“What are you deeply passionate about?” is a question from Jim Collins’s Good to Great. It is part of discovering your company’s Hedgehog Concept.
To find my own Hedgehog Concept, I asked myself the same question. My top five passions are:
My first job was selling pagers at the mall. Ever since then, I’ve loved the idea of having information and functionality at my fingertips wherever I go.
Selling pagers at the mall involved a lot of teaching and explaining what a pager was and why it would be useful to someone who wasn’t a doctor or a drug dealer.
One of the things that convinced me that pagers were cool was when a family friend (and my future boss) showed me that pager signals went out over radio waves just like FM broadcast radio and the TV signal from station U62 in Weird Al’s movie, UHF . As soon as I got the job, I got a police scanner and started listening to everything I could find. Accessing signals and protecting communications have been on my mind ever since.
When I was young I expected to be a graphic designer like my dad. I loved the creative atmosphere when I would go visit him at work. Photography is a great way to use technology to help me express myself and create.
I’m terrified of spending a winter night freezing, out on the streets. Everyone should have access to affordable housing.
I have lots of other passions and interests. My top five may change in the future. But right now, those are the things that excite me.
And now that I have those answers, I’ll go on to discover my answers to the other Hedgehog questions:
That’s a scary question! (Why is ambition frightening?)
Right now my economic engine is entirely driven by the salary from my day job.
A separate question from finding my hedgehog is whether my economic engine needs to change.)