Dr Jeff Cornwall

I have had several conversations over the past couple of weeks about the role of passion in new entrepreneurial ventures. Indeed, a good business model is never enough to carry you through the adversity and tough times that entrepreneurs almost always will face in their new ventures. And the career literature is full of the term passion these days. Experts encourage people to seek a career path that “ignites their passion” and helps give their life meaning.
I agree that passion is an important element in choosing the right venture to pursue. For those regular visitors to this site, this part of the “me” part of assessing opportunities that I often write about.
But I have some concern that many are taking the importance of passion and meaning too far — to an almost unhealthy extreme. If unchecked, seeking meaning for your life from your business can lead to the kind of workaholism that many had hoped to avoid with an entrepreneurial career.
All of this discussion reminds me of a post I wrote a while back that might be worth another look….

What do farmers do? They farm. What do designers do? They design. What do managers do? They manage. What do entrepreneurs do? Well, they…..
Those who start and build businesses engage in a career that has no simple verb to describe what we do. Entrepreneur is a noun. Entrepreneurship is a noun. Entrepreneurism, a newer form of the term, is a noun. Entrepreneurial is an adjective. But, as you remember from 8th grade, adjectives simply describe nouns.
Entrepreneur comes from an Old French word (a fact that I still find hard to accept) entreprendre, which means to undertake. So it started as a verb, but now is a noun. As a side note, I am glad we did not take the literal translation of the French term to refer to those who start businesses. Otherwise all of us who are entrepreneurs would be known as undertakers instead.
So why is Professor Cornwall going into a long, and rather seemingly trivial diatribe? Am I finally becoming the doddering old academic we see mumbling to himself, shuffling across campus?
I assure you there is a point to all of this.
I have been watching the crusty old journalist (another profession that is not a verb), Dan Rather, go ungraciously and rather defiantly off into the sunset of his life. His career as a journalist is clearly behind him, but he won’t give it up. And then it came to me. His understanding of who he is is defined only by what he does for a living. He defines who he is as a person by the career he has pursued. Without his career he has very little else. Without it he is lost as he has nothing else in his life that has any real meaning.
We have seen others fail at retirement. Lee Iacocca could not stay retired as a corporate executive (noun). Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan could not stay retired as athletes (noun). For all of them, what they did for their work defined who they were as people.
Careers can do this to us. If we are not careful, they can consume all that we are. And what gets lost? Our families, our friendships, and even our souls.
If we are to become all that we were put on this Earth to do, we have to temper the temptation to become consumed by our work. We need to resist becoming the noun of what we do for a living.
Work hard at being a spouse. Work hard at being a parent. Work hard at worshiping God. Work hard at being a friend. Work hard at being a good citizen in your community. And yes, work hard at your vocation. None of these alone can fulfill our humanness.
One of the risks of using nouns to describe what we do in our work is that it can reinforce the tendency we all have to get carried away with our work. I loved starting a growing businesses (most of the time, at least). I love teaching and writing. It is indeed a blessing to love what one does for a living and joy the hard work that goes along with it. But, with every virtue there is a vice looming in the background. Although hard work is a good thing, it can be taken to excess and become a vice if it keeps us from all the other things we should be doing with our lives.
American society does not make this any easier. I am reminded of the lyric from a jazz record from the 1980s that said, “Everything in moderation, and moderation is the first to go.” We have become a culture of excess.
This is particularly true for the entrepreneur. We seem to create folk heroes out of entrepreneurs who expend Herculean efforts to achieve success in their businesses. And while this is good to a point, if entrepreneurial success comes at the expense of our marriage, our families, our faith, and our friendships, it is a hollow victory. If all we have at the end of our lives is our wealth, if that is all we leave behind, that is not a life well lived. As the old saying goes, “you never see a hearse with a luggage rack.”
So here is what I am going to commit to: I will help to find us a verb to describe what entrepreneurs do. It has to be catchy, like the term entrepreneurship, so that people will actually use it. And if they do, maybe that will be one small step toward no longer defining those who start businesses only in terms of that activity. We can be, and should be, so much more.