(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Passion! It’s all you need, right? Just follow your passion, down the Yellow Brick Road. Fame! Fortune! Success is guaranteed. Build that better mousetrap, prepare for the thundering herd to beat down your door.

Not quite.

Most* successful entrepreneurs will tell you success doesn’t quite happen that way.

Every marketer in the world will tell you: find the market, then build the business. If there’s no market, you have no business.

Let’s back up for a moment. This article has been brewing for months. Motivation started with Johnny B. Truant – You Can’t Do It.

Then, Lisis from Quest for Balance wrote Net Worth vs Self Worth: The Passion Paradox, where I left this little note promising Lisis an article. I started a rough draft containing some links and some ranting.

Right… “Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Then Zach Clayton beefed on @garyvee for selling illusions. I wrote something like this:

Thanks for being the first to publicly call some of this into question. My friend Irina has grumbled about it, but that doesn’t really count.
Mr. V could have as easily spent that year digging for dinosaurs in Durban. Or wherever dinosaurs come from. Without missing any sandwiches.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about GV’s “formula” or “philosophy” or whatever you want to call it. Because passion isn’t enough. You have to have angle (an existing business to base it on) and a market (millions of wine drinkers).
Without an angle and a market, it’s just delusional.

Kelly Diels finally provoked me into action with her screed on love, sex and money.

Ok, fine, you asked for it, you got it. Here’s the deal:

Does that make you feel kind of dirty? If so, why?

Have you lost any respect for me? If so, why?

Personally, I don’t have a problem with it. I live in an obscenely expensive region, San Francisco Bay area. Opportunity here is vast, and education costs time and money. A lot of time and a lot of money.

But people rarely talk about money openly or honestly. So we have a “credit crunch.” We have full recourse student loans. We have people walking away from their responsibilities, breaking contracts for economic expediency.

If more people were honest about their money, perhaps the global economy wouldn’t be melting down in trillions of debt, debt that’s going to default sure as the sun rises in the East (it’s only a matter of when).

Because nobody will talk honestly – personally – about money.

But we all talk passionately about how to get more of it. If passion were all it took, I’d be a bazillionaire.

You need an angle and a market

Ben Lang nails it with this interview with Noah Alpert of Noah’s Bagels.

Mr. Alpert asserts “Follow your passion but don’t let it take over basic business rules.”

Exactly.

Basic business rules dictate you can pay the bills while you’re building your business.

That is, you need an angle.

Passion isn’t enough; success requires a market and an angle. The market is self-explanatory: you want to sell hamburgers to a starving crowd.

The notion of angle doesn’t get a lot of play, but it’s just as critical, and everyone’s angle is different.

Your angle is how you pay the rent, buy groceries, pay the bills and more or less get all the “Lesser Mortal Sh!t” (Hat tip Gary Halbert) handled while building your business.

Your angle could be your savings, it could be your full time job, your retirement check, you might be supported by your husband, your wife, your parents, or you might be investing profits from an existing business into this new venture.

Fact: without that angle, you don’t have a chance. The blogging business is brutal because the barrier to entry is very low. Anyone can get started almost for free. You have to be able to provide for yourself while your building your business.

What’s your angle?

Deacon is leveraging his day job for success in his print making art. Walter Yu is leveraging earnings from his day job to build – on his own time – a personal brand in his industry.

My savings are my angle.

Gary Vee’s angle? His family business. He ramped to $70M from a bit more than $20k/yr. And that’s cool. He’s leveraging what he’s got.

What’s your angle? How are you leveraging your angle?

Most importantly, the burning question everyone wants answered, am I “oversharing” here?

*A few dot com moguls may beg to disagree. I will not name names. I might want to pitch them next year. [back]