Juggling Your Passions Within Your Work

Running a business is tough work, startups even more so, social business startups more so still. Juggling the various aspects can take you from dark lows to euphoric highs within the same day. As Winston Churchill put it, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” But startup teams, particularly in the social space, who embody an agile startup mentality have something that keeps them going, a secret sauce…

Several years ago I came across a viral video of comedian/juggler Chris Bliss performing to a live studio audience. He simply walked out and without a word began juggling, to a mashup soundtrack of Beatles' tracks from the eponymous “Abbey Road” Check it out here (note: you may have to click the link within the video to play it on the YouTube site)…

OK, if you aren’t amazed, what I’m about to say in this post won’t make a lot of sense. In fact, you’ll downright disagree, which is exactly what a niche group of hard core jugglers did. After this video went viral, “serious” jugglers around the world scoffed at his performance, picking apart his technique, his approach and his lack of juggling ability.

One such juggler went so far as to copy the routine, but doubled down on the tricks, making it technically perfect and much more complex – demonstrating that he was by far the better juggler. See his video entitled "Chris Bliss Diss Video":

Comedians and jugglers share a common history, that of the jongleur. Think of them as the traveling minstrels, or for those who are familiar with Shakespeare, the Fool who “advises” the King. Their role went way beyond performance – it involved performance art, satire, observation and advice to nobility way above their pay grade.

Back to Chris Bliss: Keep in mind that he is a comedian first & foremost, who happens to juggle. He is not a juggler who tells the odd joke.

What Chris did was share an admirable level of skill (lets face it, most of us can’t even juggle three balls, despite all our college drinking game efforts), to a soundtrack that was delightfully familiar, mashed up in a slightly new way, in order to entertain and open our minds to beauty. the secret sauce of this audio-visual-performance mashup?

Creative passion.

Passion is what sets this performance apart. My wonderful old boss at Credit Suisse used to quote Voltaire to me (on a good day), saying: "the perfect is the enemy of the good." this is a wonderful example. Chris Bliss' technical offering is adequate - its "good enough" because frankly, it doesn’t need to be any better to achieve the desired result. It is an honest and passionate approach to his craft. He did not say a word, but I wager that a very low percentage of viewers in that audience were not deeply moved by his creative statement. The viral views on You Tube alone are now over 1.2million – that says a lot.

I’m not going to wax lyrical about how that applies to social businesses, communications or business models that serve the poor. I will say that at Resdida, we work to be effective, not perfect, and we do so with a creative passion that I thoroughly enjoy. I think John, Paul, George & Ringo have expressed this approach far more eloquently at the end of the song…“and in the end… the love you take… is equal to the love you make."

So, how's your juggling?