Diary of an Entrepreneur

 

No Substitute for Passion

 

By Mick Hagen

 

My wife hates me. Well ... almost. If I'm not working at the Zinch offices, I'm at home working on Zinch. If I'm not working on Zinch at home, I'm blabbing my wife's ear off talking about Zinch. And if I'm not blah-blah-ing about Zinch, I'm certainly thinking about it, non-stop.

We recently painted the walls of our condo. My wife wanted a sage green for our bedroom. Somehow, someway, it turned out to be a Zinch green. Our main room was to be a light blue, the paint gods couldn't resist. It turned into Zinch blue.

Consciously, sub-consciously, and whatever-heck-else-consciously, my life has been zinchified. As cliché as it is real: I eat, breathe, and sleep Zinch. Every morning I wake up bouncing off the walls and excited to get to work. Oddly enough, that's usually after I'd spent the previous night tossing and turning, excited and thinking about Zinch.

Do you think I'm crazy? You probably do. Now mix me in with a handful of other incredibly passionate (if not more passionate) individuals. You'll get quite the concoction: The Zinch team. Passion fills our veins. Smiles fill our faces. In my opinion, that's why we've come so far in such a short period of time. There's absolutely no substitute for passion.

I love every second of this dream ride, building a company from the beginning. It beats the heck out of studying in some dark, gothic, Hogwarts-like building back at school in Princeton, New Jersey. It really wasn't that tough of a decision for me to take time off from Princeton to start something as unknown, untouched and unbelievable as Zinch. You might ask why? I'd put it back on you and say why the heck not? I love this! Life is way too short for me not to follow what I love and what I'm passionate about.

I think everyone needs to feel this passion. It's a passion that makes your body shake, like you're about to explode. You feel the desire. You feel the intensity. You feel the energy. There aren't enough hours in the day, enough sun rays in the sky, enough processing power in the mind. Sometimes it can be stressful, but if this power is harnessed right, it'll leave you with nothing but a smile on your face and a capacity to produce greater results.

Every single day, you are doing what you love instead of, well, just doing what you do. Every single day, you embrace the challenges instead of shy away from them. Passion fuels hard work. Passion is the painkiller when things go wrong.

If you don't have that love, that passion, that excitement for what you're doing … it might be time to hang up the jersey and to consider doing something else. Find what you love and do it. Passion is key to getting over those walls of failure, disappointment or distraction. It keeps you up on sundown and it gets you up on sunrise. Do what you love, don't just love what you do. There's no substitute for passion.

 

Mick Hagen is the 23-year old CEO of Zinch.com. He is a student at Princeton University (currently taking a leave of absence for Zinch) where he is studying Economics and Computer Science. He can be contacted at mick@zinch.com and can be visited online at mickhagen.com.

 

Launch - Fall 2007

 

 

For the full "digital magazine" version of Fall 2007, visit: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/growutah/launch_2007fall