Launch Your Dream: A 30-Day Plan for Turning Your Passion into Your Profession

By Dale Partridge

Though his highly acclaimed Startup Camp program, bestselling author and serial entrepreneur Dale Partridge has helped thousands of people find unimaginable freedom and financial success by assisting them in launching new startup businesses. And now, in Launch Your Dream, he has distilled the essence of that course into a hyper-practical, 30-day journey for readers looking to join these other entrepreneurs in following their dreams and achieving unimaginable freedom and financial security. This invaluable and comprehensive resource will teach readers how to:• Hone their ideas• Build an audience• Construct an online presence• Master social media• Craft a beautiful brand• Create experiences that keep customers from even considering competitors• And does this in 30 days!Whether you are an experienced CEO, a budding entrepreneur, a stay-at-home mom, or a freelancer just looking to make some money on the side, Launch Your Dream provides the easy-to-follow steps necessary to finding the freedom you’ve been looking for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: May 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780718093426

Dale Partridge

Dale Partridge is the founder and editor in chief of UnlearnChurch.org, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and biblical house-church planter. With over 500,000 followers on social media and 500,000 monthly readers of his blog, Dale is a provocative influencer on the topics of church, family, manhood, and marriage. He is a trusted advisor to a variety of Christian publications and his work has been featured on Fox News, NBC, Christianity Today, Today, Good Morning America, Faithwire.com, and Huffington Post. Dale and his wife reside with their three children on their farm in Central Oregon.  

Book preview

Get Ready

DAY 1

Primed with Passion

Estimated Reading Time: 8 Minutes

The idea that you should do what you’re passionate about is so common in modern business literature that it has become almost annoying. Yet most of us still recognize it as true. Sure, working with passion is a first-world luxury—a subsistence farmer in a developing nation tills his land to survive whether he is passionate about it or not—but that doesn’t dilute its truthfulness for us. Your life’s profession should be derived from your deepest passions. This is why the first step in becoming an entrepreneur is to define passion and then locate yours.

The modern West has romanticized the word passion. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as a strong feeling of enthusiasm for something or about doing something; we typically use it to describe only things that we experience positively. We think of passions as those things that excite you or put a twinkle in your eyes or a bounce in your step. We may have a strong emotion about child abuse, but we wouldn’t say we are passionate about it. Yet, even while we’ve romanticized this word, we’ve also diluted it. We claim to be passionate about dark chocolate and ultimate Frisbee while at the same time declaring ourselves passionate about parenting our children.

I, too, had an incomplete understanding of the word passion, until I decided to research its meaning and history. What I discovered surprised me. The English word passion derives from the Latin passio, which means suffering. Even one of the predominant Greek precursors for passion is linked with suffering. The word was first popularized in English in the twelfth century to describe Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. This is why Mel Gibson’s 2004 epic film about Jesus’ execution was titled The Passion of the Christ. Even the passionflower was so named because its corona resembles the crown of thorns.

This doesn’t mean that our passions should make us miserable or lead to our early demise. But it does challenge the candy-coated definitions many of us have come to accept. Our passions involve the things we love, but they are also much more than that. Passions are those things that we love so much we are willing to suffer for them. It’s an experience to be coupled with words like pain, preparation, readiness, submission, and loyalty.

It’s important to remember that passion is not suffering for suffering’s sake. It’s suffering for the sake of something we love. Why does this matter? Because if passion is just what makes you happy, you’ll quit doing it when it becomes too tough or too risky, when you’re abandoned or mocked. If you don’t care about something enough to endure pain, it is probably not worth pursuing.

So what do you love so much that you’re willing to do it even if it hurts you? Even if it kills you? This is the foundation of your life’s work. This is the heartbeat of your calling. This is the soil from which your start-up grows.

It’s one thing to suffer for the sake of suffering, but an entirely different thing to suffer for the sake of a vision. The former makes you a victim while the latter makes you a victor. Entrepreneurs must be willing to discover—and pay a price—to uncover their life’s most passionate mission.

Steve Jobs hated the PC. Not just the computer, but the entire way of thinking it represented. He once said, If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Age for about twenty years.¹ In an interview in 2003, Jobs used words like wretched and anguish in describing the phone industry. Steve needed problems to fight. He needed something to suffer for. This passion spurred his most brilliant

Reviews for Launch Your Dream

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Serial entrepreneur and bestselling author Dale Partrigde is also the founder of StartupCamp.com that provides consulting services to startups. A condensed version of the online programs offered is published as Launch Your Dream: A 30-Day Plan for Turning Your Passion into Your Profession. Vice versa is the book a repetitive invitation to subscribe to StartupCamp.The author happens to be a Christian as well, his book notably published through Thomas Nelson Publishing, and reviewers asked among the Christian bloggers at Booklookbloggers. Occasional references to God as if the six figure income now granted to the self-made businessman is His blessing, and therefore (un)intentionally setting the example for his readers, regardless their religion (Mammon, Christian, Jewish, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.).Put aside these comments, you're left with a 200 pages book on preparation, launching, and growing your own business. Topics like mission and vision statement, marketing, competitor analysis, finance, legal stuff, social media influence, as well as leadership are addressed in short chapters. Each ends up with a proverb or short blurb to remember (and to post on Twitter), a question, a conviction to believe in, and a call to action.Costless success doesn't exist. Despite the many lifehacks and business advice thatCostless success doesn't exist. Despite the many lifehacks and business advice that was given, very few of the readers will actually start living out their dream. And that's exactly the business model of consultants, just like the illustration of the local gym used in this introduction to sales, management, and product development.