How to find your thing

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's the most potent stack of stock boosting for founders. Yeah. All right. So, Sam, I was in Austin last week and I was at a restaurant. So, we're sitting down at the table. guy comes up and he's a fan of the podcast and he says hi and he was like, "Oh yeah, I love the episodes and Sam blah blah blah." And I asked him, I go, "What's one thing you want us to talk about?" We're getting we're almost a thousand episodes in. You need a little inspiration. And so I said, "What's one thing you want us to talk about?" And he goes, "Well, I don't know what other people want, but here's what I want." He told me, he's uh he's 24 years old. He's like, "I know I'm smart. I know I'm hardworking. I just don't know kind of 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 he's like, you know, basically the generic advice is like, yo, just follow your passion. And he basically described this problem, which is like, I've been in school, my teachers, my parents, like I was told what to do. You got to take these classes. You got to get take these tests. You got to get these marks. And that's it's like super structured. All of a sudden graduates. Now he's just on his own. So went from super structured to completely unstructured. And he's like, I know that I should be doing something. and 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 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. Great. I think I I will mostly it sounds like I based off your oneline 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 you also looked at the history of following your passion. Is that true? Well, I have a historical kind of reference. So, I was reading this thing by Joseph Campbell. He famously came up with the hero's journey. So, yeah. Yeah. 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 um his philosophy. And he had this better this phrase that I think is a little bit better. It sounds a little hokey, but when you explain it, I think it clicks. And he goes he started off by saying don't follow your passion, follow your bliss. And later he changed it to follow your blisters. So he's explaining and he explains for himself. He's like, "Oh, you know, for me, the way I arrived at this kind of hero's journey thing was because when I was a kid or, you know, a teenager, I was obsessed with studying like 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 how are all these myths like why are these so why do I love these so much? What's what's the structure of these things?" And that's how he kind of discovered this story shape uh that became the hero's journey. When he's talking about bliss, he basically made a couple of points. And so let me first break down the 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% of people do not know their passion. I um so I'm going to cite Mark Manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called uh 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 and I think about it all the time. Yeah, I'm I'm with you. You're I'm always trying to figure it out. I'm perpetually reinventing myself and and starting from scratch and questioning what's going on and reinventing myself for better and for worse. That's been the place of some amazing things of 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 um you know sometimes I wish I was just one of these people who didn't question anything and just sort of just picked a thing and just 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 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 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 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 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. 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 and he goes oh man I've made a mistake. It's not that at all. He he said he kind of off-handedly 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 Murf and I've been doing pull-ups all the time. So, my hands on both sides 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 through 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. And so that's the short idea. And this has been echoed, by the way, many times over. So Paul Graham wrote this long, long essay. I don't know if you ever read it. It's called How to Do Great Work years ago. It's like a It takes you like two days to read this goddamn 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 basically enthusiasm is obviously going to provide you some fuel some like some uh your motor. It's going to get you to go 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 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? And then the interest often irrational cuz 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 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 into 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 gang busters business. and we both invested in Hone Health, which is now, you know, over nine figures run rate. It's doing great. It's it's a wonderful business. And so, it's only when you're at the frontier do you notice gaps in, hm, there's not really a trusted brand for doing this, right? Or uh hm, 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 Ozmpic back before OMIC was even called Ompic. You were like, I'm taking semiglutide. 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. Yeah. Or I 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 have took me 10 years to figure out and shows how exactly I use them dayto-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 etmology 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 you 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, which that's actually a great word to use, which is something that you're like enthused about all the time. Just do 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 guilded age. So, in the guilded 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 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 the 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 workday, which I actually think the standard workday for him was 12 hours, um, not eight, but if we 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 197 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, 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 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 uh passion is a byproduct of mastery and if you extend understand 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 pirates 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 re 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 enthusi enthusiasm to enduring enthusiasm which leads to mastery and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to uh you know uh 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? 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 going to do healthcare cuz I'm real passionate about healthcare or I'm going to do um you know, I started this 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'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 in whether it's Hampton or the hustle, how much time per day would you say you spend 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 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, uh, 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 ecom, I have an ecom 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 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 gonna 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. 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 payto-play scalable version of content. The thing I like the least is um viral growth. uh and sales. Those are my le two least favorite. Dude, I distinctly remember a 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 whining 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 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 at the cab without shoes on and I said, "I'm never doing that again. These shoes are done." 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 D in this meeting. I'm like I'm like this the truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people. It's it's okay to lie. Favorite my least favorite is the wooing of influencers. We did a streaming well 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 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 mill 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. I'm like he he just literally told me he was like, "I'm so tired of sucking." And he's like, "I'm just not going to suck anymore." And I just my first meeting with this guy. It's like two It's like two UFC fighters when they get done fighting and 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. And 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 realize 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 yet 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 before and you'll never change your behavior. 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 you've 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 this 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 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. 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 and 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 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 upfront 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 would I don't feel tired doing this. I feel some 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 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 it's my YouTube channel, it doesn't matter where 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 5 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 story? I think I think it's worth the read, but it's one of these books that if I'm 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 Oh, so she's not a researcher. She actually just worked there. She was a nurse. Yeah. So she was a 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'll 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 They did this this up and 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 suppressed 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 had stayed in touch with my friends specifically. This is for old friends. Dy patients tried to track down in their final weeks a lot of buddies who they had but they couldn't find them and they had huge regret. 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-y old man in my building who I go and talk with all the time. And Gary Vaynerchuk 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 a 96-year-old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories and I leave feeling better. A 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 6 to 12 months of expenses. And life is a lot better when you have financial security because there is a 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 their 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. I disagree with one part of what you said which was like uh you don't have to make your passion your work and 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 book, 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 8 that leaves 16 you work eight. So half your waking hours essentially half of your conscious life you're going to you know once you once you become of working age you're going to sp you're going to 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 the 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 entrep it's a oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship and it is having your a job that you love. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's sort of what I that's what I mean. Yeah. Totally. I don't think it's I don't think it's entrepreneurship at all. Right. Like I would I even said for me it wasn't entrepreneurship and I was a 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 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 is worth doing. I want 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 little seven cabin Airbnb business and sold it for 7 8 million bucks 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 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 the 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 preface this by or not preface this, 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, but today I or on Sunday I looked at an $18 million apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse and it was fancy and [ __ ] 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 need more. I need more. I need to do more podcasts. Screw back down the elevator to your [ __ ] hole. Oh my gosh. former loving home now. Shut. Have you ever done that? Have you ever done real life Zillow where you just like go and ex 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 happen 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 comparison is 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?" Cuz the train hasn't moved yet. They're like, "What? What do you mean? I'm fine." 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 lb 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 cuz 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 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 whiplashed by the world. You're just going to constantly be be whiplashed. And holding it, you know, you're still going to feel it when the the train jerks you around. But like now imagine like that that's to me like the metaphor of of like how this sort of like grounded advice plays into the 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 sell like I would like he was like I was like a $30,000 millionaire. I would like save up 30 grand and then go and like sale. 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 going to go I'm going to 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 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 gonna have to, you know, watch what I eat. I'm gonna have to Right. So, you have to like it's the blisters that decide whether you're gonna 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 you're enjoying picking up and what that mastery actually is cuz 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 that 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, "Oh, I don't know. I think you're going to be a businessman." He's like, "Business? I never said anything about businessman." She's like, "You never said it, but you're always doing it." He goes, "What?" She goes, "Yeah, like every time we walk in that pizza shop, you tell me how they're doing this, this, and this wrong, why 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 Weiwork went on Rick Rubin's podcast. A bunch of people are watching Yeah. But you Austin Reef who I think told you or you saw his thing. Austin kept 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 and he tells this story about we work where he's 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 real." What? Where'd 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 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, not 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. The wife is Rebecca Newman. I have heard five to 10 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 him. I have 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 podcast? 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. This is my safe space. This is the only place I I could say anything. I know she'll never find it. Yeah. Talk trash about it right now. Um, what else you got? You 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's it. Is that Is that Was that So, who's the guy's name? Douglas. Douglas. Shout out Douglas. Was he shirtless in Austin? Cuz that's like what everyone does. Did you walk around shirtless and barefoot? Everybody had the mustache. Everybody in Austin has a mustache. hybrid athletes. Maybe 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 gogggins hormosy like it's just about pain and that's what it is. And 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 it this other way and it's it's working pretty well for me. I don't know what to call this, but it's sort of like hybrid. Like, you could be jacked and run. It's like, oh, that that makes sense to me. Yeah, everyone in Austin's that way. Um, all right. That's it. That's the pot.