How to find your thing

Transcript

Dude, when you use the word stack I get all fired up. Dude, why don't we just describe our podcast that way? Us founders acquired it. It's the most potent stack boosting for founders. All right, so Sam, I was in Austin last week and I was at a restaurant. We're sitting down at the table. Guy comes up and he's a fan of the podcast. He says hi, and he was like, "Oh yeah, I love the episodes to you, Sam, blah blah blah." And I asked him, "What's one thing you want us to talk about? We're getting almost a thousand episodes in. You need a little inspiration." So I said, "What's one thing you want us to talk about?" He goes, "Well, I don't know what other people want, but here's what I want." He told me he's 24 years old. He's like, "I know I'm smart. I know I'm hard working. I just don't know which lane to go in. I'm ready to swim, but I don't know which lane to go in." And what he said was, "You know, the generic advice is like, 'Oh, just follow your passion.'" And he basically described this problem: I've been in school. My teachers, my parents—I was told what to do. You got to take these classes. You got to get these tests. You got to get these marks. And it's super structured. All of a sudden, he graduates. Now he's just on his own. So he went from super structured to completely unstructured. And he's like, "I know that I should be doing something. My friends are all doing this. I don't think I want to do that banking, consulting type of jobs." And his question was basically, "They say follow your passion, but 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. [SPEAKER_00] Great. I think I will mostly—it sounds like, based off your one line response right there, I might agree with you on everything. First of all, I want to hear what advice you gave him, but you told me that you wanted to look at the history of following your passion. Is that true? Well, I have a historical reference. So I was reading this thing by Joseph Campbell. He famously came up with the hero's journey—a circle that explains how Star Wars works and Harry Potter and all the great stories. They sort of start with the same structure. So this guy, Joseph Campbell, he gave a lot of interviews about his philosophy, and he had this phrase that I think is a little better—sounds a little hokey, but when you explain it, I think it clicks. And he goes, "Don't follow your passion. Follow your bliss." And later he changed it to "follow your blisters." So he's explaining it for himself. He's like, "Oh, you know, for me, the way I arrived at this hero's journey thing was because when I was a kid—or you know, a teenager—I was obsessed with studying indigenous tribes and Native American stories and myths. And I got really into all these different myths first as a consumer. Then I started to wonder, 'Like, why are these? Why do I love these so much? What's the structure of these things?' And that's how he kind of discovered this story shape that became the hero's journey." When he's talking about bliss, he basically made a couple of points. So let me first break down the problem with passion and then why I think the bliss and blisters thing is better. All right, so here's my case for why passion is maybe the wrong idea: First, raise your hand if you know what your passion is. All right, like, most people—90 plus percent of people—do not know their passion. I— [SPEAKER_00] So I'm going to cite Mark Manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called "What Should You Follow: Your Passion or Not?" and I listened to it two weeks ago. I'm 36 years old. Some people might regard me as successful. I still don't know what my passion is, and I think about it all the time. I'm with you. I'm always trying to figure it out. I'm perpetually reinventing myself and starting from scratch and questioning what's going on. And reinventing myself for better and for worse—it's been the place of some amazing things, some amazing changes in my life, but it's also a period of great uncertainty. And sticking around in the fog of uncertainty sucks. It feels shitty when you're doing it. And you know, sometimes I wish I was just one of these people who didn't question anything and just picked a thing and did it for 50 years, but it's not who I am. And so if you're somebody who's been in this fog of uncertainty, this will sound familiar. So what ends up happening is you follow your familiar. So you do what you know. You do what you've already done. You do what your parents do. You do what your friends do. And so what a lot of us do is we mistake what is familiar for what actually lights us up. And so even if you—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 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 what do you do instead? All right, so he has this bliss and blisters concept. Basically, bliss is not meant to be just pure joy. It's not meant to be euphoria. What he means by bliss is basically, "What are you enthusiastic about doing?" So using enthusiasm as your guide. So here's his criteria: naturally 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 when you're normally seeking pleasure, relaxation, just indulgence in yourself. And the stuff you find yourself doing—the fact that others would see it as work—is an important signal. And then so 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." And he goes, "Oh man, I've made a mistake. It's not that at all." He said, 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 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 have these blisters because I've been training for this Murph, and I've been doing pull-ups all the time. So on both sides of my hands I just have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a receipt. It's evidence of a price paid, a price paid over and over and over again, that you really couldn't force yourself to do just with willpower. But you had to have been actually pulled to doing it. And so if you find evidence where you suffer pain— 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 on my hand right now. 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, I just have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a receipt. It's evidence of a price paid. A price paid over and over again that you really couldn't force yourself to do just with willpower, but you had to have been actually 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. And so that's the short idea. And this has been echoed many times over. So Paul Graham wrote this long essay—I don't know if you've ever read it. It's called "How to Do Great Work" from years ago. It's like it takes you two days to read this blog post, but it's great. And in it, he has this one phrase that I remember, which is: let enthusiasm be not just the motor but the rudder of your boat. So enthusiasm is obviously going to provide you some fuel, your motor. It's going to get you going, but let it also be the thing that guides you, like a rudder that guides your direction. His take was that it leads you to the frontier of any field because the more—for example, when you got really into fitness, you started maybe at 50th percentile knowledge on health and fitness. Is that probably correct? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And then the interest is often irrational. Because why do you need—you're married, you're already healthy. Why do you want these abs so damn bad, right? But something drove you. Correct? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And frankly, I don't even know what it was. You didn't question it. You don't have to know what it is. You just have to not doubt it. That's the trick. And then how far did it take you? You're injecting stuff in your butt, you're doing the NFL combine as a civilian, you were measuring every calorie and body fat. You went to the frontier of how to do this thing—best known best practices plus some experimental. Am I right? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And so what he talks about is Paul Graham basically says: let the enthusiasm be the engine and the rudder. It'll guide you where you need to go. It'll take you to the frontier. And at the frontier, you will notice some gaps. So when you were at the frontier, Sam, did you not notice a gap? And the gap that you told me about has turned to one of our most profitable investments. There's this male epidemic of low testosterone. People are going to want to take exogenous testosterone. And it's extremely sticky when you do it. I don't know if I want to build that business, but man, I know that would be a gangbusters business. And we both invested in Hone Health, which is now over nine figures run rate. It's doing great. It's a wonderful business. And so it's only when you're at the frontier do you notice gaps. There's not really a trusted brand for doing this right, or we don't really know how to do this. But if somebody ever figured it out, that would be really valuable. You told me about Ozempic back before Ozempic was even called Ozempic. You're like, I'm taking semaglutide. And we didn't act on that insight. But when you go to the frontier, you notice the gaps. And the gaps are where all the opportunities are for any person who wants to do great work. First of all, great spiel. You got me fired up there. Second of all, it sucks that me taking drugs—I'm paying the price of your point making here. [SPEAKER_00] Or you could be friends with someone who's going to do all that. All right, so this episode is all about excellence. A while back, I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life, and the team at HubSpot turned it into a 30-day operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that took me 10 years to figure out and shows how exactly I use them day to day. These are systems that genuinely changed my life. So if you want to build a good life, scan the QR code or click the link in the description now. Let's get back to the show. 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. 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—the Passion of the Christ—is the story of Jesus being nailed to the cross. You're like, why? Why? [SPEAKER_01] You love that? Yeah, it stands for suffering. And so the idea of bliss versus blister is interesting because blister is a significantly better word. Because passion, following your passion, means following your suffering—meaning something that you love so much you're willing to suffer a whole bunch in order to put into it, to 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, which is actually a great word to use—something that you're enthused about all the time. Do it. Yeah, don't love your job. You love, you know what I mean? [SPEAKER_00] So up until, 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 you were rich, then you would spend your days in a state of leisure. A "man of leisure"—have you heard that phrase? That was a phrase that was invented in the late 1800s in America. And this idea of no one has leisure. That's an idea of passion and leisure 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 a middle ground. And so up until 1930, there was no vacation or work weeks or weekends. Did you know that? Up until when? Like the 1930s? Do you know who popularized the weekend? Isn't it Henry Ford with the factory system? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, so Henry Ford's company was so big at the time they employed so many people. He was like, how do we get the most out of our workers? And he actually determined through research and scientific data. He was like, if we actually give people weekends off and we create a standard work day—which I actually think the standard work day for him was 12 hours, not 8—but if we and then we institute 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... [SPEAKER_00] Up until the 1930s, do you know who popularized the weekend? Isn't it Henry Ford with the factory system? Yeah, so Henry Ford's company was so big at the time. 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 scientific data he was like, if we actually give people weekends off and we create a standard work day, which I actually think the standard work day for him was 12 hours, not eight, but if we are and then we institute a minimum wage and this type of thing, we're actually going to get more loyalty and we're going to get more productivity. So the idea of work weeks and vacation and all that stuff didn't even exist until 1930. Then the Great Depression happened and then World War II happened and those ideas went away. We worked really hard to make things happen. But then post-World War II, so between the years of 1950 and 1970, that was peak leisure. This is when the idea of baseball and bicycles and vacations really took off. It's very interesting, but they literally—that was the golden age of leisure because 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, if you're still young, they would pay for your college. So all these young guys were saying, I was in Germany fighting for my life, now I'm in college and the economy is booming. I can get a job where I can have a house in Dayton, Ohio, where I can afford two cars. And this idea of buying an oven and a car and a stove and all this stuff—that was this golden era. 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 passion has become 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 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 this author used the idea that 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 am I not following my passion, this should feel better—those people are actually significantly more discontent with their life. There was Cal Newport who wrote "Deep Work." He had this thing where he said passion is a byproduct of mastery. And if you extend that, where does mastery come from? I would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm. You know, yesterday 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. I'm a pirate on a boat or something. And I'm playing this song and my eyes are half open, but I got a little bit better, right? I've got one step closer to mastery. And the only way you can get yourself to do enough—the 10,000 hours type of idea to achieve mastery—is through enduring enthusiasm. So if you think that maybe that's the chain: enduring enthusiasm leads to mastery, and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to passion. And in this idea of "look for the evidence of suffering because you enjoy what you're getting out of it." Can I give you my riff on this because I was thinking, okay, I like the idea, but how do I actually do this? How do I use this? So I had this observation that I used to pick projects based on industry. It's like, oh, I'm gonna do healthcare because I'm passionate about healthcare, or I'm gonna do this clothing business because that sounds fun. Let's do fashion, let's do apparel. That's cool. That sounds more fun. You're a big clothing guy, huh? 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 the actual product or industry—the industry almost fades to oblivion. The time you spend on a product is very minimal. Like, how much time would you say—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? You start a company thinking because you love to tinker, and then after six or 12 months, if you're really successful, the majority of time is spent on managing or leading or organizing people. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, even when you're organizing them, you might be leading them or managing them, 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 great the thing is. So what I realized was, dude, you spent all your time—when you decide to start a company, you're gonna try to, inherently you're saying I'm gonna make this thing successful. To make it successful, it's got to grow. And to make it grow, you're gonna 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, a minority percentage, not more than 50 percent. I would say closer to 15 percent. Most of your time is going to be spent on building the team, managing the team, and working on core growth and sales. So 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 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 have an e-commerce 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. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it's like do you want to work with spreadsheets or do you want to work with guys that wear bright brown shoes and sports jackets and call themselves the regional VP of 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 orchestrating? Or do you want—so there's a few of these, right? Like if you're an SEO game, then you're going to play the SEO. That's what you're spending most of your time doing: improving your SEO. If that's the main growth channel, so I realized, oh, I should actually just figure out what type of sales or growth mechanism I like, and that's the constraint. What do you like? [SPEAKER_00] Want to work with spreadsheets or do you want to work with guys that wear bright brown shoes and sports jackets and call themselves the regional VP of the Southeast region? Exactly. Do you want to take people to dinner and promise to circle back, or do you want to sit behind your laptop orchestrating? Do you want so there's a few of these, right? Like if you're in the SEO game, then you're going to play the SEO. That's what you're spending most of your time doing—improving your SEO. If that's the main growth channel, so I realized, oh, I should actually just figure out what type of sales or growth mechanism I like, and that's the constraint. What do you like, by the way? So for me, it's content. I was like, I like making content, and so I should pick things. I should pick games that content is the main way to make it grow. My second favorite is ads. I like ads, which is also content, but it's like the more pay-to-play scalable version of content. The thing I like the least is viral growth and sales. Those are my least to most favorite. [SPEAKER_00] Dude, I distinctly remember a time. So The Hustle was a media company, so we had a couple seven-figure deals, a bunch of six-figure deals, and that required a little bit of wining and dining. There was one distinct day that I had to go to New York City and I wore these stupid bright brown shoes, which is a joke that all the sales people would wear for some reason. The outfit was blue jeans with a sports jacket and these ugly brown shoes. I distinctly remember a trip where I took the shoes off post-meeting, I threw them in the trash can, and I got in the cab without shoes on, and I said I'm never doing that again. These shoes are done. It's the dude version of taking off your bra after a long day, dude, because I was just like, I'm out of here. Sucking so much in this meeting. I'm like, the truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people. It's okay to lie. [SPEAKER_01] My least favorite is the wooing of influencers. We did a streaming company we sold to Twitch. It was a streaming app, and so it was made for people who live stream on YouTube and Twitch. The number of absolute meetings where I'm metaphorically on my knees with some 19-year-old streamer who's not looking up from his phone, and his manager, who is his girlfriend, is sitting next to me. They don't ask a single question. They're making more money than they know what to do with—millions and millions of dollars—sitting in Toledo in their bedroom, and you're trying to pitch them on your product. I just remember thinking, I actually met with one of my biggest competitors that night for dinner, and we were both just commiserating. He just literally told me, "I'm so tired of sucking," and he's like, "I'm just not going to suck anymore." It's like two UFC fighters when they get done fighting. They're backstage and they're like, "We both lost." [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, exactly. That's how it felt. So that's my least favorite—the wooing of divas, where you need these influencers to back you for your product to succeed. That's the absolute worst. All right, so 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—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. So I remember when I was in college I took the MCATs. I thought I was going to go be a doctor. Specifically, I knew what I wanted. I knew my passion was to be in sports medicine, to be an orthopedic surgeon. I went, and I actually, before I went to med school, I spent two weeks shadowing a guy who did the exact dream job I wanted. He was an orthopedic surgeon for an NFL team, plus he had his own practice. Wow, it doesn't get any better than this. And I go in, and I realize the loop that he was doing, which was basically somebody comes to you in chronic pain. You say some version of, "Well, that's just what it is. You don't have any cartilage left in that shoulder or that knee." 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, a steroid, but it's never going to be the same as it was, and you'll never change your behavior. And I'll do pain management for you or performance management for you, and 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. He'd been doing that for 40 years. 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. Emotionally tired, dealing with suffering all day. And I was like, do I have to do this just because I've been saying this since I was 14? Because I don't know, it sounded good to my parents or something. I'm not sure where this even came from. But 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 an industry or a situation. You imagine it better. 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 on the whole, and on a daily basis. It's going to be mostly initially a building loop, then a selling loop, and then a building the team loop. That's what you're going to do for the rest of time. So, do you like that? And so there's many of these. A farmer has a loop, right? It goes with the seasons. You plant the seeds, you water them, then it grows, and then you reap what you sowed, right? And 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 key to life, if I was telling that kid who walked up to us at the restaurant—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. You don't have to know up front that you would like to do it thousands of 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 have to ask yourself, "Is this something I feel myself doing more and more?" I would, I wouldn't. I don't feel tired doing this. I feel energy doing this. Yeah, there's pain, there's suffering, there's difficulty. I'm not saying it's without that, but find the loop that you love. Don't know what it is, but know what you're looking for. You're looking for the loops that you enjoy, and that will come from doing this loop thousands of times. You don't have to know up front you would like to do it thousands of 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 have to ask yourself: is this something I feel myself doing more and more and more? I would, I wouldn't—I don't feel tired doing this. I feel so energized doing this. Yeah, 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. For me, I stumbled onto it when I was basically 30 years old, which was this podcast. It's like, oh, 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 one percent of what I found and I enthusiastically share it with like-minded people. I like that they like it, and then I go and do it again the next day. Whether I'm writing books or I'm doing the podcast or it's my YouTube channel, it doesn't matter which way I do it. That's the loop I love. I've been doing this podcast six years or so, and I'm fresh as a daisy. I could keep going. Not everybody—other people could do this exact same loop and they would be totally burnt out and they would hate it. [SPEAKER_00] Let's get really practical on advice for that guy. But let me ask you something first: have you read this book? I read this about five years ago. I told you about it when I read it. It's called "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying." I didn't know this is a book. I've heard the story. Some researcher went and talked to people in hospice, right? Is that the one? [SPEAKER_00] I think it's worth the read. If I'm going to, I can tell you the five points and that's definitely a lot of it. It's worth the read. But basically, I forget how many people she worked with, but it was a woman who worked in a hospice for decades. I think it was potentially 10,000 people, but for sure thousands of people. She's not a researcher. She actually just worked there. She was a nurse. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, she was a nurse. She was a nurse. This was her occupation. She saw thousands of people die and she wrote this book called "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" where she put together a list of the five things that were most common amongst the people she worked with. I don't believe this book is scientific. It's purely observational. But her number one regret, by a huge margin, was: "I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." That was the number one regret by a huge margin when she tallied this up. The idea is that they would spend too long and they didn't realize until the end of their life that they were living a life that other people thought other people should want them to live versus what they really wanted to live. Now listen to the rest, because the third one is actually related to the first one. The second one was: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." This was the majority—men who said they missed this game, they weren't around for X, Y, and Z, and they had massive regret around that. The third thing was: "I wish I had the courage to express my feelings." So it was people who suppressed themselves and they wish that they had the courage to say X, Y, and Z to someone they loved or a friend. It also was when they were conflicted with someone and they had arguments. Someone said, "I wish I had the courage to say I don't agree with you. Can we please hash this out?" But it's related to number one, which is living the life that you want to live versus what you think you should. The fourth one was: "I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends." Specifically for old friends—dying patients try to track down in their final weeks buddies who they had, but they couldn't find them, and they had huge regrets. The last one was: "I wish I had let myself be happier." This idea is that happiness is a choice that people didn't realize they could make. They stayed in comfortable patterns and they pretended to others and themselves that they were content. They feared change right up until change was forced upon them. This book is really good and I highly recommend it. I should actually go and reread it. Just telling the summary, it kind of excites me because I did feel it felt awesome reading this in a weird way. There's this man I told you about—a 96-year-old man in my building who I go and talk with all the time. Gary Vaynerchuk has said this all the time: that he likes to go talk to old people. But I think reading this book is very similar to the joy I get. To the listener, I'm friends with the 96-year-old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories. I leave feeling better. Part of the reason you enjoy reading this is because you think you have wisdom, but also you can learn from others' mistakes, which is a little morbid, but it's still useful. I think this book is really good for anyone to read when they're asking themselves if they should follow their passion, because the answer is almost always yes. But I would argue 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 make that mistake where they thought following their passion meant pursuing that as a career. I think that actually can be a massive mistake. For anyone listening to this—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 six to twelve months of expenses. Life is a lot better when you have financial security because money may not make you happy, but a lack of money certainly will make you unhappy. I've seen so many people that have followed their passion and it was a mistake because following your passion often means creative pursuits, artistic things like that. You don't really make a good living in any of those things. I think there's nothing wrong with having your passion be your hobby. I disagree with one part of what you said, which was that you don't have to make your passion your work. I get what you mean—that it can be your hobby—but I would say probably the default mode would be: don't you accept that most people are not lit up by what they do for work? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, most people are not. Most people don't get excited about Mondays. They don't wake up and tap dance into work. According to Bill Gurley's books, 70 percent of people do not like how they spend their days. Right, and I think in that book he makes a point which is like, you know, 24 hours in a day, you— [SPEAKER_00] any of those things and i think there's nothing wrong with having your passion be your hobby i disagree with one part of what you said which was you don't have to make your passion your work i get what you mean which is it can be your hobby but i would say probably the default mode would you accept that most people are not lit up by what they do for work yeah most people are not right most people don't get excited about mondays they don't wake up tap dancing into work according to bill gurley's books 70 of people do not like how they spend their days right and i think in that book he makes a point which is 24 hours in a day you sleep eight that leaves 16 you work eight so half your waking hours essentially half of your conscious life you're going to once you become of working age you're going to spend at your job and so doesn't it make sense to find the one that you like to do right like that you actually enjoy because half of your life experience is going to be spent that when you're once you're of working age once you're in that 20 to 65 range so i would say way too many people accept it is what it is on something that's too important to me i'm way too against not accepting that now obviously you're right that not everybody figures it out or makes it or whatever but it's to me it still seems like the quest you should go on but the fight worth fighting for is to fight for that to fight till you get that to fight [SPEAKER_00] i'm saying is that oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship and it is having a job that you love yeah yeah totally that's what i mean yeah totally i don't think it's entrepreneurship at all right like i would say i have even said for me it wasn't entrepreneurship and i was an entrepreneur that's what i thought my job was for a long time i think it's finding that loop that you love if that loop is as a salesman or a marketer or a connector or whatever it may be there's many different loops but figuring out one that actually gives you a lot of energy and makes you feel alive i think is worth doing [SPEAKER_00] i'm going to leave you with one quote that was said on this podcast isaac french came on and he was here to talk about his airbnb business where he built this little seven cabin airbnb business and sold it for seven eight million bucks some cool business like that but he said this phrase i don't remember much about the airbnb thing but he said this one phrase or quote which was light yourself on fire and people will come from many miles away to watch you burn i just thought there's something poetic about the way he said it and i do think there's a test of like could that be used to describe what i'm doing right like it's not a literal thing but it's almost like that's what level 10 looks like now you might not be a 10 but let's agree that somebody who's really lit up by what they're doing that's how it would feel is that they've decided they've lit themselves on fire with passion and they are now people will come from many miles away to watch them burn i would say that kind of describes in a visual format what that's supposed to look like i think that's a great quote isaac's the man [SPEAKER_00] and i want to say that this is really hard for example one of the best ways to kill passion sometimes i like to apartment shop i don't intend on buying an apartment anytime soon right but today or on sunday i looked at an 18 million dollar apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse and it was fancy and i wanted to go look at it and there were many other people there and i went from i'm happy to i need more i'm not i need more i need more i need to do more podcasts screw you came back down the elevator to your shithole oh my gosh is that loving home now have you ever done that have you ever done real life zillow where you just go and i always like i'll call my parents oh i'm looking at an apartment and they're like you're looking at that apartment i'm like the word looking i need a different word i am flipping through a catalog and that's happened like that happens to be there i'm not actually going to buy this apartment and that's the easiest way to start comparisons the thief of joy that is a way to kill the passion and so i think it's really challenging to fight internal rewards versus external rewards and what we have just said sounds really great and what isaac said is really great but i also want to acknowledge it's incredibly challenging to pull off my analogy is this i took my kids to the airport and you know how you have to take those airport trams like the little i don't know why we're at an airport but we're taking a train inside the airport from one part to another and my kids have never done this before so they get on they're super excited oh we're on a train and i'm like hey grab the bar and they're like why because the train hasn't moved yet they're like what what do you think is that's what's going to happen and i'm like no hold on to this it's about to go and they're like no i just want to balance this is going to be fun and i was like all right train starts 30 pound daughter goes flying into someone's suitcase right away gets rocked by the world and i would say a lot of advice that falls into this kind of easier said than done bucket is really the internal soul equivalent of holding on to the pole because trust me this world's about to rock you and if you're not holding on to this you stand no chance you will go flying into that man's suitcase right now and so the idea of yeah you do want to figure out what lights you up what makes you feel alive not what sounds good to others you do want to figure out an internal reward and a scorecard so that you're not going to the 18 million dollar penthouse and feeling like you need more when you walk out of there and so it's you need all this generic cliche advice because it's the equivalent of the pole to hold on to if you don't have it you're going to get whiplash by the world you're just going to constantly be whiplash and holding it you know you're still going to feel it when the train jerks you around but now you're holding on to it that's to me the metaphor of how this grounded advice plays into the world you know to daily life which is going to whip you around [SPEAKER_00] i call it braces money i had a friend that had this amazing job and he was like i used to just sail like i would he was like i was a thirty thousand dollar millionaire i would all this generic cliche goddamn advice because it's the equivalent of the pole to hold on to if you don't have it you're going to go, you're just going to get whiplash by the world. You're just going to constantly be whiplash, and holding it you're still going to feel it when the train jerks you around, but that's to me the metaphor of how this grounded advice plays into the world, to daily life, which is going to whip you around. [SPEAKER_00] I call it braces money. I had a friend that had this amazing job, and he was like, "I used to just sail. I would like, he was like, 'I was a thirty thousand dollar millionaire. I would save up thirty grand and then go and sail.'" And then he's like, "I had a kid, and I realized I wanted to buy them braces because that was my passion more so than sailing. So I got this really great job so I could have braces money because I realized I'm passionate about that as well, not just sailing." I want to leave one other point, which is when you accept that the trick to figuring this out is following your enthusiasm, especially things you're enthusiastic about that others are not, especially things that you're willing to suffer for, the blisters, then there's two takeaways. The first is name the blisters. So it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome. It's like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to start working out because I really want to be in shape. I really want to be fit. I want to have a six pack. Okay, cool. I want to be jacked." Name the blisters. The blisters is: I'm going to be waking up at this time. I'm going to be going to gym on days that I don't even feel like it. I'm going to have to push myself when I'm there. I'm not going to be looking at my phone. I'm going to be pushing myself till failure on a bunch of different sets. I'm going to have to watch what I eat. So you have to like, it's the blisters that decide whether you're going to like it or not, much more so than the rewards. So figure out when you're looking at what loop, the blisters are actually pretty obvious. You can actually know what they are and you decide if you're good with those or not. So that's the first thing: be upfront about those. The second is there's a great art of noticing. So you have to learn to notice in yourself where you have some weird irrational disproportionate enthusiasm or where you're willing to go further than most people or the mastery that you're enjoying picking up, and what that mastery actually is, because it doesn't always have a really clean label that other people have told you about. And also, sometimes other people will notice it for you. I'll give you two examples. Naval, who's somebody I think we both kind of admire, he tells a story about when he was a kid. He thought being a scientist was what he was going to be. He thought scientists were the highest calling. They were the truth seekers. They were the ones who invented things. That's what he wanted to do. And his mom was like, "I don't know, I think you're going to be a businessman." He's like, "Business? I never said anything about businessmen." She's like, "You never said it, but you're always doing it." He's, "What?" She's, "Yeah, like every time we walk in that pizza shop you tell me how they're doing this, this, and this wrong. They should be doing this instead. What this company should do instead." And she's like, "I think that's just how your mind actually works." And he's like, "She spotted it when I couldn't." And I don't know if you saw Adam Newman from We Work. [SPEAKER_00] Went on Rick Rubin's podcast. A bunch of people are saying yeah, but Austin Rief, who I think told you or you saw his thing? Yeah, Austin kept saying it's like one of the greatest. He's like, "Adam gets a lot of hate, but he is really worth listening to." Yeah, Austin was the one who was keeping talking about it. He's like, "Dude, he's a master storyteller. I can't believe you're not more obsessed with him." And I was like, "What? What kind of reverse neg? Okay, I'm interested." So I watched it. He tells a story about We Work where he actually was working on a kid's clothing brand before We Work, and it wasn't working. He was failing at it. And his girlfriend at the time, he's asking, "Well, what do you think I should do?" And she's like, "Real estate." And he's like, "I've never done real estate. Where did that come from? Random? I've never done anything in real estate." She goes, "I think you should do real estate because whenever we're walking on the street," she goes, "A man's eyes can go in many places walking down the street in New York. You can look at the woman who just passed you. You can look at the dogs. You can look at many things: the food, you can look at all the types of things. Your eyes go up. You're always looking at the buildings and what's in these buildings and how they could work and, you know, why this, what this building could be for, that what it is for." She goes, "I think you should be in real estate." And like, okay, this honestly the story sounds a little bit like reverse dude. [SPEAKER_00] I have heard, no I have heard, I think her name's Rebecca, his wife is Rebecca Newman. I have heard five to ten and the Newmans are storytellers, so it could all be fake. I have heard five stories about Rebecca being the one, you know, whatever they say—like behind every successful man is a woman like pushing them. I've heard like five stories of her being like the Adam whisperer and pointing him in the direction. I would, we need Adam. Would be great. I would like to have her on. Yeah, everyone needs a Rebecca in their lives. That's awesome. [SPEAKER_00] And what did you learn from the pod, you know? My wife has never listened to this podcast. Isn't that hilarious? You want to talk, say something bad about it right now. My safe space. This is the only place I could say anything. I know she'll never find out. Yeah, talk trash about it right now. [SPEAKER_00] What else you got? You want to talk about anything else? No, I do, but I don't think it, I think we're good here. [SPEAKER_00] Okay, I think that is it. Who's the guy's name? Douglas. Shout out Douglas. Was he shirtless in Austin? Because that's what everyone does. Did you walk around shirtless and barefoot? Nobody. Had the must? Everybody in Austin has a mustache. Hybrid athletes, baby. That's when you're buff and you run. That's the move in Austin. I'm trying to figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of business, where you have the success but you don't have the grind culture suffering mindset, right? Like the Goggins, Hormozi, like it's just about pain and that's what it is. You need to not see your family and not do this, not do that. It's like, I don't know, man. I'm doing this, I'm doing this other way, and it's working pretty well for me. I don't know what to call this, but it's like joy. You could be jacked and run. It's like, oh, that makes sense to me. [SPEAKER_00] Baby, that's when you're buff and you run. That's the move in Austin. I'm trying to figure out how to Brand the hybrid athlete of business where you have the success but you don't have the grind culture suffering mindset, right? Like the Goggins, Hormozi—like it's just about pain and that's what it is. You need to not see your family and not do this, not do that. It's I don't know, man. I'm doing this, I'm doing this other way and it's working pretty well for me. I don't know what to call this, but it's like joy. You could be jacked and run. It's like, oh, that makes sense to me. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, everyone in Austin's that way. All right, that's it. That's the pot. direction his take was that it leads you to the frontier of any field because the more uh like for example when you got really into fitness you started maybe at 50 percentile knowledge on health and fitness is that probably correct yeah and then the interest often irrational because dude why do you need you're married you're already healthy like why do you what do you what do you why do you want these abs so damn bad right but something drove you correct yeah and frankly i don't even know what it was you didn't question it you don't have to know what it is you just have to not doubt it is the kind of trick and then how far did it take you you're injecting stuff in your butt you're doing the nfl combine as a civilian you were like getting to you know measuring every calorie and body fat like you went to the frontier of how to do this thing like best known best practices plus some experimental am i right yeah and so what he talks about is like paul graham basically says let the let the enthusiasm be the engine and the rudder it'll guide you where you need to go it'll take you to the frontier and at the frontier you will notice some gaps so when you were at the frontier sam did you not notice a gap and the gap that you told me about has turned to one of our most profitable investments there's this like male epidemic of low testosterone people are going to want to take exogenous testosterone and it's extremely you know it changes the way you feel it's extremely sticky when you do it i don't know if i want to build that business but man i know that would be a gangbusters business and we both invested in hone health which is now you know over nine figures run rate it's doing great it's a wonderful business and so it's only when you're at the frontier do you notice gaps in there's not really a trusted brand for doing this right or uh we don't really know how to do this but if somebody ever figured it out that would be really valuable you told me about ozempic back before ozempic was even called him ozempic you're like i'm taking semi-glutide and um you know we didn't act on that insight but it took you when you go to the frontier you notice the gaps and the gaps are where all the sort of the opportunities are for for any uh person who wants to do great work first of all great spiel you got me fired up there second of all it sucks that me taking drugs uh i i'm kind of paying the price of uh your point making here or you could be friends with someone who's gonna do all that all right so this episode is all about excellence a while back i shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at hubspot turned it into a 30-day operating system that you can check out right now it breaks down the systems that have took me 10 years to figure out and shows how exactly i use them day to day these are systems that genuinely changed my life so if you want to build a good life scan the qr code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show 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 you love that yeah uh it stands for suffering and uh it's 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 which that's actually a great word to use which is something that you're like enthused about all the time do it yeah 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 you were rich then you would spend your days in a state of leisure a man of leisure have you 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 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 than but there is like a middle ground and so up until like 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 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 are and then 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 ii 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 uh the years of 1950 and 1907 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 they're literally that was like the golden age of of leisure because 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 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 is booming 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 can have a i could buy an oven and a car and a stove and all this stuff that that was like this golden era 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 while why am i not following my passion this should feel better this doesn't feel better those people are actually oftentimes significantly more discontent with their life there was a cal newport who wrote deep work he had this thing where he said 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 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 pirates like 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 uh you know uh passion and in 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 because 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 it's like oh i'm gonna do healthcare because i'm real passionate about healthcare or i'm gonna do um you know i started this clothing clothing business because oh that sounds fun let's do fashion let's do apparel that's cool that sounds more fun than you're a big clothing guy huh 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 a 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 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 six 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 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 uh what i realized was like dude you spent all your like when you when you decide to start a company you're gonna try to like inherently you're saying i'm gonna make this thing successful to make it successful it's got to grow and to make it grow you're gonna 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 percent i would say more closer to 15 percent 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 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 so there's a few of these right like if you're an seo game then you're going to play the seo that's what you're spending 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 what do you like by the way so for me it's content i was like i like making content and so i should pick things i should pick games that content is the main way to make it grow my second favorite is ads i like ads which is also content but it's like the more pay-to-play scalable version of content the thing i like the least is um viral growth uh and sales those are my lead to least favorite dude i distinctly remember time so the hustle was a media company so we had um a couple seven-figure deals a bunch of six-figure deals and that required a little bit of winding and dining there was one distinct day that i had to go to new york city and i wore these stupid bright brown shoes which is like a joke that like all the sales people would wear for some reason the outfit was like blue jeans with a sports jacket and these ugly broad shoes i distinctly remember a trip where i took the shoes off post meeting i threw them in the trash can and i got at the cab without shoes on and i said i'm never doing that again these shoes are done it's a dude version of taking off your bra after a long day dude because i was just like i'm out of here sucking so much d in this meeting i'm like i'm like this the truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people it's okay to lie my least favorite is the willing of influencers we did a streaming the company we sold to twitch it was a streaming app and uh so it was made for people who live stream on youtube and twitch and the number of absolute shitty meetings where i'm i'm metaphorically on my knees with this uh you know some 19 year old streamer who's not looking up from his phone and his manager who is you know his girlfriend is sitting next to me they don't ask a single question they're making more money than they know what to do with making millions and millions of dollars sitting in toledo in their bedroom and you're trying to pitch them on like you know your product and i just remember thinking like i actually met with one of my biggest competitors that night for dinner and we were both just commiserating on like he just literally told me he was like i'm so tired of sucking and he's like i'm just not gonna suck anymore and then i just my first meeting with this guy it's like two it's like two ufc fighters when they get done fighting they're backstage and they're like we both lost yeah yeah exactly that's how it felt and uh so that's my least favorite is the wooing of divas where you need these influencers to back you to for your product to succeed that's the absolute worst 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 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 two 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 it's damaged or it's ruptured and we're going to try our best to do surgery or to give you an injection a steroid but like it's never going to be the same as it was and you'll never change your behavior and like you know 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 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 because i've been saying this since i was 14 because i don't know it sounded good to my parents or something i'm not sure we 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 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 it's 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 thousands of 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 have to ask yourself like is this something i i feel myself doing you know like more and more and more i would i wouldn't 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 onto 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 one percent 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 it's 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 been doing this podcast what six years something like that and um i'm fresh fresh as a daisy you know it's like i could keep going and not everybody other people could do this exact same loop and they would be totally burnt out and they would hate it let's get really practical on advice for that guy but let me ask you something first have you read this book i read this um i think five years ago i told you about it when i read it it's called the top five regrets of the dying i didn't know this is a book i've heard the story some researcher went and talked to people in hospice right is that the i think i think it's worth the read but it's one of these books and if i'm gonna i can tell you the five points and that's definitely a lot of it it's worth the read but basically i forget how many people she worked with but it was a woman who worked in a hospice for decades and i think it was potentially 10 000 people but for sure thousands of people who she's not a researcher she actually just worked there she was a nurse yeah so she was uh yeah she was a nurse uh i think she yeah she was a nurse this was her occupation and she saw thousands of people die and she wrote this book called the top five regrets for dying of the dying where she put together a list of the five things that were most common amongst the people she worked with and i don't believe this book is scientific it's purely observational but her number i can tell you all five of them but the number one regret by a huge margin was i wish i had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me that was the number one regret by a huge margin when she like tallied this this up and then basically this idea is that they like would spend too long and they didn't realize until the end of their life that they were living a life that other people that they thought other people would should want them to live not versus what they really wanted to live now listen to the rest because the third one is actually related to the first one the second one was i wish i hadn't worked so hard now this was the majority men who said um i missed this game i wasn't around for x y and z and they had massive regret around that the third thing was i wish i had the courage to express my feelings so it was people who suppress themselves and they wish that they had the courage to say x y and z to someone they loved or a friend and um it also was when they were uh conflicted with someone and they had arguments someone and they're like i wish i had the courage to say i don't agree with you can we please hash this out but it's related to number one which is living the life that you want to live versus what you think you should the fourth one was i wish i'd stayed in touch with my friends specifically this is for old friends dying patients try to track down in their final weeks a lot of buddies who they had but they couldn't find them and they had huge regrets and the last one was i wish i had let myself be happier and this idea is that happiness is a choice that people didn't realize that they could make and they stayed in comfortable patterns and they pretended to others and themselves that they were content and they feared change right up until change was forced upon them and so this book is really good and i highly i should actually go and reread it just telling the summary it kind of excites me because i did feel it felt awesome reading this in a very uh weird way but there's this man i told you about this 96 year old man in my building who i go and talk with all the time and gary vanderchuk has said this all the time that he likes to go to talk to old people but i think reading this book is very similar to the joy i get i'm basically to the listener i'm friends with the 96 year old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories and i leave feeling better part of the reason why you enjoy reading this is because you think you have wisdom but also i can kind of learn from your mistakes which is a little bit of a morbid way to look at it but it's still a useful way to look at it and so i think that this book is a really good book for anyone to read while when they're asking themselves if they should follow their passion because the answer is almost always like yes but i would argue 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 six to twelve 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 a and because following your passion oftentimes 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 i disagree with one part of what you said which was like uh you don't have to make your passion your work i get what you mean which is like it can be your hobby but i i would say probably the default mode would you accept that most people are not lit up by what they do for work yeah most people are not right most people don't don't get excited about mondays they don't wake up sort of tap dancing into work according to bill gurley's books 70 of people uh do not like how they spend their days right and i think in that book he makes a point which is like um you know 24 hours in a day you sleep eight that leaves 16 you work eight so half your waking hours essentially half of your conscious life you're gonna you know once you once you become of working age you're gonna spend you're gonna spend at your job and so like doesn't it make sense to find the one that like you like to do uh right like that you actually enjoy because it's half of your life experience is going to be spent that when you're once you're of working age once you're sort of in that 20 to 65 range so i would say way too many people accept uh it is what it is uh on something that's too to me i'm like way too important to not accept that now obviously like you're right that like not everybody sort of figures it out or makes it or whatever but it's i don't know to me it still seems like the you know the quest you should go on but you know the fight worth fighting for is like to to fight for that to fight till you get that to fight what i'm saying is that it's a lot oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship and it is having your a job that you love yeah yeah totally that's sort of what i that's what i mean yeah totally uh i don't think it's i don't think it's entrepreneurship at all right like i would say i have even said for me it wasn't entrepreneurship and i was an entrepreneur that's what i thought my job was for a long time uh i think it's finding that loop that you love if that loop is as a salesman or a marketer or a connector or uh you know whatever it may be there's there's many different loops but but figuring out one that actually gives you a lot of energy and makes you feel alive i think is is worth doing i'm going to leave you with uh one quote that was said on this podcast isaac french came on and he was here to talk about his airbnb like business where he he built this like a little seven cabin airbnb business and sold it for seven eight million bucks i said some some cool business like that but he said this phrase i don't remember much about the airbnb thing but he said this one phrase or a quote which was um light yourself on fire and people will come from many miles away to watch you burn i just thought like there's something poetic about the way he said it and i do think there's a test of like could that be used to describe what i'm doing right like it's not a literal thing but it's a like it's a it's almost like that's what level 10 looks like now you might not be a 10 but let's let's agree that that somebody who's really lit up by that what they're doing that's kind of how it would feel is that they're they've just decided they've lit themselves on fire with passion and they are now people will come from many miles away to watch them burn i would say that kind of describes in a visual format what what that's supposed to look like i think that's a great quote isaac's the man and i want to preference this by or not preferences but i want to say that um this is really hard for example you know one of the best ways to kill passion sometimes i like to apartment shop i don't intend on buying an apartment anytime soon right but today i or on sunday i looked at an 18 million dollar apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse and it was fancy and shit and i wanted to go look at it and there was many other people there and i went from i'm happy to i need more i'm not i need more i need more i need to do more podcasts screw you came back down the elevator to your shithole oh my gosh is that loving home now have you ever done that have you ever done real life zillow where you just like go and like i always like i'll call my parents like oh i'm looking at an apartment and they're like you're looking at that apartment i'm like the word looking i need a different word i am uh i'm flipping through a catalog and that's happened like that happens to be there i'm not actually going to buy this apartment and uh that's like the easiest way to like start like you know comparisons the thief of joy that is a way to kill the passion and so i think it's really challenging to fight internal rewards versus external rewards and i and what we have just said sounds really great and what isaac said is really great but i also want to acknowledge it's incredibly challenging to pull off my analogy is this i took my kids to the airport and you know how you have to take those like airport trams like the little like the i don't know why we're at an airport but we're taking a train inside the airport from like one part to another and my kids have never done this before so they get on they're super excited oh we're on like a train and um and i'm like hey grab the bar and they're like why because the train hasn't moved yet they're like what what do you think is that's what's going to happen and i'm like no no hold on to this it's about to it's about to go and they're like no no i just want to balance this is going to be fun and i was like all right train starts 30 pound daughter goes flying into someone's suitcase right away gets rocked by the world and i would say like a lot of advice that falls into this kind of easier said than done bucket is really like it's the internal soul equivalent of holding on to the pole because trust me this world's about to rock you and if you're not holding on to this you stand no chance you will go flying into that man's suitcase right now and so like the idea of like yeah you you do want to figure out uh you know what lights you up what makes you feel alive not what sounds good to others you do want to figure out an internal reward and a scorecard so that you're not going to the 18 million dollar penthouse and feeling like you need more when you walk out of there and so it's like you need all this generic cliche goddamn advice because it's the equivalent of the pole to hold on to if you don't have it you're going to go you're just going to get whiplash by the world you're just going to constantly be whiplash and holding it you know you're still going to feel it when the the train jerks you around but like now mad like that that's to me like the metaphor of like how this sort of like grounded advice plays into the world you know to daily life which is going to whip you around i call it braces money i had a friend that um had this amazing job and he was like i used to just sail like i would like he was like i was like a thirty thousand dollar millionaire i would like save up 30 grand and then go and like sail and then he's like i had a kid and i realized i wanted to buy them braces because that was my passion more so than sailing and so i got this really great job so i could have braces money because i realized i'm passionate about that as well not just sailing i want to leave leave one other point which is when you if you accept that the trick to figuring this out is following your enthusiasm especially things you're enthusiastic about that others are not especially things that you're willing to suffer for uh the blisters then um there's two two kind of takeaways the first is name the blisters so it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome it's like oh yeah i'm gonna go i'm gonna start working out because i really want to be in shape i really want to be fit i want to be i want to have you know a six pack okay cool i want to be jacked name the blisters the blisters is i'm going to be waking up at this time i'm going to be going to gym on days that i don't even feel like it i'm gonna have to push myself when i'm there i'm not going to be looking at my phone i'm going to be pushing myself till failure on a bunch of different sets i'm going to have to you know watch what i eat i'm going to have to right so you have to like it's the blisters that decide whether you're going to like it or not much more so than the rewards and so figure out uh when you're when you're looking at what loop i like like just the blisters are actually pretty obvious you can actually know what they are and you decide if you're good with those or not so that's the first thing be upfront about those the second is there's a great art of noticing so you have to learn to notice in yourself where you have some weird irrational disproportionate enthusiasm or where you're willing to go further than most people or the mastery that you're look you're enjoying picking up and what that mastery actually is because it's not always doesn't always have a really clean label that other people have told you about and also that sometimes other people will notice it for you there's this i'll give you two examples uh naval who's somebody i think we both kind of admire he tells a story about when he was a kid he thought uh being a scientist was what he was going to be he thought scientists were the highest calling they were the truth seekers they were the ones who invented things like that's what he wanted to do and his mom was like i don't know i think you're going to be a businessman he's like business i never said anything about businessmen she's like you never said it but you're always doing it he's what she's yeah like every time we walk in that pizza shop you tell me how they're doing this this and this wrong right they should be doing this instead what this company should do instead and and she's like i think that's just how your mind actually works and he's like she spotted it when i couldn't um and i don't know if you saw adam newman from we work went on rick rubens podcast a bunch of people are saying yeah but you austin reef who i think told you or you saw his thing yeah austin kept saying it's like one of the greatest he's like adam gets a lot of hate but he is really worth listening to here yeah austin was the one who was like kept talking about it he's like dude he's a master storyteller he's like i can't believe you're not more obsessed with him and i was like what what kind of reverse neg okay i'm interested so i watched it he tells a story about we work where he he actually was working on a kid's clothing brand before we work and it wasn't working he was failing at it and um his he's asking i think his girlfriend at the time well what do you think i should do and she's like real estate and he's like i've never done really where did that come from random i've never done anything in real estate she goes i think you should do real estate because whenever we're walking on the street she goes a man's eyes can go in many places walking down the street in new york you can look at the woman who's who just passed you you can look at the dogs you can look at you can look at many things the food you can look at all the types of things your eyes go up you're always looking at the buildings and what's in these buildings and how they could how they work and you know why this what this building could be for that what it is for she goes i think you should be in real estate and like okay this honestly the story sounds a little bit like reverse dude i have heard no i have heard i think her name's rebecca his the wife is rebecca newman i have heard five to ten and the newmans are storytellers so it could all be fake i have heard five stories about rebecca being the one you know whatever they say like behind every successful man is a is like a woman like pushing them i've heard like five stories of her being like the adam whisperer and like pointing him in the direction i would we need adam would be great i would like to have her on yeah everyone needs a rebecca in their lives that's awesome um and what did you learn from the pod you know my wife has never listened to this podcast isn't that hilarious you want to talk say something bad about it right now my safe space this is the only place i could say anything i know she'll never find yeah talk trash about it right now uh what else you got you want to talk about anything else no i do but i don't think it i i think we're good here okay i think that is that it is that is that was so who's the guy's name douglas douglas shout out douglas was he shirtless in austin because that's like what everyone does did you walk around shirtless and barefoot nobody had the must everybody in austin has a mustache hybrid athletes baby that's when you're buff and you run that's the move in austin i'm trying to figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of uh business where you have the success but you don't have the like grind culture suffering mindset right like the goggins hormosi like it's just about pain and that's what it is you need to not see your family and not do this not to that it's like i don't know man i'm doing this i'm doing this other way and i it's working pretty well for me i don't know what to call this but it's sort of like like joy you could be jacked and run it's like oh that makes sense to me yeah everyone in austin's that way um all right that's it that's the pot win win win win win win win win win win win win win