I meet a lot of companies who do free audits, assessments, reviews etc. and then moan because the prospect doesn’t develop.

If you want someone to focus get them locked in financially, that can often help channel their attention!

This is not the only time I have been frustrated with people’s lack of passion. I have some ministries at my church. I go all out. I make advertisements, decorate, keep records, invest time planning, make personal visits. But my coworkers do well to just show up. They wont prepare or be excited. They can’t be excited because they’re not invested.

I have children I’m trying to school. I love school. I plan games, fun outings, I try to look for activities that accomplish more than one goal to make good use of their time. But they just don’t care. They could learn all this great stuff, but they have no passion.

I get excited about everything I do. I am all in. I LOVE life. I am even loving researching these posts on social triggers doing research for my business. I can sit and watch Ted Talks for hours. I know that other people could love life too if they will just commit task at hand and do it with all their heart.

I know that churches are dead, sermons are boring, people are depressed, people lack skills, hate their jobs, can’t use their tech efficiently, whatever, all because they lack passion. They can’t because they don’t want to. It’s so annoying.

With me I never start off motivated. The best example I can think of is doing dishes. As long as I don’t want to get my hands dirty, I hate every minute. When I decide to plunge my elbows in and make a game of it by seeing how fast I can get it done, or how well I can get it done, the time goes by fast, I do a good job, and I actually enjoy myself. The feeling of focus is exhilarating. But first you have to focus.
And it doesn’t matter the activity. I’ve experienced the same focus based passion writing blogs, doing research, organizing supplies, painting walls, building websites, designing book cases, washing the car, you name it. There is no activity that can’t be enjoyed when you’re doing it with all your heart and not begrudgingly.

My question is how can I get people to give the 100% committed focus so that they can experience the thrill of the task ie. passion?

Yeah! Kick Ass!

Nothing is quite as sexy as a well-thought out, intelligent question (like many of the above in the comments). Well done everyone 🙂

I agree with you that there are too many bad questions floating around out here. It’s kind of a mixed blessing for me, however, because bad questions keep me in business. So my problem is, if you and I work together to eliminate lousy questions, I’m going to have to go back to teaching eighth grade history. Teaching knowledge workers how to do their best thinking is a lot more fun.

My business is teaching people how to ask sharp, focused analytical questions. I do this by teaching a kick-ass one-day workshop called Precision Questioning+Answering. Precision Q+A was developed by two brilliant people at Stanford University, Dennis Matthies and Dr. Monica Worline. In 1995 they began teaching the workshop outside academia and in Silicon Valley. Since 2005 we’ve called our merry little band Vervago, and we’ve now taught Precision Q+A to nearly 50,000 people around the world. We teach people how to ask seven categories of analytical questions, and also how to answer questions with crispness and clarity. The workshop is highly interactive and based in the participants’ work, so it is a blast to teach.

My question to you, then, is this: In the long-term, what do you think will be the likely impact on the productivity of knowledge workers if we all learn how to ask better questions?

Wait, I must give you some background on me. In the offline world all I did was marketing and have been in the business all my working life, starting with a newspaper route when I was a little boy.

Okay, getting back to asking dumb questions. If you are running an online business you need to create products. So, you ask your list “if I created XYZ product, would you buy it” most people would say yes to that question.

But the question is a decoy question, never heard that express before? Well you just learn something.

The next question is the real one. And it goes like this. “what is the biggest challenge in your business right now” the response from the second question is correct answer. That is what they will buy!

If it works for you tell them where you got it.

I’ve had this a few times in the past.

I think the trick is to segment your friends, if they don’t share your passion – so what? You have other passions with them so just focus on those.

What you need is to develop your online passion with other people. For example, on the Blog That Converts course I was surprised to find the Facebook forum was chock full of people just like me, they love blogging and business building and can talk for hours about it.

I’ve since formed some great friendships and set up things like mastermind groups so I can develop those ties even closer.

If I was you I wouldn’t bin your friends, they’re just not into marketing but just develop new circles that align more closely with your passion.

Reach out to other bloggers in your niche or even different niches who are at the same stage as you and see if they want to share tactics and experiences. I regularly post tips and ideas into my mastermind group and ask people if they need help, others do the same, that’s how new friendships develop and everyone wins.

– Dylan

Do you memorize all your lines, improvise over bullet points or actually read everything from a teleprompter?

I want to be able to create more fluid, natural videos but I can’t memorize a lot and I also have never tried using a teleprompter before (I’ve heard it’s very difficult to come natural when reading from one).

If I just try to “wing it” I end up rambling everywhere and the videos end up being very long so your help is going to be really appreciated, thanks!

Sergio