Passion and Focus is a Potent Combo for Success

Being passionate on doing things is important if you want to make things great. It is the driving force that would allow you to put emotional investments, time, effort, etc. without needing any compelling reason to do so which makes the process of excelling easy.
Can passion guarantee success?
Passion alone cannot guarantee success but is a determining factor to endure pains and trials to achieve success.

Where does focus comes in?
People can be passionate on things that have large scope and boundaries more than one person could handle. A large scope of interest is not bad but would not be possible to maintain a high level of performance in the long-run and would always be best to choose and focus on specific areas.
Experience in Point
Let’s take myself as an example; I am an Information Technology by profession and am very passionate on anything about technology. This passion has led me to work and become interested in learning a lot of technologies from Web, Mobile, Desktop, etc. but this diversity will not help me be the best in something and might even hinder me from achieving my goals as nobody would identify me as the go-to-guy. But as my senior manager is helping me progress in my career, he has specifically put me in Collaborative technologies centered on Microsoft SharePoint and told me to focus on that area until I become the best in the industry.
He ended by saying I have the passion for technology and by positioning me in a focus area, success is expected.
The point my senior manager was driving is common sense but struck me nonetheless because I forget to focus on specific areas of interest in some of the things I do like in sports wherein I joined the basketball, football and badminton teams; but trainings and games have taken a toll that I can’t participate well enough in any of them anymore.
Action Steps
In the next month or so I shall be doing reflections on a number of areas looking to trim down the scope and make things as simple as possible but expecting more returns than before.
As I begin to consolidate or simplify things, I begin to realize that one of the things that make leaving something difficult is your emotional attachment to the specific interest, but then again, you can only do so much and morphing yourself to a number of clones is not going to happen anytime soon.
Skills Learned
Defining my focus and getting the most out of the decision I make is a skill I ought to master, because only then can I define the focus and direction of my teammates and the organization as a whole.
How about you? Do you see yourself placing more focus on specific interests you are most passionate about?
[tags]Management[/tags]