Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life — Chapter 2 : The Early Influences That Drive You To Create Your Life

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Apr 6, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(This is Installment #6 of Lessons From The Passionist:  How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  Today’s post is the beginning of Chapter 2: The Early Influences That Drive You To Create Your Life.  In this chapter, I will help you begin to explore why you have chosen the life you have.  I’ll help you examine the people, events, decisions and circumstances that in some way have determined how your life got the way it is, and how you can unwind it and change it, if you want it to be different.  I hope this helps anyone looking to understand their own life better or anyone looking to go in a new direction.  To change your life, you must first understand the influences that brought you to your current circumstances.  Then, it’s easier to find the right path by harnessing your passion.  Enjoy and please share with friends.  And remember, please post your feedback.)

Everyone knows someone who just exudes positivity and passion.  They seem to be enthusiastic about everything they do, and are always bustling with a variety of activities.  And they’re excited about them all.  They seem to have an unlimited reserve of energy, ideas, and solutions to problems, and are curious about everything.  It also seems nothing can get them down or make them negative.  They roll with the punches and approach everything they do with high energy, zeal, and an expectation of enjoyment and success.  They are inspirational and fun to be around because the energy and attitude they have are infectious.  It makes us feel good to be with them.  You may even wonder sometimes (perhaps it’s why you are reading this book), “How did they get like that?”,  or maybe, “How could I be more like that?”

While some of these unusually passionate people may have born with what seems like a “passion gene,” it’s more likely that they were just fortunate enough to spend their developmental years in an environment prone to making them view life as enjoyable, positive, hopeful, and even exciting with all its possibilities.  They learned — consciously or subconsciously — how to adopt and sustain a positive, passionate approach to life.  Their experiences, attitudes, choices and the people around them shaped their passion-driven life view.  In this chapter, I explore how you can begin to shape or reshape your life so that you can approach everything you do, even some of the things you may now dread, with more energy and passion, and begin creating your fascinating life.

As with most human behavioral traits, there are a combination of factors that influence our programming when it comes to passion – they are people, environmental circumstances and experiences.  These influences help shape our outlook on life and the behaviors we choose.  Our capacity and willingness to embrace our passions, and build our life around them, are influenced early in life and are fine tuned as we develop and grow.  It is a never-ending process.

To develop a passion for anything, we must freely engage in the activity without the thought of success or failure.  We must engage out of fun, curiosity, or a sense of challenge.   We must enjoy the process of pursuit of the passion, not just anticipate an outcome.  How we are introduced to and guided through our early experiences with our passions, or would be passions, is also critical.  In my case, I had parents, friends, coaches, and teachers who supported me in pursuit of my tennis and business passions.  Occasionally I encountered negative people, but it just made me engage more fully and focus more intently.  I wanted to prove the naysayers wrong.  I wanted to show them that I could live life on my terms by following my passions.

I’ve interviewed many people that have turned other people’s negativity into positive, forward-thrusting passion.  Cirque du Soliel feature performer, Jerome Sordillon, told me that his early school teachers’ negativity drove him to prove to her that he could accomplish something with his athletic skills.  Because he was a French national-champion gymnast as a young teen, and strong, Jerome’s school put him in a curriculum to be a construction worker.  He hated it.  After completing three years of course work, he was assigned to a required internship.   After three weeks, he was miserable and quit with no idea what he would do with his life.  Today, he twirls high above the stage, hanging from two straps and “walking” on air to the amazement and delight of cheering crowds around the world.  He chose to follow his passion.  I’ll talk more about Jerome’s story later in this chapter.

As I began to write this book, and reflect on my experiences and observe the lives of others, I realized that it is a few key people we encounter throughout our lives who build and enlarge our capacity to harness passion.  When we are young, they ignite our curiosity and inspire our dreams.  They help us learn to develop confidence and mitigate fear.  These people are the fuel of our lives, powering our passion engine.  I sensed this early in life, and gravitated to the people who were positive, encouraging, and full of life and curiosity.  The people who laughed often and smiled a lot – they were fun to be around.  I stayed away from people who were negative, cynical and draining, and who were always looking for the next shoe to drop in life.  They were not fun to be around.  They seemed to suck any passion right out of you.  I avoided too much exposure to those people, and still do today.  These negative people deplete your energy and steal your passion, and while I always try to be compassionate to people who are in a tough emotional place because of difficult life circumstances, I guard myself from being infected with their corrosive negativity.  I tried to learn from the passionate people I encountered when I was young, the people who set a positive example of how to look at life, how to choose behaviors, how to roll with the punches, and how to create an amazing life.  These people fueled my passions as I developed, and that fueling has never stopped.

If this didn’t happen for you, it’s okay.  The good news is that you can fuel or refuel at any point in life.  You make the choice.  Human interaction and energy are critical for developing and harnessing passion, because passion energy grows when shared and combined with the passion energy of other people.  I call this the Chain of Passion.  Who has been part of your Chain of Passion?  Who lit a fire under you as you were growing and exploring life?  Who inspired you to get up a little earlier each day to take a run, hit one-thousand tennis balls, study a bit more than was required to just get by or just look at the beauty of the sunrise?  And who are you inspiring now?

Given that people are the fuel, I thought it best to start this passion quest roadmap by helping you examine and understand the biggest contributing factor to finding and developing passion – the people who have shaped your life.  The relationships covered in this chapter are the ones that have imprinted the passion code in all of our hearts and minds, and understanding their impact on us is critical for leading a passion-driven life.  While many of the people discussed are most likely people you have encountered early in life, you never stop encountering people who can influence your passion.  I meet them all the time and when I least expect it.  The Chain of Passion can link to us whenever we are ready.

Let’s look at the following types of people who have shaped your life and influenced your capacity to harness your passion:

  Parents, Siblings and Relatives

  Friends

  Teachers

  Coaches

  Other Role Models

Parents, Siblings, and Relatives

The people who have undoubtedly had the most influence on us are our parents.  When we are babies, the importance of this relationship is obvious.  We would not have survived without them or some adult feeding us, bathing us, and getting us dressed every day.  They took care of us when we were sick, and as we grew into toddlers, they helped us navigate walking and moving around the world on our own without encountering too much danger.

When we entered school, our parents helped us with our early development in reading, writing, math, art and dealing with other kids and teachers.  They tried to insure that we got enough physical activity to develop our bodies, and tried to get us to eat healthy foods.  If we were fortunate, they began to introduce us to activities like sports, music and reading outside of the required school assignments, or suggested (or better, insisted) we get a part time job.  I remember my mom taking my siblings to piano lessons every week, driving my sister to the skating rink every morning at six am and driving me and my brother to my first tennis lesson with a women named Mrs. Hecht in Barrington, Rhode Island.  This was a day that would later prove to be life changing.

Without making an exhaustive list of all the things parents do for their kids, it’s easy to see that they are a pervasive and significant influence in our lives.  When we were adolescents, this sometimes felt like a mixed blessing as we were trying to assert our independence, but there is no doubt that our parents played a prominent role in our development of a general life view.  If our parents were negative, cynical people, odds were that we might develop a negative and cynical life view.  If our parents were positive people, who expected to enjoy playing a game, win or lose, it’s likely that we did, too.  If our parents expected to be well paid for their time or work, chances are that we expected the same when we set out into the working world.  If our parents viewed life as a noble struggle to put food on the table for their family, chances are we did too.  And if our parents viewed life as an adventure of their own making, well, you get the idea.  Often, they are the first link in our Chain of Passion.  Did your parents add a link for you?  How did they influence your ability to harness passion?  Did they help you embrace your passions or make it difficult to do so?

We have all been programmed from our earliest experiences to think, feel and act in a certain way, and sometimes not necessarily in the best way to create the life we want.  Many people tragically live someone else’s dream.  Some people develop without much parental influence or guidance.  That’s okay, because research shows that strong passion may develop even under those circumstances.  In her New York Times best-selling book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perserverance,  Angela Duckworth concludes that, “A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important.  Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation.  Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion.”  If you were left alone to forge your own path, you may have found it easier to pursue your passions as a result.

Some kids have no choice.  Their parents are not around much, if at all.  I have great admiration for people who lead incredible, passion-driven lives, who did not have one or both parents present while growing up.  They might have missed out on some critical early nurturing, guidance and lessons-by-example provided by parents, but somehow they found ways to learn the positive attitudes and behaviors that drive passion.  At some point, we all have to own our lives and decide how we want them to go.  You can live with passion or not.  It’s your choice.

Vivid evidence of how parents, siblings, and relatives can consciously and subconsciously program our attitudes about life and influence our passions can be observed in families that have exceptional multigenerational success at one particular activity.  Many children, grandchildren, siblings or close relatives of highly acclaimed athletes, performers, artists, politicians and business people frequently achieve identically high levels of success in the same profession or activity.

Here are just a few examples of the familial Chain of Passion at work:

We are all familiar with the Kennedy family.  In that family they developed one president, John F. Kennedy; two senators, Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy; and one congressman, Patrick J. Kennedy.  While you might argue that their wealth and connections created much of their political success, many wealthy families have tried and failed at this.  Another notable political dynasty is the Bush clan.  President George H.W. Bush has a son, George W. Bush, who also became President of the United States.  Another son, Jeb Bush, was Governor of Florida.  While connections and money alone can help, they can’t provide the passion needed to win elections in this difficult, and sometimes no-holds-barred, profession.

The late golfing legend and leader of Arnie’s Army, Arnold Palmer, changed the face of golf and became successful in numerous businesses upon retirement from competition.  His grandson, Sam Saunders, is also an accomplished PGA tour golfer.  I’m sure growing up on the course with one of the all-time best golfers somehow raised Sam’s passion for the game and expectations for himself, especially when he was competing with his grandfather.  Sam said in a New York Times interview after Palmer died, “The way our family operated was, nothing was given to you.  Arnold wanted all of us to be successful on our own, and my parents were the same way, and I’m so grateful for that.  If you’ve always been handed things, when life gets hard, you won’t know how to handle it.”  True, and kudos to his parents.  But the presence of Arnie’s greatness up close and personal also had to inspire, teach and influence Sam Saunders in a way that was unique from the experience of thousands of other talented kids who did not have the great Arnold Palmer as their grandfather and did not make it onto the PGA tour.

Former world #1 tennis player and media personality, John McEnroe, has a brother, Patrick McEnroe, who also made his living playing professional tennis, reaching a career high #28 in the world.  He even became the longest-tenured Davis Cup captain and was head of the United States Tennis Association’s player development for several years.  Patrick now does tennis commentary for ESPN and CBS.  I played against Patrick in a high school match while I was attending the Kent School in Connecticut (Patrick played for Trinity-Pawling in Pawling, NY, a neighboring town to Kent).  It was a close match, and I remember thinking at some point mid-match, “He’s good, but he’s not Johnny Mac good.”  But he shared Johnny Mac’s passion.  I wonder how many matches Patrick won because opponents were intimidated that he was the brother of the world’s #1 ranked player?  You could count one match for sure, because I lost that day when I really had an even chance of winning.

Another incredible familial success story from the world of tennis is that of the McNair family from Bethesda, Maryland.   By anyone’s standards, my dear friend Fred McNair IV, has an impressive tennis pedigree.  He was a top-ranked junior player, an All-American at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a French Open Doubles Champion, and was ranked #1 in the world with partner, Sherwood Stewart (another great athlete who qualified for the Senior PGA Tour in Europe after retiring from tennis!). But that’s not the interesting part of this story relative to the subject of parental influence on passion.  Fred IV’s father, Fred III, was a tennis champion is his own right, reaching the level of what would now be considered an elite professional tour player.  Fred III played on the United States Tennis Association National Father and Son circuit for thirty-one consecutive years with with ALL FIVE of his sons, winning eight national titles with two of them, Fred IV and John.  He was a finalist another six times with two sons, Fred IV and Bruce.  And in one year he won two national titles with two different sons, a feat never accomplished before or since by another father.  You might say the Chain of Passion for tennis had many links in the McNair household.

Other examples include the late crooner, Nat King Cole, whose daughter, Natalie Cole, also became a grammy-winning recording artist.  Hollywood star, Kirk Douglas, whose son Michael Douglas is a two-time Oscar-winning actor and producer.  Paloma Picasso, daughter of painting and sculpting master Pablo Picasso, is a successful jewelry designer.  NFL Quarterback, Archie Manning, who has two sons, Peyton and Eli, who have each won TWO Super Bowls.  And Grammy-winning singer Janet Jackson had five Grammy-winning brothers who inspired her pursuit of music.  Is all of this just genetic talent?  Not likely.  I could write several books telling more of these family passion success stories.

While it’s tempting to look at these examples and conclude that there must just be some genetic predisposition toward athletics, singing, acting, artistic achievement or politics in these families, or that these people had unique access to contacts or coaches who could nurture their talents and careers (all true), there is actually much more to the cause and effect element of these relationships.  It takes enormous amounts of passion to achieve success at these levels, even with talent and contacts.  Yes, who you know is important.  But at some point, you have to deliver.  You have to sing the song the song, throw the ball, make the speech or deliver the lines with an unusual level of exceptional skill.  And that takes passion.  These families, and many like them, found a way to pass down passion through a generation or, in some cases, two.

This familial passion for an identical activity – resulting in tremendous success – demonstrates exactly how much people’s ability to harness passion can be influenced and programmed by their parents and siblings.  All of the parents (or siblings in the case of the John F. Kennedy and John McEnroe) involved in the above mentioned examples, wittingly or unwittingly, transferred their passion to their offspring, brothers or sisters.  That passion, combined with talent and years of disciplined practice (also demonstrated by the successful parent or sibling and learned by the son, daughter, brother or sister), drove and shaped the passion behind these fascinating stories.  Was passion handed down to you?

While not all cases of shared familial passion will result in the levels of achievement cited here, our objects of passion, our level of passion, and how we harness our passion, are clearly influenced by our parents and other family members.  If you want to find, develop and pursue your passions to create or change your life, start by understanding how your attitudes and behaviors have been influenced by your parents and family members.

Below is an exercise to help you examine these influences in your life.

Passion Journey Exercise #1

Take out a piece of paper and write down the answers to these questions:

In which ways have I been programmed by my parents, and has that programming been positive or negative in my life?

Were my parents generally positive or negative in their outlook on life while I was growing up?

Were my parents optimistic or pessimistic?

Did my parents encourage me to reach for the stars or play it safe?

Did my parents encourage or discourage my early passions?

Did my parents pursue their passions?

Did my parents enjoy life?

Did my parents feels “rich” or “poor”  (not in monetary terms, but in terms of their satisfaction with their daily life)?

Is there any particular skill, talent or interest that you acquired from your parents?

In which activities did your parents encourage you to participate?  Were they different from the one’s you wanted to pursue?

Did your parents’ attitudes about life change as they got older?  If so, how?

What were your passions as a kid?  Are they still passions now? Why or Why not?

Use the answers to these questions to reflect on your own life and attitudes.  Were you encouraged to develop and pursue your passions?  Are there passions you had when you were younger that were squashed by a parent, and that you would like to rekindle now?  Are there thoughts or attitudes that you inherited from your parents that are holding you back (or helping you succeed) in pursuing your passions or experiencing life with a passionate attitude?

If you currently have a positive, passion driven life view, how can you build on it?  If you do, go with gusto in the directions that move you.  If you have a negative, fear-filled or passionless approach to life, it’s never too late to reprogram.  If you are a parent, think about how your beliefs, attitudes and actions are programming your kids.  Are you encouraging them to stoke or stifle their passions in life?

In the next section of Chapter 2, we’ll explore the influence friends have had on your passions.

Until then,

Let Your Passion Create Your World!

Robert (aka The Passionist)

Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life — Chapter 1- Not A Destination: My Personal Passion-Guided Journey (Conclusion)

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Apr 1, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(This is Installment #5 of Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  This week, I conclude the story of my passion guided journey that led me to write this book.  I hope you enjoy, and please continue to send your comments and stories.  I love the feedback and hearing from all of you.)

Chapter 1 (conclusion) –  A Journey, Not a Destination: My Personal Passion Journey

In early 2001, the marketplace for big, senior level marketing and advertising jobs was changing and I was ambivalent about continuing down that career path. Clients were becoming less loyal. The digital revolution was making data manipulation and data mining sexier to brand managers than good creative ideas. And the industry as a whole, although nowhere near as sophisticated as today’s data obsessed marketing machine, was about to be shaken up in a short-term focused, digitally-driven paradigm shift. The art of building lasting brands, always a crucial counter-balance to the science of building them, was being minimized and even lost in some cases. Close relationships, always the special sauce that created the magic between clients and agencies, were becoming tenuous and short lived.  The times, they were a-changing.
Good ideas, human connection, human judgement and experience are critical to marketing success in the same way that a great driver is critical to guiding even the most technologically advanced Formula One race car to victory (Steve Jobs demonstrated this with the successful iMac and iPhone, which he developed without the use of any market research data). Technology alone can’t win the race or build a brand.  But in 2001, people were enamored with new marketing technology and, although I appreciated its value as a new addition in the arsenal of brand building tools, I was not a “technologist”. I was essentially a strategist with a creative mind who loved connecting ideas and brands with people. This changing industry dynamic and obsession with “technology for technology’s sake”, prevalent in the early 2000’s, was draining my passion for the business I loved, which had always been fueled by the human elements and creativity of the craft. Without passion, I knew it was time to change. But what to do next?

I was facing a common dilemma, and the main reason why many people don’t follow their passions: my economic success, and the comfortable lifestyle it provided, made it hard to leave or even contemplate leaving. At thirty-nine, I was living what might be considered by many a great life, with multiple homes and cars, traveling first-class to anywhere on a moments’ notice and eating in the best restaurants in the world everyday for lunch.  My daughter attended private school and we enjoyed fun-filled ski and beach vacations every year.  Who would want to change this?  I was torn about what to do. Continue on a path without passion or make a change, even if it would drastically change my lifestyle for an unforeseen period of time?

Fortunately, I have always believed that if you do what you love, you will work hard enough to become good at it, maybe even the best. If you are good, you will be well paid. There is always a market for great. From this belief, I was able to quell my fear of change.  I had confidence, based on my experience, that passion would steer me in the right direction with the right level of focus and energy to succeed at whatever I did, or it would lead me to something better.

I had spent my whole career to that point selling intangible concepts and ideas (not including the time I sold the Encyclopedia Americana door-to-door as a high school student trying to make some extra money) to brands, and had always wondered what it would be like to directly sell a tangible product, something that someone could walk into a store and touch and buy.  Sure, people bought my clients’ beer, cookies, cars, insurance and the myriad products I made campaigns to sell.  But my primary job was selling the campaigns to the clients.  I was curious about taking a new direction toward actually selling MY product to consumers.

While curious about change, I was still resisting it. Fear is powerful.  I knew how to run agencies and marketing groups, and was good at it.  It would have been a fairly easy and lucrative career path to continue. Or so I thought.  Then one day, I was invited by a recruiter to interview for a CEO position at a mid-sized agency in NYC. We had met briefly once before, and he knew my history.  However, while he had called me to interview for this position (his client had asked him to), he thankfully told me that I was unlikely to get the job or any other senior job in the advertising industry for years. What? How was that possible? It wasn’t that I was unqualified for that position or others that might come up, he stressed.  I had run my own small agency and a successful division of a large public advertising holding company. I had proven skills and relationships with clients who had worked with me for over a decade at two different agencies.

The recruiter’s theory, however, was that my age would work against me in the post-dot-com-bubble job market we were experiencing in 2001. I was still under forty, and all the candidates I was competing with for this particular job, and presumably the other senior jobs for which I would come under consideration that year, were all in their fifties. They offered at least ten more years of experience for the same or less money than I was commanding based on my work and salary history. When companies can buy good and more experienced people for less money, they usually do. It’s good value and it feels safer.  If you try to drop your price to be competitive, it doesn’t work. Smart employers know that you will leave when the next good job comes along offering to pay what you really want to earn.  So they don’t hire you.  He turned out to be right.  I did not get that job, and other attractive offers were not forthcoming.  It seems that taking the unusual, rapid-growth career path I choose by starting Pinnacle Promotions at twenty-four was effective for creating lots of early success and financial reward, but it basically made me unemployable at forty.  Thankfully, I had saved enough money to take some time and figure out what to do.  Change is a lot easier to accept when it’s the only choice, and if I was contemplating a career change out of lack of passion, now it would be out of necessity.

Understandably, I was ready to go in a new direction, when my friend Gary Cohen, then president of Ted Baker USA, invited me to lunch.  Gary and I had met on the Delta Shuttle between New York and D.C.  We were both frequent fliers on that route.  Gary lived in suburban Maryland and worked in NYC.  I lived in NYC and visited my daughter on weekends in Virginia. On our flights together, and over many lunches and dinners, Gary and I would often talk about our passions: life, sports and family, and sometimes about fashion trends and the marketing of fashion.

On this particular afternoon, I told Gary that I was thinking of leaving the marketing agency business.  I was ready to find a new passion to dive into.  “Did you ever consider a career in men’s fashion?” he asked. “It’s a growing industry and I think you might be great at it.”  Hmmm.  I had briefly thought about it Italian industrialist, Claudio Del Vecchio (of Luxottica fame) purchased the iconic American brand, Brooks Brothers, from English retailer Marks & Spencer.  I wore Brooks Brothers shirts in high school and loved the brand’s heritage and story.  Marks & Spencer had almost killed Brooks Brothers by lowering product quality and poorly managing the in-store consumer experience.  I had written to Del Vecchio a few months prior to our lunch to express interest in putting my marketing expertise and first-hand knowledge of the brand to work for him as he rebuilt the company.   I got no reply and no return phone calls.  I listened carefully to Gary as he told me what was happening in the menswear industry, and it certainly piqued my curiosity.  Apparently, the industry was booming.

Throughout my advertising career, I probably spent enough money on suits to open my own store.  My wardrobe was a big part of the “theatre” of advertising back when men wore suits to work every day.  I studied clothing and used it to create different moods and impressions in meetings.  When I was a kid, my mom taught me about clothing and how to dress appropriately for any occasion.  Her passion for fashion was fostered in high school.  At sixteen, she dreamed of being a fashion designer and was even awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.  Unfortunately, her father, an Italian immigrant and talented artist who made his living painting beautiful signs, had other plans for her.  She should find a husband and have a family (lucky for me!).  Her fashion dream got squashed, which is probably why she was always so supportive of my dreams as I was growing up.   Anyway, I had successfully put my wardrobe to work in the boardroom for years, always creating the right image for every meeting or informal client get together.  Maybe fashion was something at which I could excel.

While I half-heartedly continued to interview for agency jobs, I found myself increasingly more interested in observing men’s clothing and brands.  I studied ads, brochures and websites.  I visited stores and read magazines to see what was happening in the business.  I was stoking a new passion. The idea of using my marketing and selling skills to sell an actual, tangible product rather than intangible ideas was gaining appeal.  My Italian background contributed to my interest because most of the best quality men’s clothing was designed and manufactured in Italy, and many of the people I spoke to as I researched the industry were Italian.  Perhaps this was a business I would enjoy, especially if it connected me to my Italian roots and offered a few visits to Italy each year.

While my passion for this possible career twist was growing, I had a lot to learn if I was going to invest my time and money in a new business. What area of the industry would I like? Wholesale or retail? Design or marketing? I studied for months and met with people in the business to learn as much as I could.  I talked to wholesalers, retailers and tailors.  I considered different business scenarios and ran spreadsheets to see if I could actually earn a decent living.  About four months after my lunch with Gary, I drew up plans to open a men’s clothing store called Robert’s.  After all my research, it seemed the best way to learn would be to start where the product touched the consumer every day – on the retail floor.  Passion had struck again and I would now pour everything I had into a new career direction for the next seven years.

I picked Westport, Connecticut as the town in which to open my first store.  Westport was close to my home town of Rowayton, a small bedroom community about thirty miles outside NYC.  It was also home to Mitchells, the most successful independent men’s specialty store in the U.S.  Ironically, Mitchells had been founded by an advertising executive who got tired of commuting back and forth from his home in Westport to NYC every day, so he started a little suit shop that grew into a $200 million plus, multi-store retail apparel empire.

I decided to open Robert’s about a mile down the road from Mitchells.  Crazy idea?  Not really.  I surmised that in the process of growing so large (they had about 15,000 customers in their database and I only needed about 800 to make my much smaller store profitable), Mitchells must have lost 5-10% of their customers over the years because of bad experiences or Mitchells’ not offering what some customers were looking for, something other than just the well-known “mass luxury” menswear brands they sold.  I planned on satisfying those customers by traveling to Italy and finding small and unique luxury brands that Mitchells did not carry.  My formula worked.  However, occasionally Mitchells would find out what I was selling from mutual customers, and place an order for the same items.  Of course, the brands would take their much bigger orders rather than mine.  It was the law of the jungle, and Mitchells was the proverbial 900 pound gorilla.  But this just kept me on my toes and provided incentive to keep searching for new items to offer my customers every season.

It turned out that Gary was right about my chances for success.  I had a natural instinct for selling fashion, probably the result of the skills that were honed by years of pitching abstract marketing campaigns to demanding clients.  I was a natural story teller, and easily romanced the products in my store.  I told of the small villages in Italy where they were made, or introduced them, virtually, to the third generation tailor who had made the very jacket they were holding.  I poured them wine from a vineyard near the shoe factory that made the shoes they were trying on.  My customers were not buying clothes.  They were buying an experience.  People who came into my store usually bought something.  Products that people could touch and try on were easy to sell, especially when accompanied by a good laugh and glass of scotch.   If fact, the selling was the easiest part of the business.

The buying was the hardest and riskiest part of retail. Picking the right merchandise for the store was tricky, especially with no experience.  Not everyone likes what you like.  As a retail buyer, you have to pick merchandise that caters to many tastes, not only yours.  And you have to buy the right quantities and sizes.  I made some massively expensive buying mistakes in the beginning, like loading up on pleated pants right as the market was moving to slimmer silhouetted, flat-front models.  I had no idea who my customers would be once the store got going, so choosing sizes, styles and colors was mostly guess work at first.  I eventually learned to how buy the right merchandise, how to take measurements for custom shirts and suits, and even how to design one-of-a-kind pieces for customers, which turned out to be a big part of my business.  My passion to be the best drove me to learn and work long hours, seven days a week, and to always explore new opportunities to grow the business.

After three years of working in Robert’s every day, I started to sense an opportunity to offer some new products to the wholesale menswear marketplace.  I felt I had learned enough in my store to start selling to other stores.  My creative and entrepreneurial juices were flowing.  I created a new brand, Roberto da Carrara, and bought another, niformis, and started a company to offer retailers like me artfully designed, high-end fashion for men.

I named the first brand after my grandfather’s hometown of Carrara (the brand name translates to “Robert of Carrara”), a town in the northwestern corner of Tuscany famous for mining the world’s best white marble.  I bought niformis from Victor DeLeon, a hugely talented, one-man band who designed, manufactured and sold amazing shirts after a stint selling Dolce & Gabbana in the men’s department at Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship store in NYC.  Victor was a shirt star, who was known by menswear buyers for having the most creative, yet wearable shirts. The fit was amazing and the designs were just shy enough of over-the-top for most men to feel comfortable wearing.  The designs were limited each season and people collected them, which means they keep returning to the store (which retailer’s loved, of course, so they could sell them more stuff).  Victor’s passion for shirts and Italian culture was infectious.  When I initially bought his niformis collection for my Westport store, the shirts sold out immediately.  He would turn out to be an excellent partner for my new venture.

Roberto da Carrara, our uber expensive line, was made with the most luxurious fabrics and loaded with hand-made details. One-of-a-kind silk linings printed in Como, hand-hewn horn buttons, featherweight cashmere and exotic fabric blends, and the best Italian tailoring were all wrapped up in a unique brand experience.  Our target audience was small and well defined.  The brand was marketed to the man who could afford anything, and we used the tagline “Vita con Passione” (“Live with Passion”) to appeal to the adventurous and fearless nature of most our super successful prospects.  I guess the passion theme for this book was taking shape even then.  Two years after launching Roberto da Carrara, Victor and I were nominated for a global menswear design award by Fashion Group International and came in second place!  What power passion has to make things happen in life.

The business grew steadily from 2003 to early 2008.  In a few short years in the industry, I went from running a small store to running Robert’s and 2M Apparel Group, the company I formed with a small group of investors to build the Roberto da Carrara and niformis brands and to open a Roberto da Carrara store in NYC’s Nolita neighborhood.  2M had about fifty wholesale accounts by 2008 and in April 2009, Town & Country magazine featured our Nolita store as one of the best in NYC.  Robert’s had about five-hundred loyal customers.  I was on my way, harnessing my new passion to another business success.  What a journey!  What fun!

Unexpectedly, this incredible journey would start to unravel in the spring of 2008, just as we were hitting our stride. The mortgage market crash, the one ruined many people’s retirement and about which they made the movie, The Big Short, hit the NYC market harder than most.  Unfortunately for me, the majority of my customers were young financial industry hotshots making millions at the hedge funds scattered around Fairfield County and at big NYC investment banks.  We sold to other people as well, but the hedge-fund high rollers would come in every weekend and buy a few $300 shirts to wear to dinner or to take to some over the top party in St. Barths that they were flying off to in their friend’s jet.  This was our bread and butter business and the backbone of our company.  They were also the one’s about to stop spending money.

By fall of 2008, the entire business had skidded to a abrupt halt.  It was not a slow down.  People who thought nothing of casually spending $2500 on a Saturday afternoon in our stores wouldn’t even buy a pair of $150 jeans.  Stores were canceling or reducing our wholesale orders.  Or worse, returning merchandise.  Full on consumer panic had set in, and even people who were not financially devastated by the crash stopped spending money.  They felt guilty spending money on something as conspicuous as fashion while the world they knew melted down around them.  My customers, most of whom had become friends, regaled me with tales of market woes and new budget constraints.  Many lost their jobs.  Some lost their houses.  And some lost everything, including their trophy wives who had jumped on the gravy train when the market was red hot and money was flowing freely.

By mid-2009, I knew I had to act.  Forced with an “invest more or shut down” scenario, I liquidated the inventory of both stores, and shut them down.  Our heralded flagship store in Lolita didn’t even stay open for a full year.  I wound down the wholesale business as fast as I could.  It was a whirlwind of activity, of liquidation and negotiation.  By 2010, I exited the fashion business completely, unwilling to invest more time and money waiting and hoping for the market to improve for our products.  Good decision.  It didn’t recover for about five years, which would have been a long and expensive wait.  I have great respect for small boutique owners, especially those who weathered that crash.  Retailing is one of the hardest things I have ever done in business.  You can make a fortune or lose your shirt (no pun intended) very quickly.

Even with the difficult and abrupt ending, I loved everything about my experiences and career in the fashion and retail business (except maybe the seven day work weeks).  I still visit stores and share war stories with other store owners.  I have great memories of traveling to Como and Biella in Italy during those years, visiting the best fabric mills in the world and seeing how the most exquisite cashmeres and wools are actually made.  One year, I took my daughter on a fun-filled trip to Florence to accompany me to Pitti Uomo, the premier seasonal men’s buying show that happens twice a year in that inspiring historical city.  I met and learned about quality from passionate artisans who made our buttons, shoes, silk, suits, shirts and other apparel items, many of whom still run family-owned companies that are a century old or more.  I even ate my way through the entire country of Italy, my ancestral homeland, and learned many cooking secrets (another one of my passions) that I use everyday.  Most importantly, I learned about myself as I navigated the only market crash that actually effected my life directly and significantly.

After closing Robert’s and 2M Apparel Group, I needed to recharge my batteries.  Even the most passionate people reach a limit to their energy, and I had reached mine.  I decided to leave the hustle, bustle and winter weather of the NYC area and move to sunny Sarasota, FL.  It was a quiet town with the most beautiful beach in the U.S., Siesta Key.  Just what the doctor ordered.

The move to Florida, and out of the frenetic environment of NYC, gave me a chance to refresh my energy and decide which passion would drive my next adventure.  While I was winding down 2M Apparel, I went back to my roots and formed Crosscourt Advisors, a consulting business advising marketing agencies and brands on a variety of issues.  By the time I relocated to the sunshine state, I had a few good clients.  But I wasn’t ready to jump in to work full time.  Instead, I spent much of my time learning and practicing yoga, swimming in the ocean with dolphins and manatees, playing tennis and generally recharging my batteries.  I wanted to be patient and see which of my passions would be the driving force for my next career move.

I operated in this partial-work mode for almost three years, advising a client or two at a time.  Eventually, my energy returned and I started considering my next chapter in life. Sarasota was a sleepy town, full of mostly retired people and somewhat lost, younger people who worked in the bars and restaurants that catered to the tourists who visited the beautiful, white sandy beaches of the gulf-coach.   It was no place for a recharged New Yorker.  As I was getting prepared to get back to a more active work life, I knew I would also need to move.  After living in the tropics and enjoying the quality of life that comes with living in a warm climate, going back to a cold city was out of the question.  As I looked around the U.S. for a warm-weather climate with close proximity to the ocean, an international vibe, and a vibrant business community, Miami was the obvious choice.  So off I went to the Magic City.

If there was ever a city to ignite your passion and make you feel engaged in life, Miami is it.  The combination of beautiful tropical blue water, lush foliage and palm trees, incredibly designed skyscrapers, vibrant music and art, gourmet food and people from all over the world provide all the energy needed to light you up every day.  Yet, Miami also has a tropical chill vibe, which makes it slower and calmer than New York or other major world cities.  In Miami, you can work hard and then easily slow down.  In New York, it seemed hard to ever slow down.  The balance in Miami was perfect for me.  I felt at home immediately and ready to begin the next phase of my life.

Since it’s inception, Crosscourt Advisors had been engaged to work on a variety of marketing-related projects.  While in Sarasota, I worked with both agencies and brands.  I worked with both start-ups and established companies.  I basically worked with everyone who called for help, provided it didn’t interfere too much with my schedule.  I was a bit unfocused.  But once in Miami, and back in my groove, I was able to give my company a more clear, passion-driven definition.  My passion translated into three areas of business: helping people bring their ideas to life, helping make brands better and helping people achieve their dreams.  With my focus clear, I was able to pick the clients who best aligned with my work and personal goals, and I was even able to schedule time to write this book!

Today, about forty years after pursuing my first real passion on the tennis court, I look back at the incredible journey taken, while keeping an eye toward the future.  I’m enjoying the present, while anticipating the next unexpected twists that my passions seem to attract.  I still work in the tennis and marketing industries and, as I write, am launching a new fashion lifestyle brand called The Original Miami Beach Towel Co. (which I started because I could not find a good beach towel in Miami Beach. Go figure!)  Passions tend to be cumulative and portable.  While some die out, others follow you around and intensify over time.  Many of mine have followed me and grown and fed each other throughout my life.  It’s been a fascinating ride so far, all because I decided when I was twelve years-old to fearlessly follow my own path.  I had no idea where it would lead, or what it would lead to.  All I know is that I have never sat around bored or wishing I was doing something else for one second.  To me, that’s a successful life.

If you have not yet identified your passion, it’s okay.  Many people haven’t.  I am going to help you find yours.  In fact, the process of exploration is itself an exercise in passion.  Plenty of people have to try different things for years before they find the one thing that makes them tick, that gets them out of bed in the morning with the anticipation that “today, I get to do what I love!”  There is great satisfaction in trying different sports and activities; learning about different areas of science or medicine; creating art with cameras, brushes and pencils; cooking foods from around the world; learning new languages and traveling to new countries to try them out; writing stories and poems; or building a business that serves some unmet need.  The passion possibilities are endless. The key is to be open to trying new things and sticking with the one’s that grab your attention.  Embrace them and let them enthrall you.

My father, who was a dentist, left a prescription on my desk one morning while I was getting ready for school.  I asked, “Dad, what’s that?” “A prescription for life,” he answered as he went off to work.  On the prescription pad, he had written four words:

patience

persistence

consistency

balance.

You can’t pursue a passion driven life without following that prescription. You need patience to find your passion and to endure life’s inevitable ups and downs.  You need persistence to pursue your passion until you reach a level of competency that will bring you joy, and possibly allow you to earn a living from your passion, if that is your goal.  You need to be consistent in your study and practice of your passion, and not get distracted or pulled off course.  And you need to find balance in life, so your passion does not consume your entire existence and lead to burnout.  I will reveal more about the power of this prescription throughout the book.

The list of possible passions is infinite, and if you don’t explore all that life has to offer, not only will you not find your passion, you will wake up one day wondering “How did I get HERE?”  And you’ll be asking not with gratitude, as I did that morning on my walk along the water in Miami when i decided to write this book, but with the frustration that you are not where you want to be.  Today is the day to begin living a life that gives you energy, rather than sucking it out of you.  Today is the day to wake up smiling and excited about the day ahead.  Today is the day to shape your life in your own way on your own terms.  Today is the day to start living your life with passion!.  Today is the day to let your passion start to create your world.

Let’s get started!

(Next week, in Installment #6, I will post Chapter 2:  What Drives You To Do The Things You Do in Life.  In this chapter, I will explore our early influencers – parents, friends, family, teachers, etc. – the people who likely shaped our world view and behaviors, and either helped or inhibited our ability to find and pursue our passions.  In this chapter, I’ll start to tell you some ways you can begin finding your passions.  Until then…)

Let Your Passion Create Your World,

Robert (aka, The Passionist)

Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life — Chapter 1- Not A Destination: My Personal Passion-Guided Journey (Continued)

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Mar 24, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(This is Installment #4 of Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  This week, I continue to tell the story of my passion guided journey from a brief career as a fledgling pro tennis player to a marketing industry pioneer and leader.  I hope you enjoy, and please continue to send your comments and stories.  I love the feedback and hearing from all of you.)

Chapter 1 (continued) –  A Journey, Not a Destination: My Personal Passion Journey

Steven Roberts is a gritty entrepreneur who literally throws himself into everything he does until he achieves his goal. He was always creating some kind of business as a kid, and even made enough money stringing tennis racquets at sixteen to buy himself his first car, a convertible MG. Playing tennis, he would often dive for balls and come off the court bleeding. It was a badge of honor for Steven, a sign that he put out the required effort to win or die trying. He still plays the same way.

I thought Steven would be the ideal business partner for a pioneering marketing company, so I called him (he was living in California at the time, and I was in Northern Virginia, near Washington, DC, one of the hubs of the early sports marketing industry) and shared my ideas. I told him that I was considering taking a sports marketing job, but was hesitant because I felt strongly that there was an opportunity to create a company to change the way sports marketing was done, to make it more strategic and marketing driven. “Why not us,” I said, “Let’s create our own company.”  We also wanted to get rich, so working for someone else, and making them rich, didn’t seem like the right path.  As often happens with close friends, he was thinking similar thoughts, and had already created a company that was doing some tennis related promotions. We were young and had little to lose by launching our own business rather than working for someone else, so after a few hours of discussion, we decided to become partners and go for it.

Two months after that phone conversation, I convinced Steven to move from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where we could be closer to the center of the industry, and closer to New York City, where many of the headquarters of our potential clients were located. Within a week of his arrival in D.C., Pinnacle Promotions was born. Founded by two twenty-somethings with a passion to make a difference, street smarts, newly minted college degrees (neither in marketing), some still open wounds form being brutally spit out by the pro tennis tour and not much else (we didn’t have two pennies between us when we started), Pinnacle Promotions set out to make its mark on the fast-growing sports and event marketing industry.  Without a doubt, a high degree of passion and persistence would be required to make this venture successful.

Steven and I developed a strategic framework for how we thought companies should approach sports and event sponsorships. Today, the practice is called sponsorship activation and experiential marketing, and many companies do it intelligently with great results. But in 1987, few brands executed strategically effective sponsorship programs, or even thought a strategy was needed to optimize their sponsorship investments. Sponsors were still busy shaking hands and taking photos with celebrities in the VIP tents, and calling it marketing. We knew this was an unsustainable model, and that boards and investors would eventually start to demand more accountability from sponsorships.

A good example of scant accountability was Team Nabisco. For those of you unfamiliar with Team Nabisco, it was the pet project in 1987 of Nabisco CEO, F. Ross Johnson. Johnson assembled a private team of hall-of-fame athletes that included Bobby Orr, O.J. Simpson, Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and other sports luminaries. He spent millions of Nabisco’s dollars flying these former superstars around the country on the corporate fleet of jets to play golf with him and, presumable, his customers. Google it or read Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco – it was the biggest sports marketing related boondoggle ever dreamed up. Pinnacle Promotions mission was to prevent these types of crazy deals from happening. It was also our passion.

Night and day, I set out to learn everything I could about advertising and marketing, trying to figure out how sponsorship really fit into the picture to help build brands. I must have read hundreds of books on the subject in the first year we were in business. I needed to make sure I understood what our prospective clients, mostly brand managers then, were talking about, especially when they used industry jargon. Clients would often use terms and acronyms we’d never heard before in meetings, and Steven and I would just nod, not knowing what the hell they were talking about. After the meeting, I would run off to the library (no Internet back then) to figure out what they had said and why it was important. Sometimes the acronyms were only internal abbreviations that they failed to explain, and assumed we understood (not sure why they would have assumed that, but they never explained them unless we asked). We were challenged and learning every day.

We had no fear. We were complete novices when we started the company, and we made lots of mistakes in the beginning, both strategically and in program execution. While preparing for our second big event, a beach volleyball tournament for Coors Light, we stupidly printed the posters before getting the signed contract back from the event venue in Ocean City, MD. They had told us we had a deal, and we believed them. The day we showed up to pick up the contract and begin event preparations, we learned that the owner had changed his mind about hosting our event. They didn’t bother to call us and let us know. I’ll never forget the shocked look on Steven’s face as he was interrupted while trying to reason with owner, saying we had already printed the posters as he held one up for emphasis.  Lenny Berger, owner of the hotel, just blurted out at Steven, “Get out of my office!” And we did. We left with our tails between our legs wondering what we were going to do to solve this problem.

The event was only a few weeks away and we had already been paid half of our fee by the client. We had dinner planned with him that night to give a progress report on the event. What were we going to do? Definitely not panic. At dinner, we calmly told him that we had lost our venue for the event. “But,” I said. “It’s no problem. We’ll have a new one by the end of day tomorrow.” For reasons I still can’t explain (but really appreciate now, because we would have been out of business that day if he didn’t), he gave us twenty-four hours to fix the problem. Maybe he sensed our passion and unwillingness to fail. Who knows?

We weren’t planning to spend the night in Ocean City. Steven and I didn’t have money for a hotel, so I slept on the beach and Steven slept in his red VW Scirocco with his girlfriend (now wife), Maryam. We didn’t sleep much, and I was jolted awake at dawn by the noise of a truck about to dump a load of garbage on me in the sand crater I thought would be good shelter for the night (it turned out to be an empty garbage pit). I’ll never forget having to jump out of the way before getting tons of garbage dumped on me. Entrepreneurship is not always as glamorous as it seems. We showered at an outdoor pool shower at the Holiday Inn, put on our suits and hit the streets, going up and down the beach trying to find a hotel that would host our volleyball event. As I remember, we were never really worried about finding a new venue, we were just determined to get it done. By the end of the day, we had signed a deal with The Carousel Hotel & Resort. Crisis averted. That would be the first of many near disasters we would face during our early years in business.

We were so driven to succeed at building our company, and so broke when we started, that we even agreed to lease office space with no heat and no air conditioning for our first year. The space was over a dry cleaners’ shop in Old Town Alexandria, VA. We paid $300 a month rent and had to paint the place and get new carpets before we could use it. It was a funny scene, Steven and I working in that office. In the winter, our hands often got too cold for us to type and we would huddle at our desks in coats and scarves, our breath visible as we spoke. In the summer, we would strip down to our underwear, and sweat would drip onto our desks and our work, and our heads would stick to the phone. Yes, making this business work required a high degree of passion to help us the through hardships and missteps. In retrospect, those were some of the most enjoyable and satisfying moments of my professional life, fighting battle-by-battle and surviving to fight another day.

After a roller-coaster start and too many near-bankruptcy moments (nine in the first three years), Pinnacle Promotions survived and eventually succeeded in its mission to raise the strategic bar for its sports and event sponsorship clients, and our efforts were rewarded by loyal and appreciative clients who then offered us other, non-sponsorship related, marketing work. This allowed us to expand our scope of services, and become what is now called an integrated marketing agency.  Many of our initial client contacts came from our tennis experiences and from our ability to play tennis with prospective clients as part of the sales pitch process (it seems that many club players were anxious to hit a few balls with some ex-pros, even if we weren’t household names).  But eventually, Pinnacle Promotions began to grow for different reasons. Mainly, we got better at creating marketing programs that worked, and new business started coming in because we were good. The company that was created out of passion and belief had grown into a legitimate business that helped big brands solve tricky marketing problems.

My transition from tennis player to expert marketing practitioner was a multi-year journey. Passion was the bridge from tennis to marketing. Six years after creating Pinnacle Promotions, we sold it. Steven moved back to California and continued a successful career in marketing and media. I followed my passion for marketing and was hired by global advertising giant Bates Worldwide (then owned by Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world in 1993). Off to NYC I went to make my name on Madison Avenue, where I would eventually work in my favorite building in the world, The Chrysler Building.

My first job at Bates was in their newly formed sales promotion company, BSB Dryden & Petisi. Bob Petisi, the guy who found and recruited me to Bates, and Tom Dryden were sales promotion veterans who had sold their small agency to Bates in an effort to provide services to Bates’ large client base. They were ten years older than me. Tom was a copywriter and drove the creative product for the agency. Bob was an expert schmoozer, a quintessential people person who made sure the clients were happy and stayed at the agency. They were a good team and would give me an excellent opportunity to learn and improve my skills.

In September of 1993, I became an account director at BSB Dryden & Petisi, and for four months ran the work for Miller Genuine Draft, RC Cola, Perrier, The New York Racing Association (which comprised the horse tracks Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga) and CBS, along with chasing new business. I was enjoying the job immensely, shuttling between our offices in Westport, CT and New York City on Metro North Railroad. I worked closely with Bob and Tom, but also with our counterparts at Bates in NYC with whom I shared a few clients. Miller Genuine Draft was one of Bates largest clients, so I worked closely with the account team on the advertising side, and coordinated our promotional work with their campaigns. Since the CEO of Bates USA, Frank Assumma, had come from the Miller account and had actually approved my hiring, I also had a good relationship with the most senior managers of the company.  I felt at that time that I was in the game, a “Mad Man” , and I loved it.

1993 was also the year my daughter, Ariana, was born. If you want to ignite passion in your life, become a parent. Nothing anyone could have told me would have prepared me for being a father. I never imagined how much love I could have for a person or how much fun it could be to just watch a baby grow. The birth of my daughter was far and away the greatest moment of my life. No passion will ever compare to the passion I have for being Ariana’s dad (my daughter is in her twenties now and busy exploring her own passions in life). I enjoyed every aspect of being a father when she was young. Changing diapers. No problem. Waking up early (fortunately, Ariana liked to sleep, so I didn’t lose too many nights sleep). No problem. Birthday parties. Sports practices. You name it. I wanted to experience everything with her. I was happy to do it all and wanted to spend as much time being a dad as I could, especially since my work and travel schedule kept me away often. Even now, as she gets older, and is beginning her own career, I still feel my day is incomplete if I don’t talk to her.

A year after joining BSB Dryden & Petisi, Bob and Tom confided in me that they were having second thoughts about their deal with Bates. They did not think the costs of being part of the global advertising giant were worth the benefits they were getting. In short, they felt they were spending too much money on needless Bates corporate overhead expenses, and that it negatively effected how much they could pay themselves. They were going to leave Bates.

I, on the other hand, loved being at Bates. It wasn’t about the money for me, I loved being around the advertising business. I loved the creativity. I loved the global nature of the company (Bates had 112 offices around the world). At this stage in my career, I saw much more upside being at Bates, and Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings, than BSB Dryden & Petisi. I did not want BSB Dryden & Petisi to separate from Bates because I would likely end up going with them. So, I did what any good entrepreneur would do. I created an opportunity and a win-win-win deal.

I went to Bob and Tom and told them I had a solution to their problem with Bates. I would go to Frank Assumma and Art D’Angelo, the Bates CFO, and suggest that I create a new promotion company in the New York City office serving a few key clients, Miller Genuine Draft, CBS and Perrier. Bob and Tom would be released from their contracts, and take some of the BSB Dryden & Petisi clients that were not also Bates clients and start a new agency on their own. Everyone would win and get what they wanted. I would get to stay at Bates. Bates would get a promotion capability to service its advertising clients. And Bob and Tom were free from the deal they no longer wanted. I pitched the idea to the Bates executives and they agreed. In January of 1994, I would become President of the newly formed Bates Promotion Group. Bob and Tom would go on their merry way. Everyone was happy.

I arrived at The Chrysler Building for my first official day of my new job and walked through the incredible art deco marble lobby toward the elevators. I looked around and marveled at the beauty of the building. I’m not sure I had dreamt of working in this building specifically, but from where I started in an office over a dry cleaner with no heat and air conditioning, this would have been an ambitious dream for sure. Yet here I was. As I approached the unique, wood-veneered and art-deco metal designed elevator doors, I stopped to look at the building directory (not electronic then, but white plastic letters pressed into a black background). It was framed by artfully crafted metal replica of the building’s famous spire.  As I scanned the company names, I saw Bates Promotion Group on the seventeenth floor. Under the company name, it said “Robert Mazzucchelli, President”. I was thirty-two, my name was on the directory in the lobby of The Chrysler Building as president of a major division of one of the largest advertising agencies ever created, an agency famous for iconic campaigns for Coca Cola and Miller Lite Beer. I had made it to the big time. Maybe not in tennis, but in advertising.

I was on quite a ride. Following my passions had already brought me through a remarkable journey, from the smallest state in the U.S. to a career as a professional tennis player; from owning my own small marketing company to landing a job as president of a major division of one of the biggest global advertising agencies in the world. All just eight years after graduating from college. What awesome power passion has to transform our lives.

I stayed at Bates for about six years, enjoying every minute of working with some of the smartest and craziest people I had ever met. Mad Men (and women) for sure. I didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy and politics of such a big company, but the people and the work made up for the headaches. While at Bates, I helped start a global marketing agency called 141 Worldwide and traveled the world to open new offices and meet with clients in cities I’d heard about, but never imagined I would visit so frequently. I went to Bogota, Warsaw, Tokyo, Oslo, Hamburg, Paris, London, Lima, Buenos Aires, and dozens of cities. This frequent travel, while hard on my personal life at times, ultimately fueled my lifelong passion for travel, meeting new people from different cultures and trying different cuisines.

By the ripe old age of thirty-eight, following my passions had already yielded two careers, a few trips around the world and enough adventures to last several lifetimes. What would be next?

I took some time off after leaving Bates to pursue another passion, one I shared with my Dad until his death: golf. My golfing experiences with my father are some of the best memories of my life. He was a golfing fanatic who, when diagnosed with cancer in 1991, said to me while considering his treatment options, “I just want to be able to play golf.” He loved golf that much and survived to play countless more rounds for twenty years after beating his cancer.

One of the most memorable rounds of golf I played with my dad was during the summer of 1984. I was teaching tennis at The Beacon Hill Country Club in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, while preparing for my last year of college. I was miserable in New Jersey. I was lonely, hated teaching spoiled little kids and housewives all day and was anxious about getting my tennis game back into shape for my senior year. The coach had recruited several new hotshots, and the competition to make it into the starting singles line-up was getting intense. Anyway, my parents came to New Jersey to cheer me up, and I took my dad out for a round of golf at my club.

When we started our round, it was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining, the fairways looked lush and green, and there was a light breeze making the temperature and the playing conditions perfect. We were both playing well that day, and laughing a lot as usual as we approached the 17th tee. We both hit pretty good tee shots that left us within striking distance of the green, which we both reached on our second shot. As we drove up to the green, it looked like we both had about twenty-five foot putts on either side of the hole.

As we parked the cart, we noticed that the green’s sprinkler was on, showering water along the manicured putting surface. Normally, golf courses have a clearly marked valve near the green, that allows you to turn off the sprinkler while you putt. We couldn’t find it. So one at a time, we waited until the sprinkler passed our ball, and then ran on to the green to make our putts. I went first, and ran onto the green with no time to line up the putt or do the usual pre-putt ritual. I just gave it a quick look, hit the putt and ran of the green watching the ball snake around the hole, and…plop, right into the cup. “Nice putt,” my dad said as he waited for the sprinkler to pass his ball and prepared to run onto the green. He ran up to his ball, looked quickly at the line and knocked it toward the hole. As he ran off the green to avoid the returning sprinkler’s shower, I remember screaming, “It’s going in, it’s going in.” And sure enough, it went in. We both made our massively long putts and avoided getting wet. We had beaten the sprinkler and the golf course, or so we thought. Then, out of nowhere, as we stood laughing hysterically at what had just happened (it’s unlikely that one of us would have made our putts without the sprinkler’s interference, let alone both of us rushing the way we did), the skies opened up and a torrential downpour ensued. There we were, laughing at not having gotten drenched by the sprinkler, now being showered on by the rainstorm. We got soaked to the skin and laughed our heads off as we jumped into the cart and drove back to the clubhouse, leaving our golf balls in the hole.

I had shared many fun golfing moments with my dad, since the day he first took me to the driving range as a five year-old. As I got older and moved from Rhode Island, we played golf whenever I would visit, or we would go on vacations to play. We would talk about golf on the phone, and keep up with who was winning in the major professional tournaments. So, when I left Bates and had the luxury of taking some time off work to consider what I wanted to do next in life, I took the opportunity to indulge my passion for golf. With an eighteen handicap, I was a decent golfer. As a kid, I spent all my time in the summer playing tennis, and golf was just something I would do with my dad for fun.  But now that I had time to get serious about it, I wanted to be good. Really good.

When the golf bug bites, it bites hard. Small improvements, or even one great shot, can bring you back to the course day-after-day, hoping for a little more improvement, and another great shot. It’s a vicious cycle. Having a passion for golf is a curse and a blessing, but for many just a curse because getting better gets harder once you’ve reached a certain level. The small adjustments it takes to improve your game after you’ve reached about a ten handicap get more difficult to perfect. The margin for improvement gets smaller, and shaving shots off your score harder. Your mental game often determines how well you will play on a given day. Some days you are great and others you are terrible. Consistency is often elusive. But when it is good, it’s as good as it gets.

While on my sabbatical from work, I played golf every day. My goal was to become a scratch golfer (that’s a golfer who shoots even par and has no handicap). I was obsessed, and would drive from my home in Connecticut, two hours to my golf course in Rhode Island (my dad was also a member there) a few times a week to practice. I would hit practice shots, play eighteen holes with my dad, have lunch, play another eighteen holes alone and drive back to Connecticut. I did this for months, until my handicap came down to eight. I was on the way to scratch, or so I thought.  After lowering to eight, my handicap would not budge. It stayed at eight for months. So I practiced and practiced more. Nothing. Eight. And then it finally moved, but the wrong way. Ten. I became a decent ten handicap golfer that year, and stayed at that handicap until I quit playing golf with any seriousness or regularity six years ago.

Golf was a great passion journey for me, but one that ended when my dad died and I decided that I no longer wanted to spend the many hours required to maintain a consistent playing level. It brought me many moments of joy, many more of frustration, was the catalyst for many business deals, and the source of many new friends, acquaintances and business associates. It also brought me to some amazing cities and resorts around the world. And it’s a sport I can still enjoy recreationally for the rest of my life.

After six months of golfing and working in my garden (another passion I developed during that same work sabbatical), I was getting itchy for my next career adventure. While picking tomatoes one morning, I got a call from a head hunter. He said he had a job I should consider. It was at a relatively new, but very large publicly-traded entertainment company that was looking for someone with global marketing experience.

After a few interviews, I took a position as Executive Vice President with SFX Entertainment (now known as Live Nation). While the job offered the opportunity to implement, in a massive way, the sponsorship strategies and activation ideas I had spent years developing at Pinnacle Promotions and Bates, I was not that excited about working for another giant company. As I suspected during the interview process, SFX – which was cobbled together by the acquisition of hundreds of small, local and regional concert promoters, sports agents and entertainment venues – turned out to be a gigantic political nightmare.

Politics often took precedence over all else in absurd ways at SFX. The music industry entrepreneurs, broadway producers and sports promoters, all with giant egos and used to getting their way, who made millions of dollars when their companies were acquired during the SFX roll-up process, would frequently flex those egos in the newly created company. They would actually argue over things like who’s jet we should take to a meeting. It was insane. It made the Mad Men of advertising look not so mad. But after several months of not working, the idea of a healthy paycheck outweighed my apprehension of working in this crazy culture.

Immediately after accepting my position, SFX got gobbled up by radio giant Clear Channel Communications, and the global initiatives I was hired to lead were abandoned in favor of local, city-by-city initiatives that served Clear Channel’s domestic radio market footprint. I sucked it up and dove into the job anyway, but never really accomplished what I had hoped. We did get one big deal done in England with Carling Brewery, which closed after I left the company thanks to a talented guy on my team named Michael Rapino. And I did get to live and work in Brazil while furthering the companies entertainment efforts in South America.  So, the job did have some lasting rewards.

But after eighteen months, I was done with SFX and ready for the next passion chapter of my life. In a footnote, four years after I left the company, it imploded (my leaving had no bearing on this). The company split into a few smaller pieces, the largest being Live Nation and iHeart Radio. Most of the sports agencies were sold back to their original owners at deeply discounted prices. Some of the owners who had made millions selling those companies to SFX would make millions more selling them again to new buyers. It was a fitting end to the insanity.

Live Nation has been run since its spinoff in 2005 from SFX by none other than Michael Rapino. He was a smart, ambitious guy, who approached me after a company presentation at The Loews Hotel in Miami Beach entitled “Revolution” — the presentation was my plan for globalizing live entertainment sponsorship activation at SFX, a plan that the Clear Channel CEO, sitting in the back row, scowling, would kill within months of my presentation. Michael liked my ideas and vision and wanted to work on my team. He probably really wanted my job instead, and as it turned out, he became the king of live entertainment. He was passionate about the live music business then, and his passion has clearly worked wonders for the Live Nation and its stockholders. Today, Live Nation dominates the live music industry, and with its merger with Ticketmaster, has boosted its size and clout. No competitor even comes close to their influence in the live music business. Well done, Mike!

(come back next week when my journey takes an unexpected twist into an unfamiliar industry that will consume my passion for seven years…)

Until then, Let Your Passion Create Your World!

Robert (aka The Passionist)

Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life — Chapter 1- Not A Destination: My Personal Passion-Guided Journey

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Mar 16, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

This is Installment #3 of my serialized eBook, Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  Subscribe below to receive email reminders when new weekly installments are published. Enjoy!

Chapter 1    Not a Destination: My Personal Passion-Guided Journey 

Before I begin to help you find your passion and create your fascinating life around it, let me share the story of the passion-guided journey that led me to write this book.

The idea for the book came to me one morning while I was taking my daily morning walk in the neighborhood where I live near Miami Beach. Every morning that I am home, I walk about four miles in an area known as the Venetian Islands – a narrow string of small residential islands bisecting Biscayne Bay. On this walk each morning, I encounter some of my favorite things in life:

• The Miami Skyline. I am a city person at heart, and although I love nature, I feed off the energy created by the hustle and bustle of urban settings. Miami is a beautiful city (it’s actually called the Magic City, and lives up to its name) with a great skyline that is accentuated by colorful sunrises and sunsets. On these mornings, I literally watch Miami grow, right before my eyes, into one the the world’s leading cosmopolitan hubs, full of commerce, art, food, music and life. Miami also has a vibrant Lifescape that oozes passion (A Lifescape is like a landscape, but colored by people and activity rather than plants and nature. We’ll explore Lifescapes later in the book).

• Water. In all directions, I see on these walks, beautiful blue-green water. Small inlets are everywhere, with boats docked beside beautiful homes, and there are expansive views of Biscayne Bay – which leads out to the Atlantic Ocean – from any one of the multiple bridges connecting the islands. My senses of sight, sound and smell are all activated on these walks, and the yellow orange glow from the sunrise always inspires my passion.

• Nature. Little iguanas, birds of all types, fish (sometimes I see dolphins swimming with such beautiful ease or stingrays leaping four feet out of the bay) and plant life of multiple varieties inhabit my little island chain and the ecosystem it encompasses. I especially like the coconut palms which give my walk the feeling of starting each day on a little tropical vacation. Who is not passionate about vacation?

• Finally, there are people. I see adults of all ages, walking, running, rollerblading, strolling with babies in carriages, walking dogs and skateboarding. Everyone is moving for fun or fitness, or just enjoying a morning moment of contemplation. I see many of the same people everyday and I assume that, as for me, passing across this little stretch of islands each day represents some sort of ritual, a way of easing in or fueling up for the day ahead. Same time, same place, same route, same pace, but somehow always a bit different, a bit special. After these walks, I always feel sharp, energized and ready to take on the world.

As I walked and observed the beauty all around me, I asked myself, “How did I get here?” It was a question born of intense gratitude. I looked around at all the things I love – the water, the city, the trees, the boats, the sunshine and the vibrant life energy of my neighbors – and I thought about my daily life and the fact that I have a job I love in a place I love. I just had to ask my self, with emphatic joy, almost giggling irrepressibly, “How did I get here?”

It was not a rhetorical question. On that morning, I found myself living a life that I’m sure I dreamt about when I was a boy, a life that would have been a more than satisfactory answer to the timeless question every young person is asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”.  Here I was, grown up, doing what I would have wanted to do. “How fortunate am I? How lucky am I?,” I thought that day. And then I asked myself again, this time with curious disbelief, “How DID I get here?” I wanted the answer for myself, of course, but I also wanted to understand the specific influences, attitudes, behaviors, experiences and steps I took throughout my life to get here, so I could help other people get to their near perfect place in life. Then they could help other people on their journeys, and so on. I wanted to help create a Chain of Passion among the lives of people I encountered. I wanted to be a catalyst, creating an incredible Passion Reaction, that would drive people to pursue their unique version of a fascinating life.

The answer to my question was Passion!

Passion? “What kind of simplistic answer is that?”, you ask. “Give me the formula for this success, for this Passion Reaction you talk about. Give me the steps to get to MY happy, inspiring place every morning.” I will.  Almost.  While this book is not a scientific, one-size-fits-all, step-by-step manual, it is a guide that will provide some clarity and direction. It is based on a collection and recollection of my experiences and observations, and my understanding of the path I followed to find and harness my passions.  This process began early in my life, and continues to this day.  While I consciously developed and followed a plan many times, I also have been open to improvising when necessary, always looking for opportunities to fearlessly pursue passions, new and old, at every stage of my life, not always knowing where they would lead.  Following passion requires a bit of faith, but its worth the risk and uncertainty.

A good friend and business colleague, Bruce Turkel (you should read his book, All About Them) and I eat lunch together every other week at one of Miami’s great restaurants. We are both passionate about good food.  Besides enjoyable banter and tasty fare, these lunches provide a frequent opportunity to bounce ideas off each other, and have actually yielded some productive solutions for each of our businesses, as well creating a few new business collaborations. One day, while we were pondering our purposes in life over a dish of perfectly cooked pasta, Bruce looked at me and said, “You know what you are? You’re The Passionist “. I looked at him quizzically and asked him what he meant by that. “You are all about passion and helping people find their passions and giving them the courage, tools and encouragement to pursue them. It oozes out of you. You are The Passionist.”

I had never really thought about what I did in those term before, but I do instinctively try to help people in that way all the time, not because I think I have all the answers, but because I want people to be excited about their lives. Because I am usually so positive and excited about life, and have experienced a variety pursuits for work and pleasure, people often ask me how to pursue a particular activity, dream or burning desire they might have, whether it’s to open a business, become a singer, become a world champion athlete, or even write a book (this is my first!). It must be a calling. So that day, I became The Passionist. Thanks, Bruce.

My whole life then flashed before me as Bruce went on to help me understand my new found purpose. Every dream I have ever pursued, every achievement I have ever attained, every mistake I have ever made, every failure I have ever had and every breath I have ever taken in my life, has been driven and infused by one thing. Passion. Passion has been the theme of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve never pursued anything half-way, and I rarely say, “someday I will do that.” If I want to do something, I find a way to make it happen, make a plan and get to it.

As a young boy, my passion was to be a professional athlete. I played baseball first, and set up tires in my garage to practice pitching into targets. Night and day, I would pitch into those old tires, imagining that I was on the mound for the Boston Red Sox, with the crowd cheering loudly as I wound up and fired away. I could hear the television announcer calling the play-by-play in my head. It was magical and I got pretty good from all that practice, resulting in lots of success playing Little League baseball.  That was my first lesson that practice did indeed pay off, and by age twelve I had a wall of trophies to prove it. It was also when I realized how much fun it was to pursue a passion, although I didn’t think of it in those terms at that age. I was just a kid having fun in life. Too often, we lose that perspective as we age.

I also loved playing ice hockey. I was always around ice rinks as a child because my older sister was a figure skater, so I learned to skate at very young age.  At some point, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to be a baseball player. Maybe I wanted to play hockey for the Boston Bruins like my boyhood idol, Bobby Orr. So my pitching targets in the garage became a hockey goal.  Serendipitously, I would eventually meet Bobby Orr.  It happened after losing a tennis match in Boston when I was seventeen. In a ironic twist, he was actually watching me play that day, and after a hard fought battle against a talented competitor named Peter Palandjian, the son of one of Orr’s Bostonian friends, he came down onto the court to tell me I played a great match. “Chin up,” he said, “there will be other matches. Learn from this one.” I sat slumped on the court, still dazed from my loss.  It happened so fast, it took me a while to realize who had just taken the time to offer some words of encouragement. How cool is life? Always be ready for the unexpected.

I continued to play both baseball and hockey, but as fate would have it, things were about to change in my young life.  My mom took me for my first tennis lesson was I was eleven.  I’m not sure why.  I knew nothing about tennis and never asked to learn how to play.  In fact, I had only seen it played a few times before that first lesson.  I wasn’t that excited about it at the time either, because in my neighborhood, boys played hockey, baseball and basketball (after reaching all of 5’9”, it’s a good thing I didn’t pursue that sport!). But I loved tennis almost immediately. I didn’t really know who the great players were, what the Grand Slam tournaments were or any of the details I knew about baseball and hockey players. I just knew that I liked running and hitting that ball. The sport was fast like hockey and required precise eye-hand coordination like baseball. Unlike hockey, size was less important in tennis.  The sport grabbed me instantly. So much so, that by age twelve, I quit playing my beloved hockey to have more time for tennis.  Now I was left playing and enjoying baseball and tennis, practicing both as often and as diligently as any sports obsessed boy could in a twenty-four hour day.

Then one night, in the summer before I was to enter LaSalle Academy in Providence, Rhode Island, the high school alma mater of my father and two older brothers, my dad called me into the living room after dinner and changed my world again.  He said, “Rob, we need to talk.” Hmmm, was I in trouble? Or…was it time for THAT talk? “Your getting ready to enter high school,” he said, “and baseball and tennis are sports that happen in the same spring season. You need to pick one to focus on. You can’t play both.” Wow, really? I had to choose? I had to give one up? Was I really confronting my first big life decision? At twelve?

I knew my dad was hoping I’d say baseball. I’d been a Little League All-Star and was quite good at second base and hitting home runs, and the LaSalle Academy coach had already expressed interest in having me on the team.  I must have been a mature twelve year-old, because I remember thinking in that moment about my future and how this decision might effect it. Something told me that this might be one of the biggest decisions I would make in my life and, as it turned out, it was. You’ll understand why and how it’s relevant to this book as you read on.

As I sat with my dad, I thought about my family excursions to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox. It was an historic ballpark, a baseball shrine where you could sit all day and watch a double-header, eat hot dogs and feel the presence of baseball legends. People spilled “beah” (that Bostonian for beer) when they got excited and the crowd went crazy when the Red Sox scored. Boston sports fans are passionate, to say the least, and the energy at Fenway was infectious.  I thought about the beautifully manicured turf and what it might be like to actually play on that field one day. I had achieved enough success in baseball by twelve, including pitching a no-hitter and hitting a game-winning grand slam, to believe that I could actually make it happen.

Tennis, on the other hand, was still a new game to me. I had played only a few tournaments, with almost no success. In fact, I got destroyed in my first few tennis matches. I couldn’t even beat my brother consistently, which drove me crazy! He was two years older than me and didn’t play any other sports, but treated tennis like a chess match, calculating each shot with surgical precision. I would just lose it on the court when he beat me. I eventually figured out how to stay calm and beat him, but my matches with him were not my finest moments of either tennis skill or behavior on the court.  Maybe baseball would be a better option.

However, even with my limited success, I was really starting to enjoy competing in tennis tournaments and my passion for the game was growing every day.   I watched Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg on television and went to see a few professional tournaments in person. There was something special about tennis for me. Something about the sound of the ball being struck and the fact that you were out on the court alone, doing battle face-to-face with your opponent. There was something glamorous about the crowds, too, especially back in the 70’s, when tennis was enjoying its first heyday as an international sport. The sport’s great champions of that era were some of the first global sports superstars.  I’m not sure why I noticed all of this at twelve, but I did.

Nobody, except for a few Bostonian expatriates, knew who Carl Yastrzemski or Bill Lee (Red Sox stars) were in Germany or Italy or Brazil , but I was sure they knew Jimmy Connors, who had just won Wimbledon about the time I was pondering my sports future and trying to answer my dad’s question. All of these thoughts passed quickly through my mind, and I looked at my dad straight in the eyes and said calmly, “Tennis. I’ll play tennis.” He paused, looking a little surprised. Then he asked if I was sure, and if I was prepared to work hard to learn a game that I really wasn’t very good at yet, maybe hoping I would change my answer and pick baseball. I told him I would work as hard as it took to become good, great even.  I told him that I would try to get good enough to earn a scholarship to college, and maybe become a pro someday.  So, tennis it was from that day forward. Thankfully, my parents would offer unconditional support and encouragement through all of the unanticipated roller-coaster emotions and outcomes that tennis would create in my life over the next several years.

Tennis became my driving passion, and one that would shape my life and continue to influence its course in many ways. It still does every time I get invited to play in a pro-am or meet some business contact over some club doubles.  I even helped a good friend write a tennis instruction book that became a video series, which I also directed. The sport has just taken me in so many directions and created so many opportunities in my life, even though I was never a big time champion.

It’s important to note here that the pursuit of a passion is not a smooth ride, as I have learned through first hand experience. Often the road is bumpy and rocky, and the journey lonely. Being passionate doesn’t guarantee success, only that you may have a better chance to succeed. Failure is always a possibility staring you coldly in the face. Pursuing a passion forces you to test yourself, to believe when no one else might believe and to persist when you feel like quitting. Sometimes there is little logic in the pursuit of a passion, just a gut feeling that tells you “I am doing the right thing, keep going” even when your own mind and all of your family and friends are telling you that you are crazy. Passion and fear are not friends. Passion and certainty are not friends. Pursuing some passions, such as competing in a sport or starting a business, often requires near-blind faith in yourself.

So why pursue passions? The answer is simple. As humans, we are feeling beings. Our emotions are part of what makes us tick and they cannot be ignored. If you have a burning desire to become a chef and open a cafe, that desire will stay with you, even when you have decided to become a lawyer because your mother told you it would be easier to get a job and less risky than owning a restaurant. You can ignore your passion and suppress it, but every time you step into a kitchen or eat in a restaurant that you think could be better if you were running it, you will be facing the question of why you chose not to take the leap of faith and be the next Julia Child, Emeril or Mario Batali. If it’s truly a passion, it will haunt you.

It’s okay to postpone pursuing your passions. Many people often pursue them after retirement or as second careers or even hobbies. But life is enjoyed most fully when you can make your passion your life’s work, because you will spend most of your waking hours working. Let’s face it, we don’t know when our lives will end. If you put off pursuing your passion today, thinking that you will get to it someday, and that day never comes…well, that is a tragedy that happens all too often. The choice to take that risk is yours.  I choose not to.  I want to live with no regrets, and have for the most part.

The other great thing about following your passion everyday is that it helps you find new passions. Because you are so immersed in what you are doing, and living every moment with such a sense of purpose and awareness, you get better tuned in to yourself and what makes you tick. You reach a point where you only want to spend your time doing things that fully engage you. You lose interest in doing things half way. As passions beget more passions – and truly engaged, fascinating and highly accomplished people enter your life – life ultimately becomes an amazing daily adventure of doing the things you truly love with people you love being around.

I did work hard at tennis, as I promised my dad, and I did get a tennis scholarship to attend the University of Richmond.  I played four years at Richmond, two as team captain and became a nationally ranked player while in college.  After graduation, and still intensely passionate about the game, I began pursuing my goal of becoming a professional tennis player. I did not think that tennis would be my ultimate career, but I wanted to see how far I could get if I really gave it my full attention. I wanted to see if I could get ranked among the top two-hundred tennis players in the world. That was ambitious, but I always liked to dream big.  After all, I had devoted countless hours of my life to playing the sport and had hit probably a million of tennis balls trying to perfect my technique over ten years.  I was, in fact, a good tennis player. Not a great one.  Undeterred, I went off to the satellite tour (the minor, minor league of professional tennis), with whatever money I had saved from teaching lessons and the generous donation I received from my parents in support of my dream.

Professional tennis was hard. There were thousands of great players from all over the world competing for a very few spots in the big time events. Only the top fifty or so players actually make a decent living playing tennis. I was not among them. For me, winning matches was not a very fruitful business venture. In fact, I lost much more than I won, and spent more time hanging around the tournaments practicing than playing matches. But there were ample rewards for my time and effort.  I travelled to places I never would have otherwise visited, stoking my lifelong passion for travel.  I played tournaments in clubs I never would have been invited to join, giving me access to useful contacts.  I practiced and trained my body for several hours a day, fueling the passion I still have today to stay in the best shape possible.  Most importantly, I met remarkable people who would become life-long friends and became part of the global tennis community, in which I am still an active member.  So as it turned out, pursuing my passion for tennis did actually serve an important purpose in my life.  It was just not the one I planned, which was to make it on the big tour.  Sometimes, when you are on a passion-guided life journey, you need to flexible and open to a variety of positive outcomes.  You just never know where life will take you.

During the down time I had at the tournaments, I spent hours in the VIP sponsor tent taking advantage of the free food (I loved FREE food) and making small talk with the sponsors and their guests. Often, I would ask the sponsors why they had spent so much money to have their brands’ associated with tennis tournaments. Having studied communication in college, I was considering going into the then burgeoning field of sports and event marketing after my tennis playing days were over, so these conversations held great interest for me. I also knew the contacts I was making in these corporate tents might be useful to help me get a job one day. So I tried to meet everyone I could at these events.

The answers I received from the sponsors regarding why they were involved in the tournaments were not what I expected. They ranged from a CEO’s wife telling me, “my husband just loves tennis, so he sponsors this event” to, worse, a CEO telling me, “my wife just loves tennis, so I sponsor the event.” Wow, those were the reasons? I expected some in depth business explanation from the sponsors. I was expecting some strategic discussion about how the demographics of tennis fans offered a good opportunity to reach consumers for the company’s products. In today’s data driven marketing world, a calculated business justification would be imperative. But in 1986, it clearly wasn’t. I’m sure the shareholders of these companies would have loved to hear the rational I was given as to why the sponsors were supporting these tennis tournaments.  Who knows, maybe they didn’t think I would have understood the real reasons if they gave them to me.  But knowing what I know now about the business, I doubt it.  It was mostly a boondoggle.

However, my curiosity and passion for marketing was ignited by these conversations, and the more often I had them, the more I was sensing a new career direction. Playing tournaments was fun, but clearly a short-term plan for my life. I was running out of money fast. Maybe I could combine my love of tennis and my interest in marketing to create my next career move?   Finally, after only two-years, I ended my short-lived professional tennis career.  Ironically, I was in Miami (my current home town) when I realized that I had reached the end of my tennis dream. I packed my car with all my belongings and drove for twenty-four hours to my apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. From there, I would take my next step in life.

It turns out my that my little passion-guided detour through the pro tennis world was just what I needed to identify and ignite the passion that would become my primary career for the next few decades: marketing and advertising.

The business of sports marketing was in its early days as I was ending my life as a tennis professional. Sports marketing back in 1987 was a loose term for lawyers cutting sponsorship deals for their famous athlete clients. Most of the deals were based on little more than some arbitrary, perceived endorsement value, proposed by an athlete’s agent, and then justified by a CEO or brand manager hoping to rub elbows with their favorite sports star.  Everybody seemed to believe and trust lawyers back then, and there was a lot of back slapping and deals based more on relationships than business judgement. There was also very little marketing strategy or data behind the sports sponsorship process, just some great selling ability and contact mining that made a few pioneering sports agents (all lawyers, not marketers), like IMG’s late founder Mark McCormack, very rich. Much richer, in fact, than most of their superstar athlete clients.

I initially assumed I would take the conventional route into the sports marketing industry, and interviewed with the leading companies of that time, IMG, Advantage International and ProServ (all these companies have since been gobbled up in mergers by big advertising and entertainment conglomerates, although IMG still trades under its original name).  I was offered a job in event management and sales at Advantage International for a what I felt then was a pittance, but recognize now was a very health starting salary for 1986. But the idea of going to work for a company that was doing exactly the types of sponsorship deals that I felt made no sense for brands did not sit well with me.  It did not ignite my passion.

Some marketing strategy was beginning to creep into the sponsorship game around this time, and a company called International Events Group, or IEG, started publishing a weekly newsletter and hosting an annual conference about sponsorship.  People in the industry, sponsors, event producers and agents, started paying closer attention to why and how companies were spending their sponsorship money. The hunch I had while downing a free sandwich in the sponsors tent the previous year, about sponsorship needing better planning and justification, was correct.  Helping brands make sense of their sponsorship investments was turning into a big business. If I took the job at Advantage International, I wouldn’t really be on the cutting edge of this new thinking.  If I worked for one of the glorified sports agents dressed up as sports marketers, how would I be making things better in the industry by perpetuating the traditional, a la carte menu, sponsorship selling process that sadly still persists to some degree today? My passion was to make sports and event marketing better, not simply go through the motions and make mindless deals to make a good salary. Excellence, not money, was my passion.

My dad gave me this great anonymous quote when I was a teen, and I still have it hanging in my office today:

“Excellence is achieved. It is not stumbled onto in the course of amusing oneself. It is built upon discipline and tenacity of purpose”

I was twenty-four, broke and trying to sort out my life. My dream of being a professional athlete was over. I tried, but it was not meant to be. I wasn’t really upset, because I felt I gave it all I had.  Not one to brood, it was time to move on. I had tenacity of purpose and was ready to put it to use. As luck would have it, so did my lifelong best friend and first business partner, Steven Roberts, who had also just quit bouncing around on the lower tier of the pro tennis tour.

To be fair, tenacious does not even begin to describe Steven Roberts’ personality. When we played tennis as kids, he would come off the court with bloody knees from diving for shots. At fifty-two, he still dives for balls.  He is a passion driven machine who dares to dream big and live big. We even had a mantra growing up. “Think Big. Be Big!” It was our way of reminding ourselves not to limit our ambitions to conquering just the little State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (yes, the smallest state in the U.S has the longest name!) in which we were born and raised, but to go out and conquer the world.  Soon we would have a chance to put our mantra into practice.

…Come back next week for the continuation of Chapter 1.  You’ll learn where this journey led me next and how it relates to helping you find and harness your passion.

Until then, Let Your Passion Create Your World!

Robert (aka The Passionist)

Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life — Preface – Why Passion?

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Mar 10, 2017 | Lessons From The Passionist

(This is installment #2 of Lessons From The Passionist:  How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life.  Enjoy!)

Why Passion?

Why passion? Why is passion a subject important enough for me to spend countless hours writing an entire book about? Because nothing happens without it. Passion creates action. No meaningful endeavor ever got off the ground without someone having and sharing passion. No disease was ever cured without passion. No life changing invention, like the computer or phone on which you are reading this right now, ever came to life without passion. No championship was ever won without passion. Passion is what drives people to do things. Big things. Meaningful things. The things that define and give purpose to life. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” And enthusiasm is a major component of passion.

Why write a book that helps people find and harness their passion? Because in many cases, people have a hard time nailing down exactly what it is that stirs them, that makes them tick and gives their lives a sense of purpose and energy. I meet many young people who are struggling to figure out what to do with their lives. They are paralyzed by indecision or fear, or both. Some people are lucky – their passion finds them. Others are even luckier – their passion not only finds them, but provides an enjoyable career and a substantial income. For those people, and I feel fortunate to be among them, work never really feels like work. For most of my career, I would have done my job for free. That’s how much I’ve enjoyed and gotten real satisfaction from all of my “jobs”.

This book is for people seeking their passion and who have a desire to build their life around it in some way. It’s for all the people who want to fulfill their purpose and maximize their potential, rather than just let the days of their lives just pass on by (and they will pass in the blink of an eye if we let them) without yielding any sustainable, lasting satisfaction. It’s for the people who don’t want to waste a single one of their roughly 29,200 days on earth (that’s how many days we get if we live to be eighty years-old). Because even the best education and all the talent and skill in the world will not yield much in the way of life fulfillment if not combined with the enthusiasm and drive created by passion.

Passion is the essence of life. Without passion, life is just a sequence of days that begins at our birth and ends at our death. How effectively we capitalize of the days we are alive – how much satisfaction we gain, how many emotions we experience, how many sunsets we appreciate, how many meals we savor during our lifetime, how many people we embrace with joy -ultimately depends on our level of passion.

U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, a leader full of passion, is famous for a quote that is a testament to passion’s importance in people’s lives

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Wow, strong language. Teddy didn’t mince words. “His place will never be with those cold and timid souls…” – who wants to hang out with those people? Passionate people live in the arena. The arena of life. And they infect all other people with whom they cross paths with their passion. Wouldn’t it be great to be one of those people?

Our ability to touch other people’s lives in meaningful ways is dependent on passion. People feed off each other’s energy, and people with passion give off an amazing energy that lifts everyone around them, and inspires other people to activate their own passion. I call this the “chain of passion”. Imagine a world full of people building a chain of passion. What great things we would achieve, what problems we would solve and what joy we would all experience.
Unfortunately, very few people know how to harness their own passion, let alone unleash it in others. This book was written to help people navigate the road to finding, developing, harnessing and sharing their passion with the world.

I have numerous passions that I have actively pursued for most of my life. I love sports, business, travel, food, learning, beaches, wine, rum, exercise, people, yoga, fashion, cars, art, philosophy…it’s a big list that has grown over time. These are not just passing interests. All of my passions have been an integral part of my life and/or business in some way for decades. They have contributed to a fascinating life journey I share with everyone I meet in some way.

I describe my life as “purposely never dull,” and have tried to live a life perhaps best described in the words of Rudyard Kipling in his famous poem If (a copy of which I was given by my father as a young boy).

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’
But make allowance for their doubting, too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies.
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise;
If you can dream and not make dreams your master,
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet triumph and disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone…
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a man*
my son!

(*and “woman”, for my female readers)

These powerful words Kipling wrote are about a life filled with and fueled by passion. I’ve been driven by passion ever since I can remember. People ask me all the time, “Were you born like that?” For most of my adult life, I have wondered the same thing. What made me, and other people like me, this way? So, I decided to add another passion to my list: writing this book. It’s an exploration and dissection of passion, and an effort to help other people figure out how to harness its power in their own lives. Buckle up. While you can’t beat a passion fueled life, expect a few bumps along the way.

Special thanks to all the people who have taught me and tolerated me over the years. I hope I have given you as much as you have given me. This book is dedicated to you.

Let passion create your world!

Robert