***Let Passion Transform Your Life

Money is great. Yet if you study the lives of very wealthy people, you will discover that very few of them started out saying, “My goal is to get rich.” Almost without exception, they were driven by a personal passion that was so strong, money followed as an afterthought.

Consider Tom Chappell, the founder of Tom’s of Maine. His toothpaste, mouthwash, and other natural products are in more and more stores these days, from Wal-Mart to the corner drugstore. Chappell founded his company in 1970. He still owns it today, and he has been extremely successful in his life. His 2004 sales totaled $40 million. That’s not exactly Procter & Gamble territory, but it’s significant for a man who still operates his company from one building in Kennebunk, Maine.

Chappell was a member of the Woodstock generation, an environmentalist and natural-foods fan. Back in 1970, his first product was a non-polluting laundry detergent. While that product was flopping, Chappell introduced a hastily concocted natural toothpaste and a mouthwash. When those products started selling briskly at health food stores, Chappell’s passion kicked in. His toothpaste embodied his values. It was being snapped up by a small but well-defined group of health-conscious consumers. So why stop there? Why not get a tube of his natural toothpaste into every home in America?

Over the years, that passion transformed Chappell into one of today’s most innovative marketers. In fact, his marketing concepts work so well that they have been adopted by major corporations. Chappell puts kiosks of his products in unlikely places in stores, for example. What is a toothpaste display doing in the middle of the produce section in a food store? Shoppers don’t understand, but they buy. According to retail analysts, his strategy can boost the sales of most products by as much as 65 percent. A passionate toothpaste maker thought it up, and now people are paying attention. Passion transformed Chappell from a granola guy into a mega-marketer.

Consider, too, the passionate life of cosmetics magnate, Estee Lauder. Her real name was Josephine Mentzer. When she was a teenager, she whipped up her first batch of skin cream in a sink in the family apartment above her father’s hardware store in Corona, Queens.

Lauder started giving away samples of her creams at parties. People liked her products and started to buy from her. So, she visited every department store in New York until one, Saks Fifth Avenue, gave her counter space where she could sell her products.

That was in 1948. In the decades that followed, she built a company that, in some years, sold 45 percent of all the cosmetics in America and exceeded $3 billion in sales. Phenomenal success.

Her achievements were built on two passions: first, a commitment to high quality; second, fanatical supervision of the way her products were sold. When any department store began to sell her products, Lauder showed up and personally trained her salespeople. She did that in Dallas and Paris. When the GUM state department store in Moscow started to sell her products, Lauder showed up on the first day, too, and taught salespeople how to pitch her wares. The Iron Curtain couldn’t stop her--nothing could.

Chapell and Lauder could not be more different. One is a New England Yankee and the other was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Yet they were both transformed by the passion that brings ultimate success.

Let’s remember how lucky we are to live in a country that rewards ambition. Couple that ambition with passion and watch what happens. One day the world will be reading about your success in the pages of glossy magazines.