Passion or Persistence?

Tuesday was the monthly #SMBFW and Kevin Mullett lead an interesting discussion that inspired me to write this article today. (#SMBFW stands for Social Marketing Breakfast Fort Wayne, a monthly event that you are welcome to attend on the last Tuesday of the month. Just ask me for details.) 

I was sitting with Ryan, a friend and co-worker.  My friend is the Program Director of WOWO radio and he recently started a weekly podcast that is available at WOWO.com.  Others from our news department are also doing weekly podcasts.  These are filled with content that is not heard on the air at WOWO.

Each of these podcasts are due to a passion.  It takes time to come up with content and record these each week.  My friend also mentioned that he writes a monthly piece for a national trade publication, but that writing the article isn’t as much fun as doing the prep work which includes interviewing industry insiders and other fun stuff.  Specifically what he is struggling with at times is the actual writing of the article.

As I looked around the room, I saw other friends who are using different social media platforms to communicate including a realtor, Chris, who does YouTube videos, etc.

For me, I find writing articles like this easy, but that’s because it is a passion of mine.  Just like the realtor’s passion is recording YouTube videos and my co-worker’s passion is to record audio podcasts.

The take away from all of this is each of us have a passion and it’s okay to have different ways to express our individual passions. Find the platform that you enjoy and begin there.  If you want to expand to another platform, ask someone who’s doing it for some tips.

The other part of this is persistence.   I know I titled this article Passion or Persistence, but there’s also Passion and Persistence.  First the or version:

You may not know if something will be a passion until you try it.  Not just once or twice but multiple times.  That’s persistence.

For me, the writing that I do online is Passion and Persistence.  I started around 2005 but it wasn’t until a couple years later that I was doing it regularly.  In 2008 I was publishing several articles every day and never stopped.  I changed formats and kicked off this website in 2011, but I had already edited and published over 10,000 articles on my other sites before then.

Now in about 4 and half years I have written and published about 2000 articles on this site.  I used to do a couple articles a day, then just 7 per week.  Recently I decided to limit myself to 3 times a week.  I doubt that I’d ever do a podcast or create videos with any regularity the way I write, but that’s okay.  This is my passion and that’s why I’m persistent.

How about you?