Camille, thank you for your comment to my “Family Influence” post. You touch on something that has always been important to me, and I tried to include that message in the book: being a businessman is no different from any other worthy calling. To do anything right we need to have passion. A good teacher has passion. A good cleric has passion. A good entrepreneur has passion. That passion provides us with the deepest energy to persist, overcome, create, touch. And to be able to channel our passion properly we need to have a level of self-awareness, which in my case was aided by my practice of meditation. You are a dance teacher and a journalist. I have seen some of your work. It comes from a deep place within you, and that is what makes it powerful and, very importantly, enables you to reach people.
Passion and meditation
Published by ricardolevy
RICARDO B. LEVY is an executive and entrepreneur whose career spans more than three decades of founding and building successful businesses. Born and raised in South America to a European immigrant family, he completed engineering studies in the United States at Stanford and Princeton before returning to South America to run a family business. In 1969 he sold the business and returned to the United States to complete his PhD at Stanford in the field of catalytic chemistry. In 1974, after a number of years in the petroleum and petrochemical industry, he cofounded his first entrepreneurial venture, Catalytica, a research and development firm serving the chemical, pharmaceutical, and clean energy industries. The firm’s discoveries resulted in more than one hundred patents and led to the formation of three companies, one of which became, under Levy’s leadership, the largest supplier to the pharmaceutical industry in North America. Dr. Levy currently serves on public and private corporate boards of directors and the advisory board of the Santa Clara University Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, a global incubator of social entrepreneurs. He is a lecturer at the Stanford University Chemical Engineering Department, where he teaches a course on entrepreneurship and new venture creation. Throughout his life, Dr. Levy has pursued a keen interest in spirituality and personal growth and has continually applied his diverse studies to his roles as a business leader, mentor and teacher. View all posts by ricardolevy
Ricardo Levy 
You are so right, Ricardo. And I might add that passion is in the mind and heart , but also in the external qualities we look for in our leaders such as their body language and their voices. You can’t fake passion.