Passion Is The Most Beautiful Renewable Energy

The relationship between passion and excellence is not what we usually think.

Michael Jordan had an extraordinary clause in his contract with the Chicago Bulls: Called the “love of the game” clause, it allowed him to play basketball anywhere, anytime, including in pickup games on the street, despite the risk of being injured by a neighborhood player thrilled at the chance to face the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time). If he had been injured while playing amateur basketball, his contract and salary would still have been guaranteed.

“His Airness” thus perfectly embodies the etymology of the word “amateur,” which comes from the Latin amare, meaning to love. Originally, an amateur was someone who practiced an activity out of love for it – not for money.

The clause in Michael Jordan’s contract stemmed from his belief that you can only become the best if you deeply love what you do and practice it constantly. He believed he improved not only in professional practices and games, but also by playing purely for pleasure, without constraints.

Yet many organizations approach passion and excellence in the reverse order of “MJ”: They seek performance before motivation. In reality, the best often work harder and better than others precisely because they love what they do more. In fact, I concluded my first book by writing that “passion is the most beautiful form of renewable energy.” Michael Jordan demonstrates exactly that. There is no greater motivation than loving one’s craft.

For managers, the challenge is therefore to create the conditions that make people want to give their very best. Naturally, their ability to do so depends largely on the nature of the roles held by the members of their teams.

The second lesson from Michael Jordan’s contract is that, as in love, trust is proven through actions. The Chicago Bulls granted their star a freedom whose consequences could have cost them tens of millions of dollars. Every manager, at their own level, can also grant their team members trust, expressed in different ways depending on the role and the context in which it is exercised.

Nurturing the passion of one’s teams goes hand in hand with building mutual trust: Trust must be given before it is received. Indeed, motivation cannot be decreed; it must be earned. And in this domain, as in many others, managers must be willing to take risks. It is no coincidence that we speak of “unlocking” potential.

In the corporate world, one company embodied this philosophy of motivation through passion and trust: Google long encouraged its engineers to spend 20% of their time on personal projects that could benefit the Company. Over time, this practice faded, but it demonstrated that a company can achieve more by unleashing passion than by trying to optimize every minute of work. Indeed, AdSense, Gmail, Google News, and Google Transit (a precursor to Google Maps) were initially developed during that personal time by company employees.

As Michael Jordan understood, trust precedes performance.