Real Secret of Success is Enthusiasm, not Excitement - or - The Art of a Five-Year-Old's Questions

Walter P. Chrysler, legendary American industrialist and entrepreneur, once stated, “The real secret of success is enthusiasm.” I take those words to heart as a businessman and citizen of planet Earth. I started a company based solely on the URL enthusiasm.com just for this reason (and here I have to give credit to my co-founders, Matt and Phillip). But why is ‘enthusiasm’ more important than ‘excitement’? Well, ‘excitement’ is, yes, exciting – but it can also be fleeting and, at times, frivolous. ‘Enthusiasm’ on the other hand, is a more measured, matured sensation. The Great Wall of China, the Egyptian Pyramids, were not built by excited Emperors and Pharaohs, they were created by enthusiastic leaders.

But maybe we need to stand the statement on its head in some cases. Is Al Gore enthusiastic about delivering the world from Global Warming? I think everyone knows that. But if he were more exciting, could he take the issue further? Perhaps. I think maybe his ego got in the way somehow. I think he could have done well to surround himself with more smart, creative, radically-thinking people – and there is no lack of such passionate beings involved with this issue. Did he think that this serious issue would lose credibility if it were developed in a creative way? Really, Al, did you think that? His campaign may very well have been damaged by listening to too many experts.

By now you can tell that we’re back on the Global Warming issue, and you might be asking yourself how this fits in with the title of this blog. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: real estate discussion is a moot point if there is not healthy Earth left for us to live upon. It’s just that simple. And so we are here to weave together these two issues, Global Warming and success in Real Estate. Some people may think these are mutually exclusive, maybe even antithetical to one another, but I assure you they are not. And that’s exactly what we aim to show.

I watched the movie Ice Age last night with my daughter. Though a bit dramatic, it definitely makes the Global Warming issue accessible to kids. It’s truly a smart and subtle way of breaching the subject to the masses – finally, subconscious messaging working for the common good! The idea raised a lot of questions in my daughter’s young, curious mind.

What is Global Warming? Why is it happening? What will be the consequences? How can we stop it? What can I do, daddy?

It made me take a step back and think about all this. How can I answer these questions to my five-year-old daughter? How can the real experts answer these questions to us? Why aren’t more people pushing harder on these tough questions? As with most important things in life, there are inevitably more questions than answers. But that is the first step, curiosity. We should all take a lesson from my little daughter. Funny that it was she that taught me more than I could ever imagine answering her.

The first step is to wonder. The second step is to act.

VS