the importance of passion

I’ve been thinking about the importance of passion in what we do.

Not long ago I had to make a visit to my dental surgery. Now, I am not someone who is terrified of dentists, but when you’re lying back in the big grey chair, a tube draining liquid from your mouth, a bib hanging around your neck, and a light glaring in your face and then into your vision looms a masked man with what looks to be medieval instruments of torture, I must admit that even I can be prone to tensing ever so slightly.

I was having some exploratory work done. Nothing too serious. But it did involve some sharp tools and things that make drilling noises (not that I felt much as my mouth was so heavily anaesthetised).

As he was doing his work, the dentist was chatting with his nurse about the previous night’s happenings on the latest celebrity reality tv show. I wasn’t in a position to say much at the time – literally – but my mind was screaming, “excuse me, can we keep our focus on the job in hand?”

Now, in retrospect, this exploratory work is probably something that my (excellent) dentist does every day of every month and nothing to be concerned about. But for me, it was a big moment. I had visions of having no teeth on one side of my face or of leaving the surgery with one of those metal cages around my head. (Neither of which happened, I’m pleased to say.)

But afterwards, once I had regained the ability to speak without dribbling, I said to my dentist, “You know what, if you're going to do something like this for a living, then you've got to pretend that this is important. Even if it's not, you've got to pretend it is, because it is very important to your client.”

See, here's the way I look at it. As professionals, we spend our waking hours thinking about our particular area of interest and expertise. And we strive to find better, thought-leading ways of delivering our service. But when we meet with a client, let’s say at the start of a project, we can often find ourselves needing to do just some basic work to get the foundations of the project laid. And often, this is basic work we feel we could do with our eyes shut.

And yet, I never think of that as “just some basic work”. I think of it as, “Somebody put their neck on the line to suggest that they engage me. To somebody, this may be the most important project of their year, and it may be a career-breaker or maker for them. For all the people watching them, it's my job to make sure that even at this initial meeting they feel they have done (more than) the right job by appointing me”.

Every project we undertake matters an incredible amount to somebody. Therefore, it has to matter a lot for me. And not just because of the money I'm being paid. I have a chance to work with these people and, perhaps, change the way they think, and I really only get one crack at it. They'll either walk away from here saying, “Wow, that advice he gave and those questions he asked really make sense,” or saying “Oh, another know-it-all adviser. What’s he going to tell us that we already know?”

the Heresiarch
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