to my 2012 April blog on Energy and Enthusiasm in which I proclaimed the enthusiastic heart; I now want to encourage you to add another ingredient to the recipe of success: love!

Enthusiasm about your dreams and deeds is indeed closely tied to the love for your dreams and deeds, but somehow a bit different—I surely see both as complementary, where enthusiasm is the outer element with love being the inner part. You can spread and show enthusiasm about what you do, but I would like to encourage you to neither neglect nor diminish the inner part: the love for what you do.

Love for your dreams and deeds is the foundation, the fundamental core for all enthusiasm, because all enthusiasm, if it is real, comes from within; and love is its big bang. Before all enthusiasm can be seen by your fellow friends the love for your deeds and dreams needs to be there—glowing at the bottom of your heart: from within. When the love for your dreams and deeds is fully and entirely established it will shimmer and glow and slowly drift to the outside where people can see you shining and spreading joy and love; but in order to radiate this love you need to have it inside. With the love for your dreams and deeds you will constantly be fulfilled and it will be easy to pursue your deeds and chase your dreams, for you simply enjoy what you are doing...and “[p]eople who enjoy what they are doing invariably do it well” (Joe Gibbs); and when you do things well, you will be damn good at it. Love from within is an indicator, an insurance, a warranty for a successful outcome of whatever it is you do, anywhere, any time; as phrased by the entrepeneur—and founder of NBC—David Sarnoff: “Nobody can be successful unless he loves his work.”

Meaning: love what you do—and by implication: do what you love. When you do what you love, you will enjoy it, and you will then do it with heart, with an unstoppable inspirational flame you have inside your heart, with a relentless passion that then can shine through to the outside, resulting in enthusiasm to be seen by your fellow friends, by other people, enthusiasm to inspire other people, to attract other people all by itself.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell once said that “[t]here are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure,” which is nothing but true. Let the love for what you do come into play here, where learning from failure, hard work, preparation are all parts of the love you have for both your deeds and your dreams, where you stand and fall with the love for your deeds and dreams, where the love for your deeds and dreams makes you forget, how hard the work for it is, how long learning from failure can take; let the love and passion for what you do slip and slide into your heart, love what you do…and then nothing you do is work, you merely do what you love!