Chase Your Passion — But Build Around Your Strengths

Jun 7
3 min read

By Amy Wald

For most of my life, I believed passion would eventually lead me to my purpose.

In many ways, it did. But it took seven years of entrepreneurship for me to understand something I wish someone had told me earlier: passion alone is not always enough. Passion is the fuel, but your strengths are the engine. When the two finally work together, that is when momentum starts to feel less like a fight and more like alignment.

The only things that ever lit me up enough to stay committed were animals, nature, and the fire I felt through travel. I worked on cruise ships, saw extraordinary places, and also saw the tension between the beauty of travel and the impact it can leave behind. That tension stayed with me.

After years of searching for the right path, I went back to school to study sustainable business. Shortly after, I began researching the hospitality industry to better understand which hotels were not just using sustainability as marketing language, but actively protecting the places, ecosystems, cultures, and communities that made them worth visiting in the first place.

In 2019, I founded Greenluxe.

At the time, I thought the business had to look a certain way. I built it as a sustainability consulting company because I believed that was the most direct way to help hotels become more responsible. And while I deeply cared about the work, I often felt like I was forcing a square peg into a round hole.

I was passionate, yes. But spreadsheets, data, audits, and technical reporting were not where I felt most alive. Still, I kept going because I believed I had something to prove.

Seven years later, I finally allowed myself to ask a better question: Where am I actually most useful?

The answer was not in abandoning sustainability. It was in communicating it differently.

I realized the market did not just need more sustainability checklists. It needed better storytelling. Hotels, destinations, and travel brands were doing meaningful work that guests often never saw, understood, or felt emotionally connected to. At the same time, travelers were increasingly looking for places with soul, stewardship, and a deeper sense of meaning.

That is where Greenluxe began to evolve.

Today, Greenluxe is a media and storytelling platform focused on sustainable luxury hospitality. Through editorial content, podcast conversations, cinematic video, and strategic storytelling, I help bring visibility to the hotels, destinations, and brands shaping a more responsible future of travel.

And for the first time, I feel at home in my work.

I now understand that the years I spent learning the operational side of sustainability were not wasted. They gave me the credibility to ask better questions, spot real substance, and avoid the greenwashing trap. My background in hospitality gave me empathy for the realities of the industry. My love of travel gave me the emotional lens. And my experience in media, speaking, and being on camera gave me the vehicle to bring those stories to life.

That combination became my edge.