Over the weekend, I saw this new ad for Zoho software suite.

I thought I had completely rid myself of video ads (except for those annoying ones that you can't skip on Youtube) ever since I restricted my TV viewing to live football matches. But apparently not. Theatres have started showing ads to all sorts of things before the movie begins, and then again during the interval.

Usually, when I watch an ad, I end up thinking to myself, "What were they smoking when they decided to make this?" But the Zoho ad got me thinking of something else.

The ad features a man who loves to cook and churn out new recipes. He decides to follow his passion and start a restaurant where he's the chef and the owner. Slowly, customers begin to dine there and pretty soon, the competitors have run out of business and he has queues of people waiting to eat at his restaurant. So, he expands and hires more chefs and becomes a full time owner and manager dealing with the financials and the logistics and so on. This leaves him no time for cooking and creating new recipes. He gets frustrated as more and more administrative work piles up on his desk. They actually show him pulling out his hair. And then, in comes Zoho to the rescue. They introduce their software suite that includes CRM, ERP, etc that makes all the administrative work simple and outsource-able and reclaims our protagonist's time which he again goes back to spending on cooking and creating recipes, i.e. doing what he loves.

Following your passion, be it starting a restaurant like in the ad, or a person, or writing a book, or making a music album, requires work. Especially if it is a person, it requires work. And fortunately or unfortunately, Zoho can't always come to the rescue.

It is easy to think that if love requires work, it wasn't meant to be and to part ways. It is easy to give up on the dream of being a writer when you approach ten publishers and they all turn down your script. It is easy to give up on being an entrepreneur the moment a few VCs decline to invest in your idea.

It is easy to give up on your passion and it is easy to give up on love when things get a little tough and raise your hands and conclude that it just wasn't meant to be.

Maybe it isn't 'they lived happily ever after' that is the ideal, but 'they worked at it happily ever after'.