I was having a long call with Andy Warren (blog | Twitter), fellow founder of SQLServerCentral and SQL Saturday. We were talking about a few things that could be done differently with SQL Saturday and getting a little passionate about it. I stopped in the middle and thought for a minute, why am I so worried about this?

I think the answer lives in Motivation 3.0, an idea put forth by a few people, but something I heard about from Dan Pink in his book Drive.

We have things that we believe in, that we see as worth doing, and regardless of the compensation, we drift towards them and become much more focused when working on them.

SQL Saturday, PASS, the entire SQL Server Community has somewhat become that for me. I’m driven to spend time trying to make it better, not because it makes me money, but because I believe in it.

I want SQL Saturdays to be successful. I want them to train people to better use SQL Server. I want speakers to be proud of their efforts to help people. I want PASS to mean something to people’s careers, and help them. I want people to enjoy working with SQL Server, and use it to solve problems.

It’s a bit of a strange feeling for someone that has typically been a capitalist, and looked to be more profitable in my endeavors each year. One of my concerns over SQL Saturday initially was the lack of a way to monetize the time spent on it by Andy.

Now I find myself, happily, in the same boat.