It’s a sad statistic, even if it’s one I made up on the spot. Let’s look at the facts though, there are a lot of things that can kill your project: flagging economy, bad planning, incompetent teammates (everyone else), incompetent founder (that’s you) or just plain vanilla stupidity, but the one that strikes most often and most viciously is neglect.

We all know the story of entrepreneurs dumping hundreds and hundreds of hours into their projects. We all think that we’re working as hard as we can, putting every ounce of our strength into our ideas. We all sit around and muse about the fact that if we drank anymore coffee, Starbucks would name a day after us, but despite all of this somehow we manage to forget that projects are like children — no matter how much we think we’re doing, they are still going to wake us up in the middle of the night kicking and screaming.

Like raising children, a business requires a heroic effort in order to do it right. Note I didn’t say “a great deal” of effort, I said a heroic effort. That’s right, Greek poets should be able to write epic ballads about the lengths you went through to keep your idea afloat. You need to eat, sleep and breath your idea not because it’s rational or even healthy but because it’s what is required of you.

The only way you are going to have any desire at all to go through this insanity is if you’re really passionate about what you are doing.

Passion won’t save your business.

As I pointed out, there are dozens of reasons why you could fail miserably any day of the week, but passion for the concept you are trying to build will save your business from neglect. It will give you a reason to do not only the work you must in order to keep things afloat (those hundreds of hours), but will also make you want to do even more. It’s that extra bit of motivation that shores up your project against the unforeseen disasters that you are bound to run into.

If you want an idea of the “passion” you’re going to need, imagine what you would do if you were jumping out of a plane, with a parachute that you had to finish stitching on the way down.

Yup, that should do just fine.

(Image)