John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, tweeted back in 2022, and it surfaced again recently when I was reading a piece by Tyler Hogge on the role of intensity in building exceptional businesses.
The tweet:
“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”
The world is a museum of passion projects.
Every building. Every business. Every book on every shelf. Every podcast. Every product. Every restaurant you walk past. Every brand that has ever made you feel something.
A museum of passion projects.
The intensity, the creativity, the inspiration, the perspiration of incredibly capable people brought to life. And most of the time, we walk straight past it without registering what it took to get there.
Tyler’s piece is over a year old now and still it feels more relevant than ever. His argument is that intensity is the single most important trait of the people who actually build things. Not intelligence. Not charisma. Not positivity. Intensity.
His framing, lifted from Frank Slootman, Raise the quality bar. Increase the speed. Narrow the focus. Do all three at intense levels, and you build something that matters.
Most people care about quality, but not intensely. Most people want to move faster, but not intensely. Most people know focus matters, but they do not focus intensely.
Warren Buffett summed it up in five words – “Intensity is the price of excellence.”
And the thing about intensity is it is not a separate trait. It is the layer that runs through everything else. The multiplier. It is not a thing you do on top of your work. It is a way you do all of your work.
Intensity also disappears quietly. Most of the time, the loss is not dramatic. It is a slow fade. The early-business fire of doing whatever it took, replaced over time by the polite, professional, comfortable rhythm of “yes, I do this kind of work.” Same hours. Same effort. Nothing like the same fire underneath.
I see this everywhere right now.
The headlines are loud. The market is harder. Small business is under the pump. And the temptation to retreat into being sensible, being prudent, being quiet, is real.
And yet, some of us see all of this as opportunity. Some of us are leaning in harder, not pulling back. Some of us are looking at the noise and choosing to raise the quality bar, increase the speed, narrow the focus, and move with more intensity than the people around us.
The difference is rarely about ability. The difference is the connection to why.
So take a moment to think about where intensity has quietly disappeared in your business. Quality you have stopped pushing because the current standard is “good enough.” Speed you have slowed down because you got tired of pace. Focus that has widened because saying no got harder than saying yes.
I had a conversation with a client recently. She was procrastinating on a piece of work. Questioning minor details. Looping in her own head about pricing, positioning, the small mechanics of something she had built brilliantly.
I asked her a different question.
I asked her why she does the work.
She paused.
I told her she had permission to rant.
And what came out of her was extraordinary.
She didn’t want a world where her daughter would be underpaid for the same work she does. She wanted brilliant women to stay in tech instead of being quietly forced out. She wanted her daughter to grow up knowing that her mum had spent her career actively building the level playing field that her generation deserved.
She started crying.
I told her: this is what we are working with. Not the pricing. Not the deck. This. Find a way to tap back into this every single time you sit down to make a decision in your business. This is the intensity. This is what makes the rest of it work. Your passion is not something to leave on a shelf in the Museum of Passion that no one ever walks into. It is the centre of the room. It is the exhibit everyone stops to look at. It is the focus.
It is the same for me.
Everything I do is about unleashing the brilliance in women. Building their authority without apology. Helping them activate demand, command higher fees, attract better clients, and refuse to be the world’s best kept secret. Helping them commercialise what they know and turn expertise into equity.
When women own their authority, the ripple is enormous.
They win – in confidence and conviction, in doing the work they love and being the impact they want.
Their clients win. Their teams win. Their families win. Their communities win. The next generation of women coming through win.
That is not a side project for me. That is the layer that runs through everything I build.
If you can’t remember the last time you felt that fire about your own work, you have probably let your why drift.
The fix is not a new strategy. The fix is to go back to the why.
Take five minutes this week and ask yourself, why are you doing the work you are doing?
Not the version you write on your website. The version that makes you cry when you actually say it out loud.
When you can name it – in your own voice, with your own breath, with your own conviction – it changes how you show up. How you price. How you sell. How you decide.
The world is a museum of passion projects..
The world is a museum of passion projects. Make sure yours is on display – not gathering dust on a shelf no one walks past.
Janine x