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You may be passionate about being a successful entrepreneur – but are you motivated by the right kind of passion?

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, chances are you won’t build your life around a 9-to-5 work schedule. Passion and motivation are two of the most important attributes needed in a business leader, and conventional wisdom suggests you don’t grow a global enterprise by watching the clock – or bring your dreams of professional triumph to fruition by whiling away the hours watching TV or playing on your iPhone.

For the entrepreneur, the link between work activity and non-work activity can become blurred to the point of non-existence. Your business self rarely switches off: you risk all and you put your all into making that risk pay off.

All this goes against every sensible tenet of wellbeing, of course. This level of commitment, while extremely common, is rife with danger. Research by Business Network International (BNI) found that about a quarter of entrepreneurs described themselves as moderately burnt out, while around 3 per cent were extremely burnt out.

What motivates your passion?

Dig a little deeper and you identify factors that increase the tendency to burn out, one of which involves ‘passion’ – universally considered a vital characteristic of entrepreneurs. However, not all passions are equal, as psychologists identify two distinct forms of passion.

The BNI research differentiates between ‘harmonious passion’ and ‘obsessive passion’, and the difference is really about the second key characteristic of being an entrepreneur, motivation. Specifically, what is motivating your passion?

The terms harmonious passion and obsessive passion were coined by Canadian psychologist and motivation expert, Professor Robert Vallerand. Defining passion as, “a strong inclination toward an activity that people like (or love)”, he identifies harmonious passion as when you devote your time to an activity because you love doing it, whereas obsessive passion is when you feel an internal pressure to engage in the activity.

In simple terms, harmonious passion is what leads people who love music to form bands and devote their life to music. Obsessive passion is what leads people who want to be rich and famous to audition for the X Factor.

Different passions, different outcomes

Aspiring business leaders are no different from artists in being led by their passions, so if your dream is to be a captain of industry, ask yourself why. What is motivating you to put in all the hours and the sweat and toil?

Do you love the product you are creating or service you are providing? Is it something you would be passionate about even if you were not involved in its delivery? Do you love being part of a business, revel in the process of innovation and the excitement of what comes next?

If so, you are motivated by harmonious passion. There is an entire body of recent research that confirms positive psychological outcomes from engaging in an activity that is underpinned by harmonious passion – including higher concentration, positive emotions, wellbeing, physical health, creativity and performance.

If, on the other hand, you want to rise to the top in the business world because you feel pressure to compete with other members of your peer group or are motivated by the social success or financial reward that might result from helming a successful business, then you could be in the grip of obsessive passion.

Consequences of obsession

The BNI survey reveals that the entrepreneurs with high scores of obsessive passion are more likely to experience burnout than those with high scores of harmonious passion. Those with high obsessive passion scores find their work is emotionally draining and report that working all day requires a lot of effort.

Those with high scores of harmonious passion, on the other hand, report high levels of concentration, attention and absorption. They are also more likely to take breaks than those who score high on obsessive passion.

These more positive outcomes are partly because they are enjoying themselves more. Their work provides memorable experiences, yet they are more likely to be able to balance their work with other activities without feeling guilty when they’re not working.

An upside to obsession?

I’m not giving away any secrets when I say that fear of failure is a hallmark of most entrepreneurs. We don’t need psychologists to tell us this, but they’ve done numerous studies that confirm it anyway.

For those motivated by obsessive passion, where being an entrepreneur is integral to their identity, people often fear that failure will lead to such unbearable loss of status and respect that the motivation to succeed is enormous.

Other studies, including Tu et al (2022), find that by constantly striving for success, entrepreneurs with obsessive passion can fully focus on the task at hand, have an intensely strong inclination to achieve the goal, and are not distracted by other things.

In short, they found that obsessive passion often has a positive effect on entrepreneurial performance. Tu et al also shows evidence that obsessive passion can also help entrepreneurs better recognise business opportunities.

Do you still want to be an entrepreneur?

My advice to any budding entrepreneur would always be to first lock yourself in a dark room and deeply study what is in your head. Do you really want to put yourself through the rewarding but extremely gruelling experience of building a business, and if you do, work out exactly why you want to do it. What is really motivating your passion?

In my experience, most entrepreneurs have a good dose of harmonious passion as well as obsessive passion – they’re not mutually exclusive. But if you don’t have enough harmonious passion, I think you are going to struggle.

You are far more likely to succeed if you are engaged in an activity or industry you love – something that is an end for itself, rather than a means to an end.

Once you have that, a little bit of obsession thrown into the psychological mix can help support your success. But it does no harm to have another passion outside of work to stop you getting completely obsessed.



As the German playwright Bertolt Brecht so perceptively wrote (he was talking about vices, but it is equally true of passions): “Stick to two, for one will be too much.”