Passion – Is It the Only Way To Find a Business Idea?

There’s a lot of advise that says you must find your passion in order to start a business?

There’s a belief that only with passion can you create a business you love. That only if you have passion will you stick to working through the tough times and grow a successful business.

Others suggest that holding out to find your one perfect passion can cause procrastination. You never start because you haven’t found that one right thing.

Passion is not a plan, it’s a feeling and feelings change. You don’t only have one passion to pursue to the exclusion of all else. Terri Trespicio

However, another view is that passion doesn’t come first, it follows success.

According to Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. Success fuels passion more than passion fuels success. In other words, you don’t start out with passion. You don’t have to have your perfect work all figured out in advance. Instead, you should find something you love to do and as you pursue it and gain success your passion will follow.

Stop searching for your one true passion and get started doing something you deeply like.

If the passion concept is over-ratted how do you find the best idea for a business?

What can you do instead?

If finding your passion is not the right way or even necessary to start a business, then how do you find your business idea. I will outline that below.

Go through a process of discovering yourself. To help you start thinking, here are a sampling of questions I use in The Idea Finder Course.

First, describe what you want your life to look like? What is your vision? How do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to live? What kind of people do you want to spend associate with?

Why answer these questions.

Simply, if you are going to structure a business it needs to be one that fulfills the way you want your life to be. If it doesn’t meet those desires, why go through the trouble of going on your own,

For instance, if your vision is to make money and run your business while you travel or live remotely, then the idea you select must recognize and fit those constraints. You don’t want to pick an idea that requires you to be present at a physical location or have employees that need daily supervision.

Instead, you would want something that can run with a virtual assistant and technology.

After you identify what your ideal life looks like you can move on to finding the right idea.

Find your best idea.

Make a list of all your skills, talents, hobbies, interests, and experiences you’ve had. Make sure you include both professional and personal. This is most likely where your best ideas will come from. Here is another list of questions to help jog your mind.

• What deeply interests you?
• What do you read about and study in your spare time?
• What do you talk about for hours?
• Where do you put your energy, time and money?
• What consumes a large part of your mind and thoughts?
• What books do you read and websites do you search?
• If you had six years to live, how would you use that time?

Once you have a list, refine it down to the few that excite you the most. Next, ask WHY for each item. Go deep for each answer, ask why multiple times.

1. Why does this idea appeal to me?
2. Why do I think it’s a good idea?
3. Why do I believe it will make a good business?
4. Lastly, who will want what I offer? Can I identify my audience? More on this below.

If more than one idea emerges as equally appealing, try to combine them into one idea. Possibly, this combined idea will be stronger, have little competition, and give you a unique position.

Identify the smallest viable audience

Whatever idea you decide on, your next step is to research who is the smallest audience that will benefit. You don’t need a large audience, you need a group of people who can use your expertise and what you offer.

Once your know who they are you can speak to their exact needs and get feedback on what else they want.

Research what your audience desires

What is your audience trying to accomplish or what problems are they trying to solve? These are the two main things people are looking for, some goal they want to reach or a problem they want to fix. It’s why people buy.

It’s all about transformation. And when someone wants a life transformation they have a job to do. To accomplish that transformation they need help or a product to make it happen.

Here is where you’ll research into the needs of a viable audience. Their priorities, pains and gains.

What desires does your audience have or what problem do they need to solve? Define these problems in a general way. For example. I want to take an exotic vacation.

Identify everything that stops them from doing their job of transforming. Risks they want to avoid, barriers that are in the way, or fears that stop them. Example, I’m afraid I won’t find the right travel provider and lose my money or worse, get stuck in a far off place.

What is important to the audience and what do they hope to achieve from succeeding with that transformation? Explain how their lives will be better, how they will feel about themselves, and what changes they will make. Example, an exotic vacation is on my bucket list. It will make me feel that it was worth all the money I saved to make it happen.

Once you can answer these questions about your audience you can start thinking about creating a product that matches their needs. However, you’ll want to gather more information first.

In our next post we will talk more about researching your audience and understanding them better.

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