Define IMs do you mean Internet Marketing or Make Money Online ?

Passion can only last so long.

That's the truth.

You should be passionate about something you can be SKILLED at.

The learning curve should be manageable AND there should be SOME sort of return.

Simply running on passion is NOT enough.

That FACT partly explains why over 90% of blogs ever started FAIL.

One can simply have a passion for marketing.

I mainly generate leads and there is absolutely no passion behind the actual leads. However, all the work that goes into generates the leads is what I enjoy...the actual marketing, systems creation, automating, etc, etc... is where my passion is.

Also, there are many passions that are probably not very monetizable. So passion may not always be the best choice.

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, John. In the words of Confucious: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." I dare say Bill Gates loved what he did; likewise, Steve Jobs; and I would imagine Spielberg, King, Elvis, McCartney, Campbell, Discrat, and other modern luminaries fall into the very same category. When I consider my own career, both the IM and literary mountains, I truly find it hard to believe I could have climbed them without love, passion, the two elements that have often driven me to work without sleep, or push myself to new personal heights, or, in sum, arrive at the summit of my personal mountains and know that even though I have other mountains to climb, much higher ones, I welcome the journey, and in fact the promise of the journey is something that makes life worth living.

Going back a decade, I wrote a novel under a pen name that was set in the Victorian era, an entirely new period for me. Well, when I write certain novels I believe in using what I term "method writing," and this was one such novel. A method actor will endeavour to bring about complete emotional identification with his or her character, and often in doing so will rigorously force mind and body into situations that help bring about this mental transformation; an example would be Bobby De Niro gaining and losing two stones in weight for Raging Bull, or Hoffman jogging around Central Park all morning for a brief 30-second take with Laurence Olivier in The Marathon Man. (Olivier, suffering from ill-health at the time and struggling to remain capable of doing his scene, was more than a little put out. Hoffman, quite young, quite brash, asked how else was he to prepare for the scene, in which his character was suffering from physical and emotional exhaustion. Olivier replied, and I'm paraphrasing: "By acting, dear boy." Not everyone, of course, is a fan of method acting.) Method writing works in a similar way; at least for me, it does. You absorb the era, absorb the character, the other characters, and, doing whatever it takes to identify with your protragonist, the teller of the tale, you then use that identification to pen the novel as that character would write it. The novel no longer has the literary feel that your readers are accustomed to getting from you. The words, in a sense, are no longer yours. It is the character telling the story. And, oh boy, when you get it right? When the character speaks? Magic happens. The reader has a feeling of disconnect, of sorts. It is not a tale told by the writer, but one spoken by the character, and the level of verisimilitude it creates can rarely be attained any other way (unless you're Hemingway). Point is, when I did this, half a decade ago: felt it almost killed me. Young, healthy, tough, none of those things mattered. In giving that character a voice, I pushed myself to the mental and physical limit, and I never could have done that without love.

To my students, I make no secret of what I do for a living in IM; outside of coaching, I mean. (On a public forum, you never spill the beans. Why make unnecessary competition?) One morning, just two weeks ago if memory serves, a student asked how I became successful in IM, and how in particular I climbed certain IM mountains. On the day of his asking me, I told him this: obsession. I told him, you have to find that one area of IM for which you become obsessed, because that obsession will drive you; drive you into the night, drive you through the night, drive you all the way to the tippy-top of whichever IM mountain you find yourself climbing. I was wrong to tell him that. Not intentionally wrong; I believed it at the time. But, only two weeks later, give or take a day, I think I should have told him "love." (And, knowing that, I must correct myself with him today.) You can certainly do well in IM without love - love for IM in general, or for a mere field of it - but I do know, hand on heart, from personal experience and from being friends with industry players, some minor league, some major, that love is the fuel powering success. You can make it without fuel, but it's a harder climb, and I dare say that without it, fuel, love, some summits will always be out of reach.

If you're reading this and if you're new to IM, or simply struggling to climb your personal IM mountain, listen up: find what you love, do what you love. The climb will not be easy, it never is, but take my advice and you at least have a chance at reaching the summit. A chance at reaching any summit you set your sights on.

Find what you love. Do what you love.

- Tom

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yea, but you can become passionate with just about any task that you don't have to do..

Example: You're friend comes over and you decide to cook something for him/her, i bet whatever you put on that dish is going to be a burden of love, even if you're not a chef..

The moment you have to do something is when you ruin the dynamic for passion

best of luck
Ike Paz

You are missing two crucial points:

1. Regardless of their own "passion" (aargh! I detest that word) the experts find where the needs are within the market - and feed them.
   
2. Your prime objective should be not be money, but to help people; money will follow

Experts become experts by investing much time and money learning their trade, and "IM" is no different.

There is no unique market, but you have a unique voice.

This is the same advice I got from a friend of mine who owns his own brick and mortar business. He says this is the number one ingredient you need when deciding to open your own business and I couldn't agree more! I'm guessing this could be applied to an online business as well.

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Passion for doing something isn't that same as passion for marketing that passion. It doesn't matter if you love to play golf, you're going to have to work to convert that passion to money.


It's one thing to love golf, it's another to write about golf or make videos about golf and then promote them then convert that into money.


Passion doesn't automatically translate to expertise. While many experts are passionate about what they do, many people that are passionate aren't experts.


"Passion" can come from the results of IM such as freedom, being your own boss, etc.

I think there is a step before even having passion. You have to know what you want. This is not as easy as it seems. If I was to ask anyone on this thread "What do you want?" I'll bet almost everyone would reply with "more leads" or "more sales" or "make a million dollars." But these are "fools wants," folks, and you don't get any closer to attaining them by just having passion and loving what you're doing.