Do What You Love

I met Francis Ford Coppola last year; we were both in the same speaking calendar in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And Coppola said this thing, it’s kind of obvious but he said, "Look, this is really simple. Do what you love not because you just want to be self interested." He says, "Do it because you'll be better at it." He says, "I love wine and so I have a winery and I think it's pretty good. I love food and so I have a restaurant business and I have a pasta business." He's starting a resort apparently in South America and he says he uses all of those just to generate cash so he can finance his own movies. And so, pretty obvious but I hadn't thought of it in those terms. Do what you love because you'll be better. You'll be willing to put in the extra time, the extra mental energy because you love it. It's been several years ago I saw Jim Collins speak. Everybody read any of his books? He wrote two great books. Oh, a lot of people. So "Built to Last" and then "Good to Great". And it's several years ago and he used no slides of any kind. He was drawing circles in the air like this but there was something he said that has stuck with me, I remember it was like it was yesterday. And at first it seemed he was talking about companies. But as he got into it, it really seemed like he was talking to us each as individuals. And he said, "Try to think of what you should do next." He says, "Think about these three circles. The first circle is what are you good at?" He says by the time you reach a certain age most people have a sense of what they're good at. He says, "But watch out for this circle because in this circle lives the curse of competence." Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you should do it. He says, "If you look around your school or your office, you might discover you're the fastest person you ever met on the keyboard." He says, "Does that mean you should be a data entry operator? Probably not." He said he was really good at math and ev...