You may have noticed that we now live in a global economy where job security is a contradiction in terms. All you have is your personal capital, and we’re not talking about your money. It’s your talents, skills, relationships, and enthusiasm. Making success last takes a level of tenacity and passion only love can sustain. Without it, you’ll collapse under the weight of the hardship or long-lasting adversity that you are bound to encounter.

Making a life is as important as making a living. This is not an either-or decision. Builders do both. You will hear this from most everyone who has enjoyed lasting success: entrepreneurs, government and religious leaders, artists and educators, single parents, social workers, Academy Award winners, carpenters, store managers, and billionaires.

You will hear it from the most hard-boiled military generals and tough business guys like Larry Bossidy, author of a warm-and-fuzzy-sounding book called Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Bossidy has never been accused of being touchy feely.

On a bitter cold, clear day in Connecticut, we huddled in the tough-minded retired CEO’s home office built in a converted barn near a frozen pond, where we talked for hours about success and leadership. When we threw the “L” word at him, the steely eyed former CEO didn’t flinch.

“It’s a competitive imperative,” he insisted. “Only by loving what you do will you actually do more and do it better than the person sitting next to you. If you don’t, well then, we’ll find someone who does.”

Yep, fear is a big motivator, too, but you’ll find that love lasts longer. You can run a marathon at gunpoint, but you probably won’t win the race.

“You can survive without loving it, but you will be second-rate,” said Brigadier General Clara Adams-Ender, Ret. “To spend any part of your career not knowing why you’re there will take your power away.” It’s dangerous not to be fully engaged. If you want to have success that outlasts any job you have, then only love will find the way.

Warren Buffett loved his work long before he had two pennies to rub together. Today, he is one of the richest men on Earth.

“You know, they say that success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get,” he said. “Well, I don’t know which one applies in this case. But I do know that I wouldn’t be doing anything else. I always worry about people who say, ‘You know, I’m going to do this for ten years. I really don’t like it very well, but I’ll do ten more years of this and...’ I mean, that’s a little like saving up sex for your old age. Not a very good idea,” Buffett laughed.

“I tap dance to work and I get down there and I think I’m supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling, or something, like Michelangelo, I mean, that’s the way I feel. And it doesn’t diminish. It’s tremendous fun.”

The research libraries are filled with studies that confirm that love is not just a warm and fuzzy topic; we’re talking about your survival in the competitive marketplace out there, with lots of people who want your job more passionately than you may.

Passionate people spend twice as much time thinking about what they’ve accomplished, how doable the task ahead is, and how capable they are of it.^[1] Your coworkers or competitors who love their work try harder, try more things, move faster, come up with more great ideas,^[2] and, frankly, get better opportunities to move up and contribute more than people who only do things for a living.

“The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it’s to make meaning,” said John Seely Brown, who presided over research for two decades at Xerox Park. “Talented people are looking for organizations that offer not only money, but...spiritual goals that energize...(that) resonate with the personal values of the people who work there, the kind of mission that offers people a chance to do work that makes a difference.”

Be warned: The relentless irritation of not loving what you do makes you a pain to be around and has been clinically proven to chip away at your health.

“We spend our health building our wealth,” said author and financial advisor Robert T. Kiyosaki, paraphrasing the old proverb. “Then we desperately spend our wealth to hang onto our remaining health.” After several successful, but unrelated, entrepreneurial stints, Kiyosaki changed careers again at nearly age 50 to write his first book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which has sold more than 17 million copies. Wouldn’t it be “better to do what we love in the first place so we don’t bankrupt our well-being” in a vain attempt to earn our way to freedom?

There is a good chance you feel there is something missing in life—or you are on an incessant search for meaning—until you make one simple choice. Those uncertainties can dog you in a never-ending but noble quest until you just go out and serve somebody. Builders from all over the world shared this recurring theme with us.

Frances Hesselbein, chairman and founding president of the Leader to Leader Institute, formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation, is best known for her leadership work with large organizations, universities, the U.S. military, and her 13 years as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She led the transformation of that vast nonprofit organization, which today has about 236,000 troops and almost a million volunteers.^[3] She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—America’s highest civilian honor—in 1998, and was the first recipient of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Security Series Award in 2002.^[4]

Hesselbein, like most Builders, believes that there is “a powerful synergy when you combine service to others with passion for your own mission, your own work.”

“We are called to do what we do, and when we respond to that invitation, it is never a job. When we are called to serve and we respond, it is joy and fulfillment,” she noted. “The key to fulfillment is service and the key to leadership is not how to do, but rather how to be. Serving others is part of the ‘how to be’ character of a great leader.”

Leadership author Ken Blanchard calls this Servant Leadership, wherein the goal of the leader is to promote not herself, but the goals of the organization and careers of the people she leads. It’s all about alignment of what’s inside your heart and what the world needs. It’s about finding what you love and doing that to serve others.

While researching the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,^[5] the research team from the University of Chicago, directed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D. (a.k.a. Dr. Mike), had a diverse group of people scattered all over the globe wear beepers. The group included farmers, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, artists, priests, nuns, and government officials. When randomly paged, they were asked to write in a journal what they were doing, together with the quality of their experience at that time.

From a compilation of journal entries gathered from all of the participants, patterns emerged yielding the principles of what was called the flow experience. When you are deeply immersed in the process of doing whatever you are doing, and completely lose track of time and place, you are in a flow experience.

Athletes describe “being in the zone”—this is also a flow experience. To achieve success built to last, you must cultivate your capacity to be fully alive in your work and, as Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner say in The Leadership Challenge, you’ve got to celebrate your values and passions.

With the exception of a few people who are in the business of looking elegant, Builders are more like nerds than super-models. When you find you’ve forgotten social graces while doing what you love, then that is probably a clue about your calling in life, or at least you have found one of your passions. Passion is, by its nature, unbalanced and can be unappealing and irritating to people who don’t care about your particular passion. If you’re a rock star, the life of the world’s great research scientists will not appeal to you!

The point is that you know that you are on the right track when you naturally obsess over what you love like a geek, as in being a person who is single-minded in a pursuit, at the risk of being socially insensitive while so engaged. It attracts you even when you’re too tired to do anything else. It seduces you to the point where you lose interest in everything else, to an extent that you become socially inept around the people who couldn’t care less about whatever it is.

Finding and doing the thing you love offers you a very different experience of work. In fact, it may not feel like work at all. Builders typically refer to their work as “tremendous fun.” This is a totally different experience than you will have if you’re doing what you’re doing just because you think you should.

Places like Stanford University in California’s Silicon Valley are crawling with entrepreneurial ideas looking for an exciting venture in an untapped market. Students at the graduate school of business are smart enough to learn how to create an impressive business plan, but sometimes, it’s death by PowerPoint. Many are so gifted that they can sell it to investors and recruit their first employees. Sounds like a great start, but it’s not. Instead, it’s the reason we suspect that nine out of ten new companies that should work don’t last.

Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, who has been investing in start-up companies for decades, notes that when the founders have rationalized a business plan that has nothing to do with their identity or what they deeply care about, “we won’t touch that investment. For any start-up to succeed, they need every ounce of their heart, soul, and brains completely devoted to these ventures.” When you skip the step of realizing what makes you tick, then you’re taking the big risk that you’ve not landed on something upon which you can build success that will last.

Technology pundit and author, Esther Dyson, surfed the dot-com wave without crashing on the rocks. In addition to her writing, she invests in and coaches ventures during their earliest stages of development. She thinks an entrepreneur has to “have some feeling for it. When you’re tone deaf, that means you can’t pick up the music, and you can’t pick up the music if you didn’t grow up in that world,” she said.

“Once I had a guy come to me [with] a really nice business plan all about building some kind of [online, virtual] community for families. He really understood how to make money off it and so forth. So I met him. And he was maybe 25. He was certainly an MBA. He clearly hadn’t called his mother in about three years. He had absolutely no sense of family. And so I passed. He ended up not getting funded. And six months or nine months later, I heard that he was doing a start-up for college alumni. And that was perfect for him,” Dyson said.

“But for a guy like that to do something for families, it just didn’t resonate. It wasn’t his thing. And it might have been a great plan, but it wasn’t something he himself could really get into.”

All too often, people launch grand plans without this vital link to personal meaning. Without an explicit understanding of their connection with a personal curiosity or passion that matters in their lives, the risk of terminal failure for the venture increases significantly—not to mention the added stress that can take years off the founder’s life.

Built to Last revealed that a core ideology—in other words, a set of core values and an enduring purpose—beats most any great idea for building visionary companies. Collins’ and Porras’ research confirmed that starting out with ideological clarity matters even more than how good or bad the original product or service is!

The same holds true for your career and your life. If this seems like an “unreasonably” high standard, remember that most new ventures fail and life isn’t fair. Builders have unreasonably high standards that give them the edge to last and prosper.

“The quest is for the story,” said Barbara Waugh, author of The Soul in the Computer. “What story is worth your life?”

This may seem grandiose, and perhaps it is, but how much more of the rest of your life do you want to waste? Whether they’re running a household or a company or a country, Builders come to the conclusion that doing something that matters to them is a dream worth their life.

When a person finds something worth their life, like becoming a lover, what do they do? Many foolish things. But one of the most constructive compulsions is a tendency to focus on what’s right about what and whom you love.

When you suppress your passion, you are teaching yourself to become a cynic. You’re cynical because you care and don’t want to risk getting hurt. On the other hand, lovers win because they are willing to take that risk for the right reasons. They are openly optimistic and grateful for the circumstances that helped make their experience possible.

Of course, you won’t find many stories about that in fashionable magazines. Celebrating what’s right with the world is an excruciatingly unhip and un-cool thing to do. We are carefully trained by safety-conscious parents, in-laws, institutions of higher learning, and the evening news to ignore or ridicule optimistic people. In a world rife with violence and generally consumed by fight-or-flight—where most people teeter on the verge of being upset or angry—it’s hard for many people to function when they’re not scared or worrying about something.

Optimism is a tough pill to swallow and seems a silly placebo at that. It presents an uneasy vacuum that feels unrealistic. Under these circumstances, it really seems there is no safe place in our society for boundless optimism.

As schoolyard bullies used to tell us, optimists are stupid. They are particularly irritating because they don’t over-react to negative news or setbacks. They feel the fear and persist in doing things anyway and have the audacity to expect them to work. They actually believe that things will turn out well, that even if they don’t at first, they will work out eventually, and that there are good people who will be served by whatever it is.

They are convinced that there are people who will want to sign up to make the dream a reality. Some would call it faith, but it’s safer to dismiss this all as Pollyanna thinking and issue strong warning statements about how naïve and misguided it all might be.

Poet Maya Angelou found perspective on this attitude in her youth: “When complainers would come into the store, my grandmother would call me from wherever I was and say, ‘Sister, come here and stand behind the counter.’ She would say to the customer, ‘How do you feel this morning, Mr. Shepard?’ And the man would say, ‘Oh, Sister Henderson, I hate the winter, I just hate it. It’s cracking my skin, and I just can’t get warm....’ And my grandmother would say, ‘Mm-hmm,’ and then look at me with piercing eyes like, ‘Did you hear that?’”

“In the summer, another person would come in and mama would ask, ‘How do you feel, Sister Williams?’ and she would say ‘Oh, I hate the summer, Sister Henderson. It hurts my scalp, makes me itch, and my skin....’ And then when the person would leave, she would call me. She said, ‘Sister, there are people all over the world who would give anything for just five minutes of what that person was complaining about.’”

Like Maya’s grandmother, Builders tend to see the benefits of a situation rather than dwell on the negative. But here’s the paradox about enduringly successful people—they’re optimistic, pessimistic, and irrationally exuberant—a phrase favored by retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to describe the dot-com bubble and real-estate markets when they reached what he considered speculative levels. The enthusiasm of Builders is huge, but not boundless. It’s focused on what they want to build. If we were to measure optimism and pessimism on a scale, the needle would clearly weigh in the positive direction for successful people, but it’s not that simple.

“I desperately struggled to stay focused and optimistic—it was really miserable after the awful events of September 11^th,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told us over coffee at the Waldorf. “I couldn’t tell people to ‘be brave’ unless I was willing to walk the streets myself. But the leader has to be optimistic simply because if he isn’t, nobody else will be.”

Optimists tend to see their successes as their own “fault”—they hold themselves accountable by way of their own talents and effort, as well as their special brand of serendipitous good luck. They see each success as long lasting and affecting everything in their lives.

Martin Seligman, one of the fathers of “positive psychology,” calls this an optimistic attributional (thought) style. Pessimists tend to interpret any failure the same three ways that optimists see success: “pervasive, permanent, and personal,” according to Seligman in his book, Learned Optimism. The next time you’re faced with what you consider to be a success or failure, pay attention to how you come out on those three dimensions.

“The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity,” Abraham Lincoln said. “The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” He should know. Abe Lincoln was a depressed fellow, according to Seligman, but he was able to talk himself through his darkest days. He had plenty of them, suffering failure after failure in his career before becoming president during the worst period in American history.

“I am an optimist,” Winston Churchill is famously quoted. “It does not seem too much use being anything else.” He fought depression, too. Lots of enduringly successful people suffer the dark side, the “shadow self,” as some call it; some for their entire lives. It’s important to note that the people we met, however, chose to use pessimistic behaviors selectively when the stakes were great.

The most notable place for pessimism, of course, is when the cost of failure is death. Builders use a more pessimistic attitude—for example, to slow down and “de-ice the plane one more time,” said Southwest Airlines’ CEO Herb Kelleher. “We love to have fun. In fact, we require it.” But, it’s responsible optimism. Because the penalty is fatal, safety comes first.

Once you take death and taxes out of the equation, however, it’s tougher to measure what is rational in terms of risk-taking and boundless enthusiasm. For successful people, risk-taking ranges from bet-it-all gambling by some entrepreneurs to conservative experimentation by others. You’ll rarely see a frank admission that we really don’t know what a reasonable risk was in any person’s life, career, or company’s development (short of death as an outcome).

Most financial planners, for example, will tell you to diversify your investments. The idea is to increase your chances that some of your investments will do well compared with the bad ones over the long haul so you have a better retirement.

Many millionaires did it that way. But it’s also true that most billionaires did not diversify their portfolio on the way to super-wealth. Many put all their eggs in one basket. Chances are that their success has been described as a rational choice because it worked that time.

As Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a crank until their wild scheme actually works out.” We’ll never know how many entrepreneurs with the same risk profile and similar strategy entered bankruptcy.

Either way, we can be certain there were probably many skeptics and naysayers along the way (who are right most of the time), but not in the exceptional, once-desperate rags to riches cases of billionaires like Oprah Winfrey or J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. After all, there are many more millionaires who diversified their risks than there are billionaires. We can only assume that the overwhelming majority of big risk-takers are eventually described as irrationally optimistic only after they crashed, burned, and vanished from the headlines.

We aren’t suggesting either path. No one can tell you what risks you should take. We are insisting that you must choose a path that you love, for better or for worse, because only then will you have the good-hearted stubbornness to stretch for your full potential and survive the inevitable slings and arrows that await you on your bold journey.

You’ve got to love what you’re doing or you can be sure there will be someone else who will. Falling in love, with all the rational and irrational exuberance that is involved, is the only way you have a prayer of creating success that lasts.