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Entrepreneurs are renowned for their passion. They're the people that you'll find throwing back their third double espresso before noon, or choosing the red-eye because a power nap on a layover is all they need. The slightest mention of a project they're working on prompts them to deliver a high-energy elevator pitch or to explain the top five reasons they're about to disrupt the hell out of the industry.

But while many believe that passion is the key ingredient to startup success, I believe the opposite is true. In my experience as a founder and entrepreneur, unchecked passion can be the number one killer of a startup.

The emotional hook

When people speak about passion in startups they're often speaking about the pursuit of 'the dream' – that lofty, defining experience of bringing to life a precious idea bestowed to an entrepreneur.

This entrepreneurial quest can be the all-consuming, powerful driving force needed when getting a new company off the ground. It can also, however, lead to an inflated ego, a strong sense of ownership and a hardened fixation on the founding ideas being right, no matter what.

Startups often get buried in a type of single, unwavering pursuit. They set out to do X and regardless of circumstance, shifting market conditions or validation, they are determined to deliver. The founding ideas were the reason the business was created and therefore to deviate away from them, or question their validity, is to risk throwing them under the bus.

Eventually the entrepreneur and his passion become indistinguishable. Those who bond themselves to their product based on the compulsion to 'see it through' are, in my experience, on a sure fire spiral downwards.

To prevent this risky 'at-all-costs' mentality, the entrepreneur needs to focus not on what a company sells, but why the company exists.

Keeping passion in perspective

As an example of this, with Slyce – the visual search company I co-founded – we started out with a goal to make shopping in the real world as intuitive and easy as possible for mobile consumers. When the company was originally founded, the focus was on achieving this with the use of QR codes and other technologies available at the time. However, with seismic market and technology shifts occurring in the past 24 months, if we'd have stuck with the original product focus we'd have been redundant in today's market.

With our objectives clear but the path to them negotiable, Slyce has now become a state-of-the-art visual search platform which is making possible what we set out to do, but in a way far beyond what we might have thought was possible.

Getting caught up in how something has to be done will only serve to hamstring success because there is an attachment to the process and not a focus on the end goal.

Passion versus tenacity

Often the word passion can be freely interchanged for tenacity. For me, however these are two entirely different things. Within the dynamic of a startup, both have the potential to create explosive success or, similarly, implosive failure.

Where passion is the emotional attachment to an idea, tenacity is the relentless and vigorous pursuit towards it.

Pure tenacity without passion can lead to a lot of action with no movement. With passion as the primary driving force, a purely emotional ecosystem prevails where the focus is constantly shifted towards "who is right?" and not "what is right?"

The best entrepreneurs are able to combine the two qualities and use the best of both to create and drive their business, their passion delivering focus and their tenacity delivering results.

Cameron Chell is co-founder and CEO of Business Instincts Group, a venture creation firm in Calgary that finances and builds high-tech startups. To learn more about his work with sustainable startups visit www.CameronChell.com

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