I started this post near the end of my fall internship at Microsoft, and never got around to finishing it.  Yesterday’s Macroeconomics lecture by Larry Smith dealt with similar themes, and because he’s such a great speaker, and I was finally inspired to finish the post.

What personality traits correlate with future success? Some people claim it’s organization, time management, intelligence, people skills, or one of any number of other qualities.

Yesterday, in lecture, I was introduced to John Maynard Keynes’ answer, “animal spirits”.  He doesn’t literally mean animal spirits, he’s talking about qualities like ambition, passion:

“Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”

History supports this idea.  When you look back at the history of the world, massive technological and economic growth has always been coupled with high levels of ambition and passion within societies. Growth and success are typically driven by desire and human nature, not logic or calculation.

Hearing about this in lecture today reminded me of something Douglas Purdy told me near the end of my Microsoft internship, in a conversation that lead to my initial draft of this post.  He told me that the quality he looks for in people is passion, or as he put it, people who weren’t afraid to be consumed in the fires of their creativity.

I couldn’t agree with him more.  All the people I respect, the people I look up to, have had at least a spark of this quality in them.  They’re the ones motivated by intrinsic factors over money, by cool ideas and the process of creating something new.

There’s a seed of an idea that’s been growing in me for the past several months that’s closely related to this topic.  Success may be all about ambition and passion, but what about those two qualities?  I think that passion and ambition, are both just kinds of obsession.  And, because these are mental qualities, we have a degree of control over them.

If you can learn to create obsession in yourself, then you can be passionate or ambitious about anything.  If you can reign in your obsessions, you’ll be able to avoid burning out, and take an occasional pause for reflection.

The same idea holds for leadership.  Successful leadership is all about guiding and controlling other people’s obsessions.  I think that this is what lies at the heart of transformation leadership.  History’s greatest leaders have all been able to inspire their followers to incredible heights of ambition and passion.  Just look at Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill, and how they succeeded in inspiring their followers.  If they can create these qualities in others, there’s no reason we can’t create them in ourselves.

Don’t wait for your passion to find you, get out there and create it in yourself!