Education versus Passion-
So many times people think that to be successful, the main thing they need is education. I’m certainly not going to down play education, but many, many people think that is the key to success. Now certainly education is a contributing factor, but it’s not the most important factor. The key, or the main ingredient, to success is your attitude. Attitude is the real determining factor in whether you will find success. When your attitude is driven by your passions, there is nothing you can’t achieve.
My children really wanted to get a cat, but I wear a lot of black clothes. So I told them that we’re not going to get a cat unless it’s black. So, after looking for a black kitten, they finally had a friend whose cat had kittens and one of them was black. So, we got a kitten. It’s been very interesting. This cat is so unique and so different than any other cat that I’ve ever heard of. He likes to climb on my shoulder like a parrot. He likes to lie down right on top of my face when he’s ready to sleep. And he loves to watch the toilet flush. He loves it so much that he’s obsessed with the bathrooms. He has to be in the bathroom with you while you’re in there so he can watch the toilet flush. Then he was so excited about watching the toilet flush that he started trying to flush it himself. Next he started throwing things in the toilet like his cat toys. And then, eventually, he started using it on his own. It’s just really amusing because I didn’t even really try to train him to do this. I’ve heard that there are some kits you can buy that can train your cat to use the toilet. But we did absolutely no training; we didn’t try at all. It just kind of happened on its own because of his own interest.
Similarly, sometimes people do something because they’ve learned how to do it. They got the training. They went through the education. And then other people just kind of stumble on something because it’s a passion or a love and no one really taught them at all. They just learned it on their own. One of the biggest differences between the one method as opposed to the other is that the drive may be much stronger for someone who stumbled on something out of passion than those who just got the training.
In our society, many times people who we think are the most successful, like doctors or attorneys, get to that level of success through education. And people think of them as the most successful people in our nation, and it’s simply not true. The most successful people in our nation are actually business owners and entrepreneurs. These are people who most often started their business with nothing but an idea they believed in, like the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffets of our nation. They are by far the wealthiest of all people. They are far wealthier than attorneys and doctors and other professions. They found that wealth by following their passion and allowing that passion to drive them in a direction toward success.
My cat had no idea what he was doing. He just loves the toilet. He was just playing around with it - stumbled on it. He was just obsessed. We couldn’t keep him out of the bathroom. As a matter of fact, one of my daughter’s friends thought it would be really funny to flush the toilet with the lid shut so he couldn’t actually see it flush. She kept flushing it and he went crazy jumping all over the toilet because he couldn’t see it, and he really wanted to watch it. That’s what happens when you have that passion. You don’t really know exactly what you are doing. You just feel driven.
I seriously doubt that Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet had an exact plan in the beginning of how things were going to happen. They had no way to know for sure if they were going to be successful or how everything was going to unfold. They just had their passion. If you want success in your life, tap into your passion. What are you passionate about? If you let your passions drive your attitude, you will have your engine revved and running to pursue success. Then you just need to get on the right the path.
To learn more about Mary Gersten's program visit http://www.cmpsprogram.com or contact her office at 1-800-719-8270.
