We turn to the most famous member of the A-Team, Mr. T, to point out the obvious; “To have a comeback, you have to have a setback.”

Business is a funny thing. Many of us get started, start moving, work hard and achieve something and then… somewhere along the line, we get derailed, our passion disappears and suddenly labor of love is not so lovely anymore.

Business owner making coffee at coffee machine stall

Is It Possible To Get The Passion Back?

Have you ever watched Gordon Ramsay’s Hotel Hell or his Kitchen Nightmares program? If you have then you’ve seen plenty of entrepreneurs who’ve lost their passion.

The number of business owners who break down and admit they don’t love what they do anymore and don’t know how to love what they do on those shows is shocking. But it shouldn’t be shocking. It’s all too common.

Taking The Passion Back

Bill Gates may be well known for his Microsoft success but did you know before that he ran a completely different company? Have you ever heard of Traf-O-Data? Most people haven’t.

You know why? It failed. Bill was rocked on his heels for a while but in the end, he decided, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Evan Willams of Twitter says that he finds that many business leaders lose their passion because they’re over-committed. How can you have fun if you keep trying to do everything and manage every small aspect of your business? He says, “When I meet with the founders of a company, my advice is almost always, ‘Do fewer things.’ It’s true of partnerships, marketing opportunities, anything that’s taking up your time. The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.”

Recognize that even the best people fail at times. Soichiro Honda (yes, you guessed it – he founded Honda) says, “Success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure.” Failing at something shouldn’t get you down, it should inspire you to do better next time around.

James Dyson echoes that. Did you know that his inventions were rejected by the market a lot before he got that vacuum cleaner on sale? 5,126 times to be precise. It took 15 years of getting knocked down and getting back up for Dyson to make his billions. He says, “Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.”

Henry Ford went broke twice before he founded the Ford Motor Company and he said something similar, “Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

And the modern icon Steve Jobs was fired from his job at Apple! That didn’t stop him though, he said, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

You see, wherever you turn, there are people who lost their shirts, who lost their jobs and who didn’t get ahead. Yet, it’s entirely possible for them to get ahead. What they need to do is to refocus and remember that if you cut out the noise and focus and you keep learning from your mistakes – success is just around the corner.

When you are free to feed your passion and to stop taking every setback personally, you can fall back in love with business and go back to enjoying the work that you do.