Don't Chase Your Passion - Do This Instead

Key Takeaways

They say follow your passion, but how? How do you actually do that? Like what would you guys actually do if you could go back? So that's what I wanted to talk about. Why I think that follow your passion is terrible advice and what you should do instead. What a lot of us do is we mistake what what is familiar for what actually lights us up. And so even if you I I had this idea of like you want to do something, you don't really even know where to look and you feel like and while you are searching it often can feel like you're lost. And so you even though you're supposed to be searching, you feel like you're lost during it which feels like you're doing something wrong. And so um what do you do instead? All right, so he has this bliss and blisters concept. Basically bliss is not meant to be just like pure joy. It's not meant to be just like uh euphoria. What he means by bliss is basically what are you enthusiastic about doing? So using enthusiasm as your guide. So this is his criteria. So he said naturally naturally drawn drawn to it, it's of interest. You feel alive when you're doing it. It's often irrational and you will lose track of time when you find yourself doing it. And you'll do it in your off hours. So you'll do it even you'll do it during the hours when you're normally seeking kind of like uh pleasure, relaxation, um you know, just sort of an indulgence in yourself. But the stuff you find yourself doing there that others would see as work is an important signal. And then so he he started talking about this and people took it the wrong way in his opinion. He's like, I said this thing about follow your bliss and then everybody just looked for something that just made them happy, pleasurable all the time, instantaneously. He goes, "Oh man, I've made a mistake. It's not that at all." He he said he kind of offhandedly, it's attributed to him that he said, "I wish I had said follow your blisters instead." And what he means by blisters is basically that there is going to obviously be hardship. In fact, like follow your bliss most of the time leads you on a on an unfamiliar path. You're leaving a place that's safe. You're going to face the dragons, cross the bridges, pay the tolls, pay the price, and it was worth it, deeply satisfying along the way. And blisters, this idea of blisters is like on my hand right now. I've I have these blisters because I've been training for this Murph, and I've been doing pull-ups all the time. So, my hands on both sides just have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a it's it's a receipt. It's an evidence of a price paid, a price paid over and over and over again that you really couldn't force yourself to do just the willpower, but you had to have been actually like pulled to doing it. And so, if you find evidence where you suffer pain willingly, that's probably a very good signal. You are so drawn to doing it that you're even willing to endure the hardships that come along the way. That is ultimately what you're looking for. >> I'm going to tell you something that sounds academic and woo-woo, but I'm going to make it super tactical. But, the idea of blister versus bliss is actually really interesting because do you know what the etymology of the word passion is? No. So, the word passion comes from the word suffering. It always seemed weird that it was the passion of the passion of the Christ is the story of Jesus being nailed to the cross, which you're like why why why >> Why is he love that? Yeah. Uh it stands for suffering. And uh and so, the idea of bliss versus blister is interesting because blister is a significantly better word because passion, following your passion, uh means following your your your suffering, meaning something that you love so much you're willing to suffer a whole bunch in order to put to it you know, follow through it. You're basically called to do it. And what's interesting is that up until recently, following your passion didn't mean what it means today. Now, a lot of people think it means follow your bliss. Let's That's actually a great word to use, which is something that you're like enthused about all the time. >> it. Do it. Don't love your job, job you love, you know what I mean? So, up until like you've heard of the Gilded Age. So, in the Gilded Age, that was where this idea of leisure time first got popular in America, and it was a sign of class. Meaning, if If were rich, then you would spend your days in a state of leisure. A man of leisure, have you ever heard that phrase? That was a phrase that was invented in the late 1800s in America. And this idea of like no one has leisure, that's a that's a that's this idea of passion and leisure, that is the idea that is only afforded to the rich. And up until that point, your trade or your skill set was given to you by your father or mother. It was my father was this thing, therefore I will become this thing. And do you want to know something interesting? I think people were probably happier then. But there is like a middle ground. And so up until like in 1930, there was no vacation or there was no work weeks or work weekends. Did you know that? Up until when? Like the 1930s. Do you know who popularized the weekend? >> Isn't it like Henry Ford with the factory system? Yeah, so Henry Ford was his company was so big at the time and they employed so many people. He was like, how do we get the most out of our workers? And he actually determined through a bunch of research and like some like scientific data, he was like, if we actually give people weekends off and we and we create a standard work day, which I actually think the standard work day for him was 12 hours, um not eight, but if we and then if we institute like a minimum wage and this type of thing, we're actually going to get more loyalty and we're going to get more productivity, this and that. And so the idea of of work weeks and vacation and all that stuff, that didn't even exist until 1930. Then the Great Depression happened and then World War happened and those ideas sort of went away. We worked really hard to like make things happen. But then post World War II, so between the the years of 1950 and 1970, that was peak leisure. This is when like the idea of like baseball and bicycles and vacations, that's when like this idea really took off. It's very interesting, but like there literally that was like the golden age of of leisure. Cuz all these American soldiers came back from the war, the economy was booming and they got this thing called the GI Bill. Have you heard of the GI Bill? No. Veterans, ex-soldiers, when if you're still young, they would pay for your college. And so all these young guys were like, "I was in Germany fighting for my life. Now I'm in college and like the economy's booming and I can get a job where I can have a house in Dayton, Ohio where I can afford two cars." And this idea of like I could have a I could buy an oven and a car and a stove and all this stuff. That that was like this golden era. And up until recently, this idea of passion wasn't really a thing. But now we actually work harder, I believe. The data will show that we actually work significantly harder today than ever before and our leisure time and focus on leisure and focus on passion. It's sort of been like this weird dichotomy where we work really, really hard all the time and we somehow think that following your passion is what you have to do and following your passion is what you have to do for work. And because of that and because the economy is booming, there's this idea that if you think about your happiness and your purpose on Earth, it actually makes you more unhappy. There's this amazing book called Bad Therapy and it's and this author used this idea that the people who think why and ask themselves all the time, "Why am I not happy? Why am I not following my life's work? Why why am I not following my passion? This should feel better. This doesn't feel better." Those people are actually often times significantly more discontent with their life. There was a Cal Cal Newport who wrote Deep Work. He had this thing where he said pass Passion is a byproduct of mastery. And if you extend that, well then where does mastery come from? I would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm. You know, yesterday I I had a piano lesson in the morning and then in the evening before bed I'm tired. I'm walking to bed and I pass the room that has the piano. I'm like, "Ah, let me get in here and play the sea shanty like I'm a pirate on the pirate like on a boat or something like that." And I'm playing this song and I'm I'm basically half half eyes open, but it's but I got a little bit better, right? I've got one step closer to mastery. And the only the only way you can get yourself to do enough load, the 10,000 hours type of idea, to achieve mastery is through enduring enthusiasm. And so if you if you think that maybe that's the chain is enduring enthusiasm enthusiasm to enduring enthusiasm which leads to mastery and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to you know passion and and this idea of blisters where it's like look for the evidence of suffering because you're so you enjoy what you're getting out of it. Now, can I give you my riff on this? Cuz I was like, okay, I like the idea, but how do I actually do this? How do I use this? So, I had this observation that like I used to pick projects based on industry. Oh, I'm going to do healthcare cuz I'm really passionate about healthcare or I'm going [snorts] to do you know I started this clothing clothing business cuz oh, that sounds fun. Let's do fashion. Let's do apparel. That's cool. That sounds more fun than that. You were a big clothing guy, huh? >> [laughter] >> I picked things I thought sounded fun. I picked industries or products that I thought were fun. And what I learned along the way was that the time you spend on on the actual product or industry the industry almost like fades to an oblivion. The time you spend on a product is very minimal. Like how much time would you say in whether it's Hampton or The Hustle, how much time per day would you say you spent on actually working on the product? Well, none and because all the time is spent on people stuff. Right. >> Like you you start a company think because you love to tinker and then after 6 or 12 months if you're really successful, the majority of time is spent on managing or leading or organizing people. And even when you're organizing them, you might be leading them or managing them or organizing them partly around product, but a huge amount of it is around growth. You spend most of your time selling the thing not making and marveling about how how great the thing is. And so, what I realized was like, dude, you spend all your like when you when you decide to start a company, you're going to try to like inherently you're saying I'm going to make this thing successful. To make it successful it's got to grow. And to make it grow you're going to spend most of your time on that really hard problem of making it grow. Part of making it grow is the product, but that's only a small part. Minority percentage, not more than 50%. I would say more closer to 15% than 50. Most of your time is going to be spent on building the team, managing the team, and working on core growth and sales. And so I I simplified it and I was like, "Oh, I don't need to pick an industry I love or a product I love. I need to pick a sales motion that I love." Because guess what? Like if you have a product doesn't matter what the niche is. If it's grown via enterprise sales, most of your time is going to be spent doing enterprise sales, hiring enterprise sales, and managing an enterprise sales team. If it's built on Facebook ads, if you if it's e-com I have an e-com brand. Most of the time is spent on running ads to landing pages and sending emails. Because if I want the thing to grow, that's the thing I got to get better at. Yeah, it's like do you want to work with uh spreadsheets or do you want to work in like with guys that wear bright brown shoes and sports jackets and call themselves like the regional VP of uh the Southeast region? Exactly. Do you want to take people to dinner and then promise to circle back? Or do you want to sit behind your laptop uh you know, orchestrating? Or do you want And then so there's a few of these, right? Like if you're in SEO game, then you're going to play the SEO game. That's what you're going to spend most of your time doing is improving your SEO if that's the main growth channel. So I realized oh, I should actually just figure out what type of what type of sales or growth mechanism I like. And that's the constraint. All right, so my my phrase for this is you want to find a loop that you love. All right, what's a loop? So the loop is basically like I can kind of break down any job into a pretty repeatable loop. So I'll give you an example. The healer loop. This is a doctor or therapist. It's someone comes to you in pain. You diagnose the root issue of the pain. You prescribe some solution. And you hopefully send them back out with less pain. That's your loop. If you're a doctor or a therapist, you're going to do that tens of thousands of times. And so, I remember when I was in college, I took the MCATs, I thought I was going to go be a doctor. I specifically I knew what I wanted. I knew my passion was to be in sports medicine, to be an orthopedic surgeon. And I went and I actually before I went to med school, I spent 2 weeks shadowing a guy who did the exact dream job I wanted. He was an orthopedic surgeon for an NFL team plus, you know, had his own practice. Wow, it doesn't get any better than this. And I go in and I realized the loop that he was doing, which was basically somebody comes to you in chronic pain. You say some version of like, well, that's just it is what it is. You don't have any cartilage left in that shoulder or that knee or yeah, yeah, it's damaged or it's ruptured and we're going to try our best to do surgery or to give you an injection of steroid, but like it's never going to be the same as it was before you were injured. >> your behavior the on the long term. >> I'll do pain management for you or I'll do performance management for you and like I'll send you back on your way better than you were when you came in here but much worse than you want to be. And that was what he did every single day and he'd been doing that for 40 years. And I realized that is not a loop I love. It is extremely low creativity. You see people suffering all day and more power to him. He loved doing it. I didn't I felt tired at the end of every day of like oh my god, just emotionally tired of dealing with suffering all day. And I was like, do I have to do this just cuz I've been saying this since I was 14 cuz I don't know, it sounded good to my parents or something. I'm not sure where even where this came from. But like this idea of a loop, I think is really important. So for example, the founder loop is you see the world as it is, some status quo of a of a of an industry, of a of a situation. You imagine it better. Why what if we did this instead? You build a product, you sell the product and then you build the team that will build the product and sell the product. That's the loop you're going to do as a founder every as a founder on the whole and on the on the daily basis going to be mostly initially it's a building loop, then it's a selling loop, and then it's a building the team loop. That's what you're going to do for the rest of time. So, like, do you like that? And so, there's there's many of these. A farmer has a loop, right? It goes with the seasons. You you know, you plant the seeds, you water them, then you you know, then it grows, and then you reap what you sowed, right? And like, that's the loop you're going to do, and you're going to do that every year for 25 years. So, I think the the key to life, if I was telling that that kid who walked up to us at the restaurant, is assume right now you don't know what it is, but know what you're looking for. You're looking for the blisters that you enjoy, and that will come from doing this loop thousands of times. And you don't have to know up front you would like to do it a thousand times. Just see, are you interested in doing it once, twice? Do you have an enthusiasm towards doing this? And then, as you do it, you ask yourself, like, is this something I I feel myself doing you know, like, more and more and more? I would I would I don't feel tired doing this. I feel so I get energy doing this. Yeah, there's there's some pain, there's some suffering, there's some difficulty. I'm not saying it's without that, but find the loop that you love. And so, for me, you know, I stumbled into it when I was basically 30 years old, which was this podcast. It's like, oh, the I'm not the founder loop is okay, but the one I really love is I'm doing life, and I get to be curious about something, then I go dig in, then I take the top 1% of what I found, and I enthusiastically share it with like-minded people, and I like that they like it, and then I go and do it again the next day. And whether I'm writing books, or I'm doing the podcast, or with my YouTube channel, it doesn't matter where it's which way I do it. That's the that's the loop I love. And I've been now I've been doing this podcast what, 6 years? Something like that. And um I'm fresh, fresh as a daisy, you know, it's like I could keep going. And not every other people could do this exact same loop, and they would be totally burnt out, and they would hate it. That the answer is you should follow your passion, but your passion doesn't need to be your job. I have seen so many people that have made that mistake, where they thought following their passion was following that as a career, and I think that actually can be a massive, massive mistake. And so, for anyone listening this listening to this, I don't think and this includes us, this includes what you see on Instagram. I don't think you should necessarily go start a business. I don't think you should quit your job and do X, Y, and Z. If you do want to do that, I think try it, but you should probably save up 6 to 12 months of expenses and life is a lot better when you have financial security because there is money may not make you happy, but a lack of money certainly will make you unhappy. And I've seen so many people that have followed their passion and it was and and cuz probably that your passion often times means creative pursuits, artists, things like that. You don't really make a good living in any of those things and I think there's nothing wrong with having your passion be your hobby.