Fire in Your Belly: Calling vs. Job by Gary North

"Doubt is the great corrupter of callings. Doubt is legitimate when we are talking about a job."

Fire in Your Belly: Calling vs. Job
by Gary North at Specific Answers
February 15, 2013

If you do not have fire in your belly, you should not expect to achieve anything significant.

I know this sounds harsh, but I have found it to be true over half a century. A person who does not have a blazing fire in his belly to achieve something is not going to achieve very much.

If a project is significant, most of the people that an innovator counsels with will tell him that it cannot work. My favorite personal example of this is from Otto Scott. Scott and a couple of other men came up with an idea which has in fact revolutionized all retailing. They invented the idea of the credit card. They went to a specialized expert in marketing, who told them that it could not work. So, they dropped the idea. Diners Club picked it up, and the rest is history.

Scott got an idea for a series of books that was based on that experience. He wrote a three-volume set which he called the Sacred Fools. They were biographies of King James I, Robespierre, and John Brown. He never completed his fourth volume, which was a study of Woodrow Wilson. All of these men were in fact sacred fools. Scott was convinced that the experts really are not that wise.

An expert can tell you why something did not work in the past, but he is almost always incapable of telling you what is going to work in the future. He is looking to the past. He has his experiences from the past. He can tell you what he started in the past that did not work. He can also tell you what worked, but that by now has been imitated and absorbed in the general marketplace.

Here is the basic rule. If an expert tells you that something can be done, it probably can be. But if he tells you that something cannot be done, he is almost certainly wrong. He will throw cold water on a project that really should be attempted. It is a question of "not invented here." He assumes that if he did not invent it, it cannot work.

Committees are very good for warning you about pitfalls of specific plans. A committee is a combination of people's experience. They can tell you what to look out for. But they are almost always useless in telling you what you ought to do. A committee is not going to come up with a brilliant new idea that is going to change the world. In all likelihood, the committee is going to tell you that the idea that you came up with, which really might change the world, will not work.

If you have an idea about what needs to be done, then you need to pursue it. You may not want to pursue it, but you need to pursue it. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing by you. If no one else is doing it, then either it cannot be done or else no one else sees the opportunity. It does no good to ask an expert, because he is going to be on the side of those who tell you that it cannot be done. That is because he did not do it. He did not think about doing it.

If something is your calling, you must commit to it wholeheartedly. If something is the most important thing that you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace, you need to get busy, and you need to stick to your knitting. You need to pursue it without stepping to the right or to the left.

If you have fire in your belly, you can put it out in two ways. First, you can pursue your vision, and the fire will finally go out. Your pursuit will become routine. Second, you can forget about it, and the fire will go out. But if you take a halfway position, never knowing whether you should pursue it or not, or pursuing it halfheartedly, the fire is not going to go out. You are not going to get the vision consummated. This will nag at you for the rest your life.

My opinion is that you must begin to estimate the costs of the project. When you count the costs, either the fire goes out or does not. If it does not go out, then it is your responsibility to pursue the matter. That is because nobody else is likely to pursue it. If it is worth doing, it is likely that you are the only one to do it. Anyway, you are the only one that you know of who is likely to do it. You have to go by what is familiar in your own experience. You cannot second-guess the whole world.

If you do not think you can do it better than anybody else, do not do it. You can do a job on this basis, but you should not pursue your calling on this basis. If you are not the best person for the calling, then do not commit to it. Commit to something else.

People come to me wanting advice about whether they should do this or that. If it is a job, I am happy to help. If it is a calling, I am not happy to offer advice. Anyone who goes to another person to ask whether or not he should begin a calling is making a terrible mistake. The other person is not equipped to answer the question accurately. It is not a fire in his belly.

People who are insecure should not start major projects. People who have doubts should not start major projects.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are people with fire in their bellies. They are people who are convinced that a particular pathway is the best thing that they can do. They are not filled with doubt. Doubt is the great corrupter of callings. Doubt is legitimate when we are talking about a job. There are alternatives to this job or that job. But when it comes to a calling, an individual very rarely has alternatives. Maybe he does, and maybe it is a question of whether he should pursue one rather than another. He has fire in his belly for both of them. Then he probably should consult with somebody, not telling them what he ought to do, but telling him which fire he should pour water on.

There are not many innovators. There are not many people who have fire in their bellies regarding a particular calling. I wish this were not the case, but I think it is the case. Not many people have the sense that something of great importance hangs on their decision. They do not believe that anything they do, or fail to do, will make much difference for the world around them. So, they do not have fire in the belly.

I do not know of any technique which can be used to light a fire in your belly. I think those fires are self-generated by something outside: an unplanned perception of what needs to be done. I do know this, however: if you have a fire in your belly about something that you believe is crucial, not just for yourself but for the world around you, you had better give very careful attention to counting the cost of pursuing this calling. You need to put out the fire. You either need to pursue the vision, or you need to abandon entirely. Anything in between will not solve your problem.