Paul Angone spent years trying to get publishers to return his calls and emails. When they did respond, they said they weren’t interested in getting his ideas published. It was tempting for Paul to call himself a failure.
Now a bestselling author, Paul explains that God had given him a passion for his message that he just couldn’t let go.
“I had other dreams or other things I thought I might do, but when challenges came, I would quit. But this message became something I couldn’t not do. There was just too much of me ingrained in this. There was too much of my story ingrained in helping people with their story in this.”
“That becomes a powerful place for anybody to operate from. Honestly this is a byproduct in many cases of you having to work through a lot of pain and frustration in a certain area in your life. Because you know what that’s like when you have that extra dose of motivation, of perseverance to help people who are going through something similar.”
Paul’s experience leads him to a conclusion that first sounds surprising, but quickly turns profound.
“So when a millennial will ask me, ‘How do I find my passion?’ I’ll say, you have to fail at something! Fail repeatedly! Like me, where I couldn’t get a publisher to return an e-mail, and then when they finally did they said please don’t call again.”
“But if you keep doing it, it becomes something you cannot not do. So that’s what I found. It’s not that there’s anything special about me in that sense. It just meant so much to me because I knew what it was like to go through it. So sometimes our pain and our biggest problems are actually kind of our signature sauce to unlock our passion and purpose. I don’t know if we think about it that way all the time.”
Paul Angone is a bestselling author, nationally in demand speaker, and millennial advocate. His latest book is called .
On the Road with Paul Angone
