“Allow your passion to become your purpose and it will one day become your profession.”

–Gabrielle Bernstein

“Just as people cannot live without eating, so a business cannot live without profits. But most people don’t live to eat, and neither must businesses live just to make profits.”

–John Mackey, Whole Foods

“An organization’s culture of purpose answers the critical questions of who it is and why it exists. They have a culture of purpose beyond making a profit.”

–Punit Renjen, Deloitte

If you want to love your job as an entrepreneur, align the purpose of your organization with your personal and team identity. The purpose of business is about more than just making money. Money is a by-product of serving your customers well. To achieve financial sustainability, a business must provide a unique product or service to a niche market that meets a heart felt need better than anyone else.

But what about the personal side of the equation? What about motivation, passion, and commitment? If you want to love your job, the unique product or service your company provides should be aligned with your personal and team ikigai, your reason for getting up in the morning. Build your business around what you and your team love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life! Don’t do it, and work will become a burden, you’ll end up just focusing on the money, and wonder where the passion went.

“Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.”

–Dee Hock, Visa

“Follow your passion. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it gives you the best shot at being and doing the extraordinary.”

–Jesper Lowgren

“Unique differentiation is essential to success. Nothing differentiates more than purpose, because nothing else is truly unique.”

–Jesper Lowgren

If you want your people to love their job, give them a purpose that engages their passion. In his book True Believer, Eric Hoffer states that equality and belonging are the passion of the masses. We all want to belong and find equality. Every product and service, every disruptive innovation can eventually be duplicated. But people are unique. The key to workforce engagement and commitment, and passion for excellence is tied to individual uniqueness. Each person is a part of the team and each one has a gift to give. We feel equal, we belong and add value to the team, we feel like contributors when we are engaged in our area of personal gifting, our personal purpose, the reason we get up in the morning. If you want your people to love their job, give them a purpose at work that engages their passion.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away.”

–Pablo Picasso

“Only by doing what we love doing, can we discover our true destination.”

–Jesper Lowgren

A few things to consider:

• In your business, do you have a passion for excellence, an excitement to get up in the morning?
• If you have a passion for your business but the excitement to get up in the morning is gone or diminishing, who are you missing on the team? What are you doing that is not aligned with your identity and purpose?
• Do your staff feel equality and belonging in their work environment? Do they have a purpose that aligns with their passion?
• If someone on staff doesn’t love their job, how does that impact the rest of your employees?
• Can your customers tell if your staff love their job?

3 Steps to Loving Work

1. Go beyond the focus of just making money and define your business purpose around what you and your team love to do.
2. Make sure that what you love to do, the purpose of your business, is focused on passionately serving your customer.
3. Ask your staff if they love their job. If not, focus on discovering the identity and personal purpose of each staff member and then align their purpose at work to engage their passion.