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A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 60% of U.S. workers are either disengaged or actively dislike their job.

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They're checked out mentally.

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They are completely absent emotionally.

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They are simply going through the motions.

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On the contrary, surveys also find that nearly 70% of Americans experience financial stress on a regular basis, and just under 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

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So today, Drew and I are going to butt heads.

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We're going to look at the question, when considering your career, should you pursue passion or should you be practical?

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Okay.

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Should you do something because you love it?

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As the cliche goes, if you love what you do, then you'll never work a day in your life.

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Or should you be practical, get paid, and then use the extra money and free time to go do what you enjoy instead?

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My name is Mark Manson.

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I am three-time number one New York Times bestselling author.

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And don't you forget it.

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This is my co-host, producer.

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Long-time lead researcher Drew Burney.

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And today on The Solve Podcast, we are going to look at one of the most fundamental questions that people confront in their life day to day.

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Should I pursue something for the love of it or should I be practical?

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I probably get emailed some variation of this question regularly.

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at least once a week.

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Yeah.

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If not more for a decade now.

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Yeah.

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And it generally comes from young people too, but even a lot of older folks, uh, people stuck in dead end jobs, people wondering if they should change their career.

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A lot of people wondering if it's too late.

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We're going to get into a lot of different nuances and sides of this question.

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It's,

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A bit of a complicated question.

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I think there's a lot of individual variation.

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There's a lot of context dependence.

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The science says quite a bit about both of these decisions.

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There's good reasons to pursue each of these two decisions.

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There's also good reasons to not pursue each of these two decisions.

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And Drew and I are each going to take up the flag on one side of the debate.

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So me, I'm going to argue that you should be passionate about.

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that you should pursue what you love, that you should very much index on emotional satisfaction when determining what you want to dedicate your career and your life to.

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And Drew is going to take the flip side of the equation.

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He's going to argue that people should be more practical.

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The voice of reason.

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The voice of reason.

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Okay.

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Yes.

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I will be the emotional head case in this episode.

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And, you know, last episode we did a debate and we – the roles were reversed.

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We argued whether romantic love was overrated or not.

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I was the stone-hearted, cold bastard who argued that love was very much overrated.

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And you defended it like a knight defending his virgin bride's chastity.

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Okay.

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Well, that makes perfect sense to me.

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Something you're very used to.

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That's right.

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I'm sure.

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So those of you who missed the Love is on Trial episode back in February, the way this works is that Drew and I each take one side of the argument.

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In this case, I take the proposition, which is that one should follow their passion when deciding their career path.

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And Drew takes the opposition, which is people should be more practical and reconsider.

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We go for four rounds total.

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Each of us presents two arguments, and the other one can counter-argue each of those arguments.

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So it opens – it will open up with me.

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I'll give the first argument.

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Drew will rebuttal, and then Drew will open with his first argument, and then I will give a rebuttal.

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And we will go back and forth like that for four full rounds, and then we will try to – at the end of the episode, we will try to synthesize both of our arguments into –

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One cohesive takeaway for the audience of like, OK, how do we make sense of all of this contradictory information and what can you actually do and how do you apply that into your day-to-day life?

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And then, of course, we'll all agree that I won and we'll move on.

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We'll see.

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Anything you want to say before we jump into our debate, before you get absolutely throttled by my airtight arguments?

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I mean obviously there is a lot of nuance that goes into this and we'll get into that.

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I think there is just – there's an inherent tension.

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There's different tensions.

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There's different tensions.

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Yes.

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Around this question.

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And I think when people think about this, sometimes they're – they aren't aware that there's – of what tension they're trying to kind of reconcile.

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OK.

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So I would just say kind of pay attention to that as we go through this.

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OK. Yeah.

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All right.

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So in other words, you're wrong.

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Got it.

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That's how I was starting this one already.

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All right.

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All right.

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All right.

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All right, everybody.

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The question, should we be passionate or should we be practical on this episode of Solved?

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Quick reminder, if you love the show, please give us a follow and a like.

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So many people listen to the show every single month, and yet they are not subscribed.

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They don't follow us.

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Please, it's the best thing you can do to support us.

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Without further ado, let's get into it.

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Round one.

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We need to get some bikini girl in here with, you know, one of those little.

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No.

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OK.

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I can.

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All right.

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I can do it.

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All right.

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Clearly, clearly this is the passionate side of the table.

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Obviously.

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I'm being pragmatic already.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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All right.

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The Case for Passion.

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I'm going to open up with the story of one very famous J.K. Rowling.

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J.K. Rowling, a lot of people have heard this story.

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I'll give a very quick overview version of it.

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J.K. Rowling was a struggling teacher.

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She was a single mother.

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She was incredibly depressed.

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She was deep in debt.

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She started writing this novel that –

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She felt very, very deeply about.

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It was kind of the only thread that kept her going through this period of her life.

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She was the survivor of domestic abuse.

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She had gone through all sorts of hardships.

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She had moved different countries and she barely had two pounds to rub together.

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She would go sit at this cafe in Edinburgh and type away on her –

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her keyboard, writing this novel about a young wizard named Harry.

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And all she had money for was literally one cup of coffee each day.

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She was barely eating because she was so broke.

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Yet she showed up and wrote every single day.

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And the result, of course, it's Harry Potter.

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And what's striking about this story, there's two things I think that stand out.

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One is I think there's kind of almost a therapeutic case that you could make.

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which I actually is beyond the bounds of this argument for this episode.

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But I would argue that when everything else in your life is going wrong and is a disaster, if you do have something that you're deeply passionate about, that can be something that can kind of tether you back to reality and keep you going on a day-to-day basis.

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So I think that's one very important facet of this.

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The other important facet of this is just the –

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Absolute persistence and resilience that comes as a natural byproduct of caring very, very deeply about what you work on.

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I think you could argue that if she didn't care about the novel that she was writing, there's no way she would have sustained that work ethic through that period.

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She would have given up at multiple places.

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She would have –

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probably gone and found something else to do.

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She probably would have tried to pay her bills.

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Instead, she had something that was very deeply moving to her and kept her steady and persistent throughout this entire period.

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And of course, this turns up in the research itself.

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Research on motivation finds that people who are intrinsically motivated to do the work that they're doing, they tend to do it for longer periods of time.

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They tend to work harder.

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They tend to deal with setbacks better.

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And they tend to be more successful.

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So it's passion is – it's funny.

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Way early in my career, I used to give a talk sometimes and the title of the talk was Passion is Practical, which is kind of ironic given this episode.

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And that was always my argument.

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As I said, if you find something that you deeply care about, even if it makes less money, you're going to do a better job at it.

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You're going to work longer at it.

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You're going to deal with setbacks better.

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You're going to come up with more solutions.

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You're going to stick with it much more consistently.

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Over time is going to eventually result in more success.

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The other thing that I'll add to this is that we opened up the top of the show with the fact that 60 percent of U.S. workers feel disengaged from whatever they're doing.

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They don't see any meaning in it.

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Um, they're basically going through the motions.

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If you look at the, like the definition of the word passion, its root actually comes from Latin and means to suffer.

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And for much of the first millennia, it was used as interchangeably with the word suffering.

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It wasn't until the medieval period that it started to represent something that, uh,

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was more like worth suffering for, something noble, something important, meaningful, that the suffering actually had a value to it.

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And,

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I would personally argue, you know, we did a full episode on purpose.

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A big component of that episode was that, generally speaking, something that you find meaningful, you have to be willing to give up something for it.

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There's like some sort of sacrifice that is a component of it.

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Kind of predicting your counterargument here of like financial stability, the mental health that comes with financial stability.

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I would argue that some of the stress and hardship that comes from pursuing something you're passionate about is,

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is a feature and not a bug because it does make it feel more meaningful.

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It does make it feel highly personal.

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And it does create that sense of purpose in your life, regardless of what's going on around you.

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And so despite the stress, despite the anxiety, despite the depression, like JK Rowling, there's something deep and important about having a practice in your life like that, that you can stay tethered to.

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Mm-hmm.

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The last thing I'll say about this, about my opening argument, is this is something that I felt very personally as well.

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So I graduated from university in 2007.

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I initially thought I was going to go in the finance.

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Ha-ha.

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Got a job at an investment bank right as the Great Recession was starting.

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Everything was a shit show.

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I was getting paid nothing.

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I was working horrible hours.

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Absolutely miserable.

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I hated my job.

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Yeah.

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And I'd been kind of doing some of this, some web design work on the side.

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I'd been doing some dabbling a little bit in affiliate marketing and had just read Tim Ferris's four hour work week, had some friends that were really getting into like online marketing and e-commerce.

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And I...

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Almost irresponsibly looking back, just cut the cord and went for it.

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I was like, you know what?

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I'm 24.

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I'm broke.

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The worst thing that's going to happen is I'm going to be 25 and broke if I try this for a year and I fail at it.

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So I was like, let me go try for a year and fail at it.

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And it was funny because when I started –

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I had almost no money to my name.

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I was living on a friend's couch.

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I was like doing odd part-time jobs, you know, working a little bit – working at a bar 10 hours a week, working in audio transcription like 10 or 20 hours a week, and then trying to do this like e-commerce, online marketing thing.

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And then as an offshoot, started blogging as well.

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And it was funny because I remember I got –

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not even a month into it.

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And I remember sitting there on my friend's futon working and just thinking to myself, I don't think I'm ever going back.

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I remember in that moment, I realized I would rather be broke and doing this than to be at an office job that I hate and have all the money in the world.

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Like I just, I'm good with this.

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This subject is, hits close to home for me in that sense.

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Okay.

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Is that all you got for that one?

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That is my opening argument, sir.

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That is my opening argument.

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All right.

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Okay.

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What say you, sir?

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Well, OK, I'm not going to actually argue that.

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I mean, passion is good fuel.

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Don't get me wrong.

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What you're what you're making the argument for is that it's it's a source of motivation, prevents burnout, all of that kind of stuff.

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Right.

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Like passion is kind of the fuel that we use to get through difficult moments or when we're not sure of what to do next.

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We kind of.

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tap that deep well of passion, right?

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I'm actually not going to make the monetary, the money stability argument just yet, okay?

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I actually want to step back just a minute and look at another famous example of someone who was also very passionate and very successful, and it didn't turn out so great for them, which is Kurt Cobain, all right?

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Now, Nirvana's like in my top 10.

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Yeah, they're great.

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Love Nirvana, okay?

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Okay.

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Kurt Cobain was notoriously a pain in the ass to work with.

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Okay.

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But a machine.

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People talked about him like in the rehearsal studio.

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Like he would have these marathon 18-hour sessions sometimes, right?

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Like just wouldn't quit.

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A lot of the producers that worked for him just – they said he was very, very difficult to work with and they probably wouldn't do it again if they had the choice, right?

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When he took his own life, he left a suicide note.

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And one of the lines he wrote in it was, I don't have the passion anymore.

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And so remember it's better to the burnout than to fade away.

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And it was a famous line.

232
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They actually stole it from Neil Young, a Neil Young song, but still, uh,

233
00:14:04.218 --> 00:14:04.998
The passion part though.

234
00:14:05.038 --> 00:14:06.279
I don't have the passion anymore.

235
00:14:06.459 --> 00:14:06.699
Yeah.

236
00:14:06.939 --> 00:14:15.243
What happens when you fuse your identity so much with your passion that that's what, like that's the only logical endpoint for you at that point, right?

237
00:14:16.263 --> 00:14:22.566
Yes, J.K. Rowling, she like definitely got through a lot of hardship, more hardship than most people would ever face.

238
00:14:22.586 --> 00:14:27.007
She got through that, came out the other side of a jillionaire too at the same time.

239
00:14:27.488 --> 00:14:27.748
Sure.

240
00:14:27.768 --> 00:14:31.349
And we'll talk about a little bit about selection bias or the survivorship bias and stuff like that.

241
00:14:31.389 --> 00:14:32.850
But really what I want to focus on is like,

242
00:14:33.530 --> 00:14:38.753
how much of your identity gets swept up in passion or how much it can.

243
00:14:38.953 --> 00:14:39.253
Okay.

244
00:14:39.273 --> 00:14:39.533
Okay.

245
00:14:39.813 --> 00:14:47.757
Now, there is a little bit of nuance here too because psychologists distinguish between harmonious passion and obsessive passion.

246
00:14:47.877 --> 00:14:48.117
Okay.

247
00:14:48.357 --> 00:14:52.279
That obsessive passion is the kind I'm talking about where your identity gets fused with this.

248
00:14:52.679 --> 00:14:52.859
Right.

249
00:14:52.879 --> 00:14:55.221
So it's kind of you have nothing else going on in your life.

250
00:14:55.321 --> 00:14:59.023
You're just obsessive, can't put it down, can't step away.

251
00:14:59.163 --> 00:14:59.363
Right.

252
00:14:59.563 --> 00:14:59.743
Right.

253
00:15:00.044 --> 00:15:03.626
As you can imagine, a harmonious passion, though, on the other end is you have a good balance with it.

254
00:15:03.686 --> 00:15:04.966
You see it as something that you do.

255
00:15:05.107 --> 00:15:06.147
It is a passion of yours.

256
00:15:06.167 --> 00:15:08.669
You are very emotionally attached to it even, too.

257
00:15:08.749 --> 00:15:16.493
But you're not like your identity isn't so wrapped up in it that any setback to it is just going to send you into a downward downward spiral like it did with Kurt Cobain.

258
00:15:16.613 --> 00:15:16.874
Gotcha.

259
00:15:16.894 --> 00:15:17.114
Okay.

260
00:15:17.634 --> 00:15:21.677
It fuels kind of workaholism, like a toxic form of workaholism too.

261
00:15:21.798 --> 00:15:23.199
Again, you get so attached to that.

262
00:15:24.860 --> 00:15:29.524
This contrasts with that whole do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.

263
00:15:29.784 --> 00:15:29.964
Right.

264
00:15:30.004 --> 00:15:30.264
Right.

265
00:15:30.645 --> 00:15:34.168
Kind of flies in the face of that when it's like actually all I ever do is work.

266
00:15:34.708 --> 00:15:36.409
It ends up feeling like that after a while.

267
00:15:36.589 --> 00:15:37.290
Right.

268
00:15:37.390 --> 00:15:38.891
There is no work-life balance.

269
00:15:38.911 --> 00:15:40.893
And we can talk about the nuances of work-life balance.

270
00:15:40.913 --> 00:15:41.574
balance too.

271
00:15:42.234 --> 00:15:42.955
And I get it.

272
00:15:43.055 --> 00:15:47.679
If you're going to achieve anything wildly abnormal, right?

273
00:15:47.699 --> 00:15:49.341
That's not something extraordinary.

274
00:15:49.361 --> 00:15:51.683
You're probably going to have to have some imbalance in your life.

275
00:15:52.124 --> 00:16:01.753
But again, what happens when that passion is threatened in some way, then your identity is also threatened if you're so fused to it with this obsessive kind of passion that I'm talking about.

276
00:16:02.797 --> 00:16:08.039
And also not only that, it doesn't necessarily protect against burnout.

277
00:16:08.099 --> 00:16:10.200
It can actually lead to burnout, right?

278
00:16:10.640 --> 00:16:14.681
If you are so obsessed with it, you can't put it down.

279
00:16:15.141 --> 00:16:19.483
You can't separate your work life from your home life or any other things that you just need to get done.

280
00:16:19.503 --> 00:16:20.683
It all revolves around –

281
00:16:21.420 --> 00:16:22.862
this one passion that you have.

282
00:16:23.242 --> 00:16:28.467
You're so wrapped up in it that everything else gets pushed to the side and your life gets really out of balance.

283
00:16:29.368 --> 00:16:38.117
Both types of passion, this harmonious passion and the obsessive passion, they do lead to more intrinsic motivation like you were talking about, people who are intrinsically motivated and they're not.

284
00:16:38.277 --> 00:16:40.979
work more, they put more effort into it, they produce better work.

285
00:16:41.119 --> 00:16:41.639
Absolutely.

286
00:16:42.119 --> 00:16:44.821
Both harmonious and obsessive types of passion do that.

287
00:16:45.221 --> 00:16:49.584
But harmonious passion leads to better satisfaction with your work.

288
00:16:49.624 --> 00:16:55.488
So work satisfaction or job satisfaction really only comes from more of a harmonious passion.

289
00:16:55.548 --> 00:16:57.549
And we'll talk a little bit more about how that's developed later.

290
00:16:57.689 --> 00:17:03.513
But obsessive passion actually more likely and more frequently leads to burnout, right?

291
00:17:04.207 --> 00:17:06.409
Yes, you work harder, but you end up feeling worse for it.

292
00:17:06.509 --> 00:17:06.649
Right.

293
00:17:06.669 --> 00:17:07.610
You're never satisfied.

294
00:17:07.690 --> 00:17:08.451
It's never good enough.

295
00:17:08.551 --> 00:17:09.652
It's never good enough.

296
00:17:09.672 --> 00:17:11.173
You just can't put it down.

297
00:17:11.293 --> 00:17:11.513
Yeah.

298
00:17:11.533 --> 00:17:11.694
Right?

299
00:17:12.034 --> 00:17:14.016
An ex-girlfriend of mine, she was a veterinarian.

300
00:17:14.276 --> 00:17:14.556
Okay?

301
00:17:14.736 --> 00:17:16.478
She wanted to be a vet since she was three years old.

302
00:17:17.118 --> 00:17:17.599
All right?

303
00:17:17.879 --> 00:17:20.501
When she was three, she told everybody, I want to be a veterinarian.

304
00:17:20.521 --> 00:17:21.262
She loved animals.

305
00:17:21.282 --> 00:17:23.984
She'd pick up every dog and cat she found, any animal.

306
00:17:24.365 --> 00:17:24.825
She just loved it.

307
00:17:24.865 --> 00:17:26.366
She couldn't stand to see an animal suffer.

308
00:17:27.167 --> 00:17:29.368
Knew from when she was three and she became a veterinarian.

309
00:17:29.388 --> 00:17:29.888
That's what she did.

310
00:17:29.908 --> 00:17:31.748
She followed her passion since she was a little girl.

311
00:17:31.808 --> 00:17:34.269
It's very rare to find that kind of thing, but she did it.

312
00:17:34.869 --> 00:17:39.171
By the time she got to – she was doing a residency in surgery, in small animal surgery.

313
00:17:39.871 --> 00:17:45.213
By the time she got to that, she was actively telling other people who were thinking about being vets not to do it.

314
00:17:45.513 --> 00:17:45.693
Wow.

315
00:17:47.493 --> 00:17:50.915
Because I think you got to be careful like what you're actually calling your passion here too.

316
00:17:51.316 --> 00:17:51.656
Okay.

317
00:17:52.156 --> 00:17:58.920
A lot of times what we think is our passion isn't necessarily – doesn't translate into the real world very well.

318
00:17:59.200 --> 00:17:59.340
Right.

319
00:17:59.360 --> 00:18:07.565
So for her, it was – she was actually passionate about animals, taking care of animals, doing good for animals was basically like her passion.

320
00:18:07.585 --> 00:18:08.546
She wanted to do that.

321
00:18:08.566 --> 00:18:09.927
Being a vet is not –

322
00:18:11.313 --> 00:18:12.995
A lot of it is dealing with difficult owners.

323
00:18:13.035 --> 00:18:18.820
A lot of it is dealing with the bureaucracy of either a university hospital, which a lot of them are, or some small practice too.

324
00:18:18.840 --> 00:18:18.940
Yeah.

325
00:18:19.080 --> 00:18:20.101
A lot of bureaucracy.

326
00:18:20.401 --> 00:18:29.810
So I think you just have to be very careful about what you're calling your passion and not getting that confused with all the other things that actually go into living out that quote unquote passion.

327
00:18:30.290 --> 00:18:31.230
Yeah, I'll agree.

328
00:18:31.270 --> 00:18:34.051
We'll come back to that because I do think there's a lot of truth in that.

329
00:18:34.131 --> 00:18:34.331
Yeah.

330
00:18:34.852 --> 00:18:37.632
Basically, though, for this first round, I just I want to highlight that.

331
00:18:37.652 --> 00:18:42.214
It was like the harmonious versus obsessive passion.

332
00:18:42.554 --> 00:18:48.656
OK, there's a way to do passion that contributes to job satisfaction and overall life satisfaction, too.

333
00:18:48.996 --> 00:18:51.237
And there's a way to do it where it consumes you.

334
00:18:52.357 --> 00:18:55.038
And that's where I think we have to be a little bit careful.

335
00:18:55.078 --> 00:18:57.239
So yeah, JK Rowling, great example of passion.

336
00:18:57.659 --> 00:18:59.680
Kurt Cobain, terrible example of passion.

337
00:18:59.820 --> 00:19:01.561
So you can't tell me it's just the passion.

338
00:19:02.001 --> 00:19:02.261
Yes.

339
00:19:03.361 --> 00:19:03.821
Fair enough.

340
00:19:03.861 --> 00:19:04.182
All right.

341
00:19:04.402 --> 00:19:04.842
Fair enough.

342
00:19:05.442 --> 00:19:09.404
I also, as someone who has burnt himself out on multiple occasions.

343
00:19:09.444 --> 00:19:09.664
Yes.

344
00:19:09.704 --> 00:19:10.924
Yes, I've seen you do this.

345
00:19:10.964 --> 00:19:11.524
Point taken.

346
00:19:11.684 --> 00:19:11.965
Yes.

347
00:19:12.405 --> 00:19:12.645
Right.

348
00:19:13.680 --> 00:19:13.860
Okay.

349
00:19:13.880 --> 00:19:19.287
So I think, you know, what's really going on here is that you have to balance this.

350
00:19:19.888 --> 00:19:20.929
There is a tension here.

351
00:19:21.309 --> 00:19:28.138
Like I said, this is what the problem is a lot of times is that people aren't super aware of the tension that's going on or that they're trying to reconcile anyway.

352
00:19:29.008 --> 00:19:34.893
Yes, like I said, extraordinary achievements require some sort of obsessive approach to them.

353
00:19:35.774 --> 00:19:41.419
But that also often precedes like a spectacular burnout too at the same time too, just like the Kurt Cobain thing, right?

354
00:19:41.499 --> 00:19:47.905
Like the thing that made him incredibly passionate about his work was also the thing that made him ultimately take his own life.

355
00:19:48.705 --> 00:19:59.993
So I think what the real conflict is, is the balance between like sustaining engagement with your work and compulsive overwork, right?

356
00:20:00.013 --> 00:20:03.235
So compulsively doing it versus being like healthily engaged with it.

357
00:20:03.655 --> 00:20:06.197
So that's that harmonious versus the obsessive passion there.

358
00:20:06.637 --> 00:20:11.961
And this is where it's not a simple choice necessarily between passion and pragmatism, but just like –

359
00:20:12.501 --> 00:20:14.783
maintaining that healthy relationship between the two.

360
00:20:14.803 --> 00:20:19.546
I talked about this before, and I used to think this argument was such a cop-out, like finding that balance, right?

361
00:20:20.226 --> 00:20:22.047
It's actually really, really hard to find that balance.

362
00:20:22.127 --> 00:20:26.570
And that's actually the most difficult way to go about it is finding a healthy balance with something.

363
00:20:26.830 --> 00:20:30.653
It's way easy to just go extreme one way or the other, extreme pragmatism, extreme passion.

364
00:20:30.793 --> 00:20:32.134
What's harder is finding that.

365
00:20:32.414 --> 00:20:33.075
that balance.

366
00:20:33.095 --> 00:20:33.315
Yep.

367
00:20:33.755 --> 00:20:51.190
The other thing too is just that the tying your self-worth to what you do, to the performance of what you do too, that's just, you're opening yourself out for burnout and like Kurt Cobain said, burning out rather than fading away, opening yourself up to that.

368
00:20:51.430 --> 00:20:53.252
Okay, so the last thing I'll say about this too is that

369
00:20:54.803 --> 00:20:59.186
We also celebrate this kind of like obsessive type of passion.

370
00:20:59.827 --> 00:21:02.869
We look at somebody and they're like, oh my god, they're so dedicated.

371
00:21:02.949 --> 00:21:04.530
They're so passionate about their work.

372
00:21:04.550 --> 00:21:11.615
There's all these stories about like Elon and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sleeping under his desk and yeah.

373
00:21:11.990 --> 00:21:12.150
Yeah.

374
00:21:12.170 --> 00:21:18.376
And I remember it wasn't just a few years ago where somebody was asking, you know, Elon went to do a talk or something like that.

375
00:21:18.416 --> 00:21:23.781
And somebody asked him about, you know, oh, you know, I want to do some version of what you do at some point.

376
00:21:23.801 --> 00:21:25.462
He's just like, don't do it.

377
00:21:26.203 --> 00:21:27.004
My girlfriend was a vet.

378
00:21:27.024 --> 00:21:27.724
I said, don't do it.

379
00:21:27.885 --> 00:21:29.086
It's not worth it.

380
00:21:29.106 --> 00:21:37.974
Go volunteer at an animal shelter, you know, rather than go spend your life being a spend all these hours and years and money like training to be a vet or whatever it is.

381
00:21:39.044 --> 00:21:39.284
Yes.

382
00:21:39.604 --> 00:21:40.185
Again, I get it.

383
00:21:40.465 --> 00:21:41.326
Passion is a great fuel.

384
00:21:41.926 --> 00:21:43.547
It can be a great source of motivation.

385
00:21:43.687 --> 00:21:45.428
I don't think it's that sustainable for one.

386
00:21:46.049 --> 00:21:47.410
It's not consistent either.

387
00:21:47.430 --> 00:21:49.531
The emotions that are attached to your passion.

388
00:21:49.771 --> 00:21:52.073
You said that, you know, that, oh, it was this passion that got her through.

389
00:21:52.593 --> 00:21:56.636
I'm not so sure that passion is what got JK Rowling through all the time.

390
00:21:56.676 --> 00:22:00.578
I thought it's probably more of a discipline for her than it was necessarily passion.

391
00:22:00.959 --> 00:22:06.102
So I just don't, I don't think you can rely on that as a source of motivation consistently anyway.

392
00:22:06.455 --> 00:22:11.621
This obsessive type of passion is masquerading as like healthy productivity or whatever it is.

393
00:22:11.641 --> 00:22:13.483
I think that's an issue too that we have.

394
00:22:13.723 --> 00:22:15.104
We celebrate it a little too much.

395
00:22:15.545 --> 00:22:15.805
Okay.

396
00:22:16.186 --> 00:22:16.546
All right.

397
00:22:16.706 --> 00:22:17.147
That's fair.

398
00:22:17.507 --> 00:22:17.947
All right.

399
00:22:18.308 --> 00:22:18.608
All right.

400
00:22:23.433 --> 00:22:24.374
Round two.

401
00:22:24.695 --> 00:22:25.916
Round two.

402
00:22:25.936 --> 00:22:27.097
All right.

403
00:22:27.538 --> 00:22:28.499
This is where I want to bring up.

404
00:22:30.007 --> 00:22:32.028
Issues of stability, issues of money.

405
00:22:32.108 --> 00:22:36.089
This is often framed as like the passion versus paycheck argument, right?

406
00:22:36.249 --> 00:22:36.569
Okay.

407
00:22:37.109 --> 00:22:44.111
The first thing I want to point out about the J.K. Rowling story or any story, even the Kurt Cobain story too around passion is survivorship bias.

408
00:22:44.391 --> 00:22:44.711
Okay.

409
00:22:44.911 --> 00:22:46.371
This is a very real thing.

410
00:22:46.431 --> 00:22:48.012
Most people probably know about this right now, but –

411
00:22:48.745 --> 00:22:53.729
You know, we get all these stories of people who made it and then they say, oh, yes, I was very passionate about it.

412
00:22:54.129 --> 00:22:54.950
I followed my passion.

413
00:22:54.970 --> 00:22:55.770
I did what I love.

414
00:22:56.071 --> 00:22:56.251
Right.

415
00:22:56.671 --> 00:22:57.271
And I made it.

416
00:22:57.512 --> 00:22:58.652
And so you should, too.

417
00:22:58.993 --> 00:23:05.578
What they don't tell you is that there's probably 10,000, 100,000, millions of people who did the exact same thing and didn't make it.

418
00:23:06.098 --> 00:23:10.502
OK, there's a luck component to it, definitely.

419
00:23:11.482 --> 00:23:15.846
And just, you know, J.K. Rowling, Kurt Cobain, those are outliers of outliers.

420
00:23:15.866 --> 00:23:16.346
Right.

421
00:23:16.526 --> 00:23:20.069
I mean, they're generational talents that just don't come around that often anyway.

422
00:23:20.509 --> 00:23:26.554
And then on top of that, they probably got incredibly lucky several breaks along the way that they forgot about or didn't even realize were breaks for them.

423
00:23:26.886 --> 00:23:29.128
So there's a survivorship bias that's going on here.

424
00:23:29.148 --> 00:23:35.535
You know, we have this visibility gap where we only see those top performers or those people who made it through to the other side.

425
00:23:36.056 --> 00:23:44.385
And we didn't see the thousand other people that were around them doing the exact same thing and didn't make it or even completely failed at whatever they were doing.

426
00:23:45.208 --> 00:23:46.508
So there's that.

427
00:23:47.009 --> 00:23:47.309
All right.

428
00:23:48.109 --> 00:23:54.791
Not only that though, too, like financial stress is a passion killer as well.

429
00:23:55.051 --> 00:24:03.814
So if you jump into it, you know, if you want to, if you want to be an artist of, of, of some kind, especially in the early days, there's not a whole lot of money in that anyway.

430
00:24:04.394 --> 00:24:05.274
Very few people make it.

431
00:24:05.294 --> 00:24:06.755
So you have the survivorship bias as well.

432
00:24:06.815 --> 00:24:08.155
Very few people make it to the top.

433
00:24:09.596 --> 00:24:13.337
And then along the way, you're financially stressed.

434
00:24:13.537 --> 00:24:13.677
And,

435
00:24:14.590 --> 00:24:19.012
We know from research that financial stress leads to cognitive impairments.

436
00:24:19.392 --> 00:24:25.916
I mean it's just you're not going to be able to devote time to your passion if you're trying to figure out how you're going to pay rent or put food on the table.

437
00:24:26.356 --> 00:24:28.137
It's just not going to happen.

438
00:24:28.357 --> 00:24:31.358
It's kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing going on here, right?

439
00:24:31.399 --> 00:24:31.539
Yeah.

440
00:24:31.799 --> 00:24:39.142
Like if you just throw yourself into poverty to follow your passion, well, you're not going to have a whole lot of time to follow your passion.

441
00:24:39.162 --> 00:24:39.943
You're going to be worried about –

442
00:24:40.723 --> 00:24:46.390
Finding shelter, getting something to eat, just general safety concerns and survival concerns.

443
00:24:46.711 --> 00:24:48.713
That's going to take up a lot of mental bandwidth.

444
00:24:49.114 --> 00:24:54.680
You're not going to have time to dedicate to your passions at all in that situation, right?

445
00:24:55.001 --> 00:24:58.044
I think that financial stability in many cases –

446
00:24:58.705 --> 00:25:06.650
in some form or another anyway, is actually a prerequisite for creative expression and passion projects even too.

447
00:25:07.611 --> 00:25:11.413
One historical example I thought of that you've written about a lot actually too is Charles Bukowski.

448
00:25:12.588 --> 00:25:15.850
So the story goes – anyway, the lore goes with Bukowski.

449
00:25:16.310 --> 00:25:17.751
He was a novelist, a poet.

450
00:25:19.071 --> 00:25:22.693
For the longest time, up until he was like in his 50s, I think, he was a nobody.

451
00:25:22.993 --> 00:25:24.134
He worked at the post office.

452
00:25:24.294 --> 00:25:26.455
He worked all these odd jobs basically, right?

453
00:25:26.655 --> 00:25:29.897
All of his writing was rejected for the first 30, 40 years.

454
00:25:29.917 --> 00:25:30.437
Right, right.

455
00:25:30.637 --> 00:25:31.657
He was passionate about writing.

456
00:25:31.717 --> 00:25:32.318
Don't get me wrong.

457
00:25:32.518 --> 00:25:33.798
He was very, very much passionate.

458
00:25:33.918 --> 00:25:38.861
And you wrote a great article, still one of my favorite articles you ever wrote called Find What You Love and Let It Kill You.

459
00:25:38.981 --> 00:25:39.181
Yeah.

460
00:25:39.321 --> 00:25:43.184
Kind of an argument for passion but in a very also practical way like, hey, this is going to suck.

461
00:25:43.465 --> 00:25:43.745
Right.

462
00:25:44.886 --> 00:25:52.112
At the same time too, what I would argue the real story is his kind of agent publisher, John Martin, came along.

463
00:25:52.352 --> 00:25:52.572
Right.

464
00:25:53.273 --> 00:25:59.038
This is when Bukowski was working at the post office and he was hating it and was looking for something else to do.

465
00:25:59.438 --> 00:26:00.639
John Martin came along.

466
00:26:00.819 --> 00:26:01.440
He saw this guy.

467
00:26:01.460 --> 00:26:04.042
He saw his talent and he said, OK, I'm going to give you – I think it was $150 a month.

468
00:26:05.543 --> 00:26:08.405
to just write full time and whatever you produce, I'll publish.

469
00:26:08.926 --> 00:26:10.107
And that's going to be our deal.

470
00:26:10.267 --> 00:26:10.487
Right.

471
00:26:10.807 --> 00:26:12.969
Well, at that time, $150 a month covered his rent.

472
00:26:13.009 --> 00:26:13.669
It covered his food.

473
00:26:13.810 --> 00:26:14.590
It covered his cigarettes.

474
00:26:14.610 --> 00:26:15.251
It covered his beer.

475
00:26:15.751 --> 00:26:16.812
Like he was good to go.

476
00:26:17.132 --> 00:26:19.334
He actually had some form of a financial stability.

477
00:26:19.374 --> 00:26:20.155
He wasn't getting rich.

478
00:26:20.355 --> 00:26:20.835
I get that.

479
00:26:21.335 --> 00:26:25.259
But once he had that, then like three weeks later, he produced his first novel.

480
00:26:25.279 --> 00:26:25.379
Yeah.

481
00:26:25.987 --> 00:26:26.987
Post office, I think, right?

482
00:26:27.007 --> 00:26:32.468
Like once he had that financial stability, once he knew that, OK, I can put a roof over my head.

483
00:26:33.008 --> 00:26:33.909
I can eat.

484
00:26:34.089 --> 00:26:35.189
I can have my cigarettes and beer.

485
00:26:35.249 --> 00:26:35.689
I'm fine.

486
00:26:35.989 --> 00:26:41.210
Now I'm going to go off and really work on this passion project that he'd been working for for 50 years up to that point.

487
00:26:41.670 --> 00:26:48.191
So I think that's actually this – like there has to be some stability somewhere, OK?

488
00:26:48.871 --> 00:26:51.432
The economics of creative work are pretty brutal.

489
00:26:51.452 --> 00:26:51.852
Yeah.

490
00:26:52.373 --> 00:26:52.893
For the most part.

491
00:26:52.953 --> 00:26:53.133
Yes.

492
00:26:53.153 --> 00:26:58.036
So if we're talking about passions where you are seeking some sort of creative career.

493
00:26:58.497 --> 00:26:59.197
Which let's be honest.

494
00:26:59.217 --> 00:27:11.764
For most people, it's some sort of creative endeavor or some sort of like maybe athletics or probably something that is very rare or difficult to succeed at.

495
00:27:11.844 --> 00:27:12.045
Right.

496
00:27:12.285 --> 00:27:12.465
Right.

497
00:27:12.925 --> 00:27:23.916
So like for instance, for writers, I think this was in 2024, the median annual wage for writers was around $70,000.

498
00:27:23.936 --> 00:27:25.237
We're just thinking, oh, that's not bad.

499
00:27:25.597 --> 00:27:30.122
The thing is if you look at the distribution, very few writers make $70,000 a year.

500
00:27:30.142 --> 00:27:30.802
Okay.

501
00:27:31.022 --> 00:27:32.784
Excuse me while I crawl under the table.

502
00:27:32.844 --> 00:27:33.265
Yeah.

503
00:27:35.026 --> 00:27:40.109
There's a few at the top that really pull that up.

504
00:27:40.369 --> 00:27:42.310
Most writers don't make a whole lot at all.

505
00:27:42.450 --> 00:27:48.794
So most of the great works in literature, if you think about it too, were written by people who had day jobs.

506
00:27:50.275 --> 00:27:52.256
So another famous one, J.R.R.

507
00:27:52.296 --> 00:27:55.918
Tolkien, he did not have a J.K. Rowling story.

508
00:27:56.859 --> 00:27:57.899
He was a professor.

509
00:27:59.400 --> 00:28:01.842
He spent a decade writing Lord of the Rings.

510
00:28:02.662 --> 00:28:07.585
He had the time and the mental clarity and he wasn't stressed.

511
00:28:07.866 --> 00:28:10.667
He kept writing after he even became famous or he kept – I'm sorry.

512
00:28:10.687 --> 00:28:19.814
He kept his professor job even after he became famous because that stability afforded him the luxury of being able to work on his passion project.

513
00:28:19.854 --> 00:28:20.074
Yeah.

514
00:28:20.234 --> 00:28:20.534
OK?

515
00:28:20.774 --> 00:28:21.134
Later on.

516
00:28:21.615 --> 00:28:23.496
Another – I'll give you another example, Mark.

517
00:28:23.696 --> 00:28:24.717
Me, right?

518
00:28:25.057 --> 00:28:25.677
Yeah.

519
00:28:26.638 --> 00:28:27.779
I've talked about this a lot.

520
00:28:28.399 --> 00:28:29.160
I love woodworking.

521
00:28:29.200 --> 00:28:30.560
I would call it a passion of mine.

522
00:28:30.701 --> 00:28:30.861
Right.

523
00:28:30.881 --> 00:28:31.061
Okay.

524
00:28:31.601 --> 00:28:35.844
In my garage right now, which is my woodshop, I can't even park in it because I have so many tools.

525
00:28:36.084 --> 00:28:39.046
I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools in here.

526
00:28:39.506 --> 00:28:48.972
Like woodworking really wasn't even on my radar until I was able to start buying some of these tools and afford it from a stable job that I have with you that you've provided.

527
00:28:49.172 --> 00:28:49.432
Right.

528
00:28:50.292 --> 00:28:54.435
I wouldn't have been able to probably even find this passion had I not had that financial stability.

529
00:28:54.455 --> 00:28:54.575
Right.

530
00:28:54.675 --> 00:28:57.096
Are you saying you're not passionate about this podcast?

531
00:28:57.236 --> 00:28:58.377
Is that what I'm hearing?

532
00:28:58.417 --> 00:29:01.718
I'm going to, I'll argue later that I have the best of both worlds.

533
00:29:02.398 --> 00:29:07.641
Audience, I would like you to know that I am deeply passionate about this podcast and you mean everything to me.

534
00:29:07.941 --> 00:29:08.321
Thank you.

535
00:29:08.481 --> 00:29:11.182
This job only fuels my passion for woodworking.

536
00:29:11.342 --> 00:29:11.523
No.

537
00:29:11.783 --> 00:29:13.083
You are Drew's side chick.

538
00:29:13.263 --> 00:29:14.324
I just want you to know.

539
00:29:16.215 --> 00:29:16.756
No, no, no, no, no.

540
00:29:17.677 --> 00:29:22.141
I'm just saying that a lot of times there are financial barriers to get into a passion.

541
00:29:22.542 --> 00:29:29.128
I think you raise a really interesting and useful point for this discussion, which is – and it's funny because I wrote an article.

542
00:29:29.249 --> 00:29:33.153
Ironically, I wrote an article in 2015 called Screw Finding Your Passion, which I argued that –

543
00:29:34.514 --> 00:29:39.778
you don't necessarily need to make your passion the thing that you also make most of your money.

544
00:29:39.798 --> 00:29:40.038
Yes.

545
00:29:41.019 --> 00:29:44.321
There are ways to, and I'm going to talk about this in a little bit.

546
00:29:44.462 --> 00:29:48.945
There are ways to take a job that's adjacent to a passion like token did.

547
00:29:50.006 --> 00:29:57.291
There are ways to simply use a steady day job that you don't hate to fund a passion.

548
00:29:57.832 --> 00:29:59.273
And I do think,

549
00:30:00.593 --> 00:30:04.375
There's probably kind of two subcategories of argument here.

550
00:30:04.515 --> 00:30:10.238
One is, does your passion need to be your primary profession or the primary way you make money?

551
00:30:13.195 --> 00:30:18.696
I'm much more amenable to that argument that that is probably not realistic for everybody.

552
00:30:18.736 --> 00:30:18.936
Right.

553
00:30:18.956 --> 00:30:19.576
For most people.

554
00:30:19.616 --> 00:30:20.297
For most people.

555
00:30:20.997 --> 00:30:27.258
I would make the argument that I think anybody in doubt of whether to pursue it or try it should probably try it.

556
00:30:28.138 --> 00:30:33.179
If for anything just to minimize future regrets, which is going to be part of my counter argument here in a minute.

557
00:30:33.499 --> 00:30:35.520
But I do think there is a kind of a branched.

558
00:30:36.660 --> 00:30:43.666
argument here or point that you're making, which is a lot of people can scratch this itch by doing it as a side thing.

559
00:30:43.726 --> 00:30:43.966
Yeah.

560
00:30:44.226 --> 00:30:44.326
Yeah.

561
00:30:44.346 --> 00:30:47.989
And it could be a side hustle or it could just be a hobby.

562
00:30:48.249 --> 00:30:49.230
And I agree with that.

563
00:30:49.430 --> 00:30:55.835
Like, I think having a passion in your life is, in my opinion, just kind of non-negotiable.

564
00:30:55.875 --> 00:31:00.799
Like you, everybody should have something in their life that they just, they enjoy simply for the sake of doing it.

565
00:31:01.019 --> 00:31:01.380
I agree.

566
00:31:01.860 --> 00:31:03.181
That's a hundred percent.

567
00:31:03.201 --> 00:31:04.122
Yeah.

568
00:31:05.082 --> 00:31:14.107
So when you say like, okay, the financial stability can buy you the space to pursue that, on the one hand, I'm like, yes, that is true.

569
00:31:15.907 --> 00:31:17.668
But is that the goal?

570
00:31:17.828 --> 00:31:19.309
Like is that ideal?

571
00:31:19.449 --> 00:31:19.749
Okay.

572
00:31:20.230 --> 00:31:30.835
You know, if you're a 22-year-old listening to this who's about to graduate from university and you're wondering which career path do I take, is that option A?

573
00:31:31.135 --> 00:31:34.677
Is like, okay, go get a desk job at an insurance company and then, you know –

574
00:31:35.057 --> 00:31:41.259
Enjoy your passion on the side or do take the shot and go and try to make the passion your thing.

575
00:31:41.519 --> 00:31:51.643
I would encourage most young people and even most older folks who are in a – who it's responsible to do it to take the shot and see where it goes.

576
00:31:53.343 --> 00:32:09.613
I will concede the point that you're making and I agree with it, but I would return it to the fundamental argument of like, you know, is this – if you are a young person or an older person, like you're at a fork in the road of like what career path do I choose?

577
00:32:11.274 --> 00:32:13.555
I would argue that that should not be the default choice.

578
00:32:13.675 --> 00:32:14.296
OK. OK.

579
00:32:15.534 --> 00:32:17.676
Yes, I mostly agree with that.

580
00:32:17.936 --> 00:32:18.777
You're absolutely right.

581
00:32:18.797 --> 00:32:20.599
If a 22-year-old comes to me and says, what should I do?

582
00:32:20.619 --> 00:32:22.320
I'm probably going to tell him, go for it, man.

583
00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:26.284
Like you said earlier, what's the difference between like a broke 22-year-old and a broke 25-year-old?

584
00:32:26.884 --> 00:32:27.144
Nothing.

585
00:32:27.184 --> 00:32:28.125
Take a few years and try it.

586
00:32:28.606 --> 00:32:30.067
If you've got to start over at 25, you can start over at 25.

587
00:32:30.087 --> 00:32:42.118
And honestly, as an employer, if I get a job application from a 25-year-old who did take a shot and tried to do the thing that they care about and failed at it, I will actually probably look at that.

588
00:32:42.898 --> 00:32:49.184
as more of a positive than a 25-year-old that worked some dead-end job at a desk that they hated.

589
00:32:49.424 --> 00:32:49.884
Definitely.

590
00:32:49.984 --> 00:32:50.585
Totally agree with that.

591
00:32:50.625 --> 00:32:50.885
Okay.

592
00:32:52.426 --> 00:33:02.235
The one, I guess, gray area, like when I was like 22, 23 trying to first figure out what I was going to do, I didn't have much of a backstop.

593
00:33:02.475 --> 00:33:03.716
You know, I've told you before.

594
00:33:03.736 --> 00:33:05.157
I came from pretty humble means.

595
00:33:05.177 --> 00:33:05.878
So I'm like, okay.

596
00:33:05.998 --> 00:33:06.158
Yep.

597
00:33:06.318 --> 00:33:07.780
I still had to balance that.

598
00:33:07.820 --> 00:33:08.000
Yep.

599
00:33:09.046 --> 00:33:12.608
I found a way eventually to be like, OK, I'm going to go after the things I need to go after.

600
00:33:12.728 --> 00:33:14.189
But I first had to take care of that.

601
00:33:14.269 --> 00:33:18.411
Again, going back to the Maslow's hierarchy and needs type thing, like I need a roof over my head first.

602
00:33:18.611 --> 00:33:19.251
Yeah.

603
00:33:19.311 --> 00:33:23.633
Because otherwise you're going to be so stressed out about all of that stuff that you're just not going to be able to find it.

604
00:33:23.653 --> 00:33:24.674
I agree when you're younger.

605
00:33:24.954 --> 00:33:25.234
Yes.

606
00:33:25.454 --> 00:33:26.995
There's a lot more leeway to that.

607
00:33:27.015 --> 00:33:31.057
And that's a whole discussion around like what stage of life you're at and everything we can get into.

608
00:33:31.830 --> 00:33:33.692
This is – I didn't plan to get into this.

609
00:33:33.732 --> 00:33:33.932
Yeah.

610
00:33:34.353 --> 00:33:37.116
But I do think it's probably worth bringing up.

611
00:33:37.276 --> 00:33:37.476
Yeah.

612
00:33:37.496 --> 00:33:39.379
Because I think that's a really important point.

613
00:33:39.419 --> 00:33:42.162
Like you grew up – you didn't have that backstop.

614
00:33:42.862 --> 00:33:43.804
I always knew I did.

615
00:33:43.824 --> 00:33:44.084
Yeah.

616
00:33:44.404 --> 00:33:47.908
Like when my business got tough, I moved back in with my mom for a year.

617
00:33:47.928 --> 00:33:48.329
Right, right.

618
00:33:48.349 --> 00:33:49.890
And like it wasn't really a problem.

619
00:33:49.910 --> 00:33:50.431
Mm-hmm.

620
00:33:50.791 --> 00:33:51.272
It sucked.

621
00:33:51.292 --> 00:33:51.892
Don't get me wrong.

622
00:33:51.912 --> 00:33:56.255
I didn't really want to be living with my mom at 25, but I did and it was okay.

623
00:33:56.455 --> 00:34:03.780
And I kind of always knew in the back of my mind, hey, worst case scenario, I just go live with mom and dad for a year or two and try to figure things out.

624
00:34:05.541 --> 00:34:06.282
So, yeah, if you –

625
00:34:07.318 --> 00:34:11.764
if you don't have that luxury or that privilege, it changes the calculus a certain amount.

626
00:34:11.824 --> 00:34:13.005
It also changes the calculus.

627
00:34:13.025 --> 00:34:16.209
If you're coming out of school with like heaps and heaps of debt, right?

628
00:34:16.229 --> 00:34:17.931
That, that changes the calculus as well.

629
00:34:17.951 --> 00:34:22.957
Like a hundred percent concede that the, the even having the option to pursue a passion is,

630
00:34:23.798 --> 00:34:27.942
as a career is to a certain extent, a bit of a luxury.

631
00:34:28.002 --> 00:34:28.222
Yes.

632
00:34:28.462 --> 00:34:28.602
Yeah.

633
00:34:28.642 --> 00:34:30.364
I'm more of a modern luxury too.

634
00:34:30.504 --> 00:34:33.227
I think for the longest time, this is the thing too.

635
00:34:33.587 --> 00:34:36.490
I don't think people quite understand is that we even have this option.

636
00:34:36.870 --> 00:34:37.270
Yes.

637
00:34:37.290 --> 00:34:38.251
To think about this, right.

638
00:34:38.291 --> 00:34:39.973
This is, this is a good problem to have.

639
00:34:40.013 --> 00:34:40.673
Yeah, for sure.

640
00:34:40.833 --> 00:34:41.214
Yeah.

641
00:34:42.115 --> 00:34:46.799
Anything else you want to say for your, your argument round two before, uh,

642
00:34:47.374 --> 00:34:50.736
One example I didn't throw in there from the writing world again, Ernest Hemingway.

643
00:34:51.416 --> 00:34:51.696
Right.

644
00:34:51.856 --> 00:34:52.176
OK.

645
00:34:53.017 --> 00:34:55.338
So one of the most famous American writers to live.

646
00:34:55.638 --> 00:34:55.858
Right.

647
00:34:56.458 --> 00:34:57.278
He was a journalist.

648
00:34:57.799 --> 00:34:59.179
That was his day job for the longest time.

649
00:34:59.199 --> 00:35:02.421
When he wrote many of the most famous works, he was still working as a journalist.

650
00:35:02.461 --> 00:35:02.601
Yeah.

651
00:35:02.801 --> 00:35:09.564
And this was a time when journalists, that was not a prestigious job like it is, like it was, would become seen and then, you know, kind of burn out.

652
00:35:10.064 --> 00:35:10.264
Right.

653
00:35:10.404 --> 00:35:11.905
But you didn't need a lot of times it was like.

654
00:35:12.772 --> 00:35:17.835
Maybe he had a high school education to be a journalist or a reporter back then.

655
00:35:17.855 --> 00:35:24.820
So even Hemingway, like he still had to have a job to pay the bills while he wrote some of the most – the greatest American novels there are.

656
00:35:25.180 --> 00:35:25.320
Yeah.

657
00:35:25.900 --> 00:35:26.080
There.

658
00:35:26.341 --> 00:35:26.561
OK.

659
00:35:27.401 --> 00:35:28.042
Totally fair.

660
00:35:28.702 --> 00:35:29.843
I hear you loud and clear.

661
00:35:29.903 --> 00:35:30.083
Yes.

662
00:35:30.463 --> 00:35:32.624
The survivorship bias is a very real thing.

663
00:35:32.644 --> 00:35:32.965
It's very real.

664
00:35:32.985 --> 00:35:33.165
Yeah.

665
00:35:33.805 --> 00:35:36.528
I would throw that back at you, though, a little bit.

666
00:35:36.848 --> 00:35:43.935
In that this idea that you have a safe, comfortable job that buys you money.

667
00:35:45.177 --> 00:35:52.718
the comfort to be able to pursue a passion on the side is potentially a little bit of survivorship bias as well.

668
00:35:53.038 --> 00:35:56.519
Again, I don't think a lot of people don't have that flexibility in their work.

669
00:35:57.079 --> 00:35:58.439
They don't have the time.

670
00:35:58.499 --> 00:36:04.080
They're juggling full-time job, family obligations.

671
00:36:04.120 --> 00:36:05.480
They got to take their kids to school.

672
00:36:05.520 --> 00:36:07.181
They've got health issues, all sorts of stuff.

673
00:36:07.641 --> 00:36:10.921
So I don't think it's as simple as you make the case.

674
00:36:11.902 --> 00:36:13.582
And again, I would come back to

675
00:36:15.102 --> 00:36:24.604
uh, that data point that, you know, almost 60% of the U S workforce is currently disengaged and uninterested in what they do on a, on a day-to-day basis.

676
00:36:24.624 --> 00:36:24.844
Yeah.

677
00:36:25.144 --> 00:36:25.324
Right.

678
00:36:25.404 --> 00:36:29.525
And I would imagine a very large percentage of those people do have dreams.

679
00:36:29.585 --> 00:36:30.566
They do have ambitions.

680
00:36:30.586 --> 00:36:32.206
They do have passions that they care about.

681
00:36:32.226 --> 00:36:36.107
Uh, and they, they probably struggle with the, the, the,

682
00:36:37.407 --> 00:36:41.630
Whether to pursue them, how much to pursue them, do they pursue them on the side, do they go all in?

683
00:36:41.670 --> 00:36:45.111
So it is like – I do think it is a complicated question.

684
00:36:45.792 --> 00:36:57.518
The other thing that I'll challenge a little bit, even though we did talk about the financial backstop and the need for financial stability to kind of launch yourself into a passion –

685
00:36:58.815 --> 00:37:03.437
I would argue that that is probably personality dependent.

686
00:37:03.717 --> 00:37:12.661
I think for every story you can find of somebody who kind of had that financial backstop or that cushion to work off of, you can find counter examples.

687
00:37:13.161 --> 00:37:17.123
Ironically, Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain's bandmate in Nirvana.

688
00:37:17.803 --> 00:37:20.625
tapped to, to try out to be drummer of Nirvana.

689
00:37:21.146 --> 00:37:35.758
He was, I believe he was living squatting in a abandoned warehouse in Amsterdam with like 20 other musicians, um, like literally sleeping with a leaky roof and, uh, like nothing to his name more than a sleeping bag and a couple of t-shirts.

690
00:37:36.018 --> 00:37:45.006
And if you listen to interviews with him, he was totally fine with – like he was perfectly happy, borderline homeless, didn't give a shit.

691
00:37:45.266 --> 00:37:46.267
He just wanted to play drums.

692
00:37:46.307 --> 00:37:50.331
So I think there are some people that are a little bit more built for it.

693
00:37:50.351 --> 00:37:51.311
Yeah.

694
00:37:52.312 --> 00:37:58.696
and built to handle the chaotic nature of that lifestyle who are totally fine.

695
00:37:58.736 --> 00:38:03.879
Just, all right, I'm going to be a starving artist for the rest of my life, and I'm okay with that.

696
00:38:03.939 --> 00:38:05.420
Okay, yeah.

697
00:38:05.440 --> 00:38:07.862
I went to music school with some guys that were definitely –

698
00:38:09.300 --> 00:38:11.941
I would say that it's that type of personality too.

699
00:38:12.001 --> 00:38:14.701
It's like it's more like they just can't not do it.

700
00:38:14.901 --> 00:38:15.121
Okay.

701
00:38:15.201 --> 00:38:15.361
Right?

702
00:38:15.421 --> 00:38:16.602
I was going to bring this up too.

703
00:38:16.642 --> 00:38:16.762
Yeah.

704
00:38:16.782 --> 00:38:31.625
Like when I think about some of the guys I went to music school with who continued on that path, like for them it was just a complete given of like I'm never – I'm almost guaranteed to never make more than like a middle class income.

705
00:38:31.645 --> 00:38:32.305
Right.

706
00:38:32.445 --> 00:38:32.966
But I don't care.

707
00:38:32.986 --> 00:38:34.008
But I can't not do this.

708
00:38:34.028 --> 00:38:34.188
Yes.

709
00:38:34.268 --> 00:38:36.012
This is the only thing I like.

710
00:38:36.072 --> 00:38:37.334
This is the only thing I want to do.

711
00:38:37.354 --> 00:38:39.458
It's the only thing I'm good at.

712
00:38:39.538 --> 00:38:40.459
I spend my time doing.

713
00:38:40.480 --> 00:38:40.580
Yeah.

714
00:38:40.620 --> 00:38:41.722
It's the only thing I care about.

715
00:38:42.417 --> 00:38:47.540
Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, the famous venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley.

716
00:38:48.280 --> 00:38:53.343
He said when they are evaluating whether to fund a business or not, they look at the founder.

717
00:38:53.443 --> 00:38:55.224
Like who the founder is is very important.

718
00:38:55.344 --> 00:38:55.504
Yes.

719
00:38:55.524 --> 00:39:00.807
And he said you can almost – he's like he's got it down to he can tell within just a few minutes.

720
00:39:01.187 --> 00:39:04.109
Is this person somebody who just – they can't do anything but this?

721
00:39:04.349 --> 00:39:04.529
Right.

722
00:39:04.569 --> 00:39:06.530
Like they can't not do it, what you're talking about.

723
00:39:07.111 --> 00:39:09.933
I totally agree that there is a personality type out there that's like that.

724
00:39:09.953 --> 00:39:10.954
And if that's you, that's great.

725
00:39:11.114 --> 00:39:13.056
I think the vast majority of people are not like that.

726
00:39:13.337 --> 00:39:15.719
They don't know what their passion is necessarily.

727
00:39:15.839 --> 00:39:18.282
And that's where they get confused with a lot of these things.

728
00:39:18.762 --> 00:39:19.082
Agreed.

729
00:39:19.162 --> 00:39:20.143
Yeah.

730
00:39:20.263 --> 00:39:23.086
So yeah, most people are somewhere in the middle and it's confusing.

731
00:39:23.527 --> 00:39:25.308
So picking up where you just –

732
00:39:26.009 --> 00:39:26.670
left that off.

733
00:39:27.350 --> 00:39:31.754
Um, I'll give you another example of somebody who seemed to not really give a fuck, which is, uh, Thoreau.

734
00:39:32.474 --> 00:39:37.699
Um, you know, went out and lived at Walden pond, gave up all of his possessions, lived on the land.

735
00:39:38.099 --> 00:39:38.339
Yeah.

736
00:39:38.379 --> 00:39:38.720
I, okay.

737
00:39:38.820 --> 00:39:41.622
Look, I think he was a bit of a poser too.

738
00:39:41.822 --> 00:39:42.283
Yeah.

739
00:39:42.963 --> 00:39:43.823
I love Thoreau.

740
00:39:43.843 --> 00:39:44.343
Don't get me wrong.

741
00:39:44.403 --> 00:39:47.684
I'm not shitting on Thoreau, but the story has got a lot of legend around it.

742
00:39:47.704 --> 00:39:48.284
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

743
00:39:48.325 --> 00:39:50.125
Let's – But go on.

744
00:39:50.145 --> 00:39:50.665
Sorry, sorry.

745
00:39:50.685 --> 00:39:51.885
Topic for another podcast.

746
00:39:51.905 --> 00:39:56.907
But yes, let's just say I am not the most sympathetic to Thoreau either, but he did make a very good point.

747
00:39:56.947 --> 00:40:00.968
And a huge point in Walden is that he believed that most people lived –

748
00:40:01.488 --> 00:40:16.702
what he called, quote, a half-lived life, which is that they spend most of their life doing the things that they should do for social approval and security, and meanwhile they either ignore or just are in complete denial about the things that they actually want from their lives.

749
00:40:17.523 --> 00:40:27.312
And I think one of the reasons Walden is so inspiring to so many people is that it kind of wakes that up in them of like, oh my God, there are these things that I want my life to be,

750
00:40:28.043 --> 00:40:34.787
that I've never allowed myself to consider that my life could have these things or could be built around these things.

751
00:40:37.367 --> 00:40:43.612
Similarly, there was a post that went mega, mega, mega viral maybe 15 years ago.

752
00:40:43.632 --> 00:40:46.174
It was called The Five Most Common Regrets of the Dying.

753
00:40:46.414 --> 00:40:58.203
It was written by a ward nurse who basically spent all of her days taking care of people who were terminal patients and who were about to die or on the cusp of death.

754
00:40:58.903 --> 00:41:04.187
And so she wrote the piece of the five most common regrets that she heard her patients talk about.

755
00:41:04.427 --> 00:41:12.334
And the number one regret is I wish I had lived for myself and not tried to make everybody else happy.

756
00:41:12.774 --> 00:41:14.515
That's the number one thing that comes up.

757
00:41:15.837 --> 00:41:22.406
The second one, which I think this could potentially support both of our arguments, is I wish I didn't work so much.

758
00:41:22.446 --> 00:41:24.048
I wish I didn't spend so much time at the office.

759
00:41:25.269 --> 00:41:31.538
And then number three was I wish I listened to my own feelings more and I wish I gave myself more credit.

760
00:41:31.998 --> 00:41:37.080
Like the love question, this is a question that for the vast majority of the population, it's not a simple yes or no.

761
00:41:37.100 --> 00:41:42.341
There's probably a small sliver of the population that it is just an obvious yes, pursue your passion.

762
00:41:42.821 --> 00:41:47.863
There's probably also a segment of the population that it's a very obvious, just be practical.

763
00:41:48.143 --> 00:41:53.885
You know, I do think the same way some people are built only to do the thing they're passionate about and can't really do anything else.

764
00:41:54.225 --> 00:41:58.046
I get the sense that there's a significant percentage of people in the world who are

765
00:41:58.846 --> 00:42:07.273
are totally fine just doing a random job for a paycheck and have no problem with it and are perfectly happy to like pursue their interests on the side.

766
00:42:07.854 --> 00:42:10.736
I think the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle.

767
00:42:10.816 --> 00:42:11.457
Yeah.

768
00:42:11.477 --> 00:42:25.048
And there's a whole spectrum there of people who are like, I wish I had a little bit more time for my passions, but I don't really need to uproot my whole life, to people who are like very tempted to uproot their whole life but are maybe a little bit scared and,

769
00:42:26.029 --> 00:42:34.356
Very concerned about the financial practicalities that are concerned, what people are going to think, whether it's, you know, they're going to fuck their career, all the, all this other stuff.

770
00:42:35.076 --> 00:42:35.237
Um,

771
00:42:36.255 --> 00:42:47.241
So for me, I just – I look at – I think it's those people, that large swath of people on that side of the spectrum that are probably showing up in these deathbed regrets.

772
00:42:48.442 --> 00:42:56.786
Those are the same people that are being addressed by Thoreau and that are the ones that pick up Walden in high school and are super inspired by it.

773
00:42:57.126 --> 00:43:03.250
There are a lot of people in that side of the spectrum that it – this is a very, very important and legitimate –

774
00:43:03.950 --> 00:43:12.211
topic and decision in conversation, I would argue that it is probably more valuable to minimize the chance of regret.

775
00:43:13.295 --> 00:43:20.239
than to maximize stability, security, you know, subjective well-being and whatnot.

776
00:43:20.539 --> 00:43:37.628
I think the same way you argue that passion can become a cage, can become obsessive, can become something that people are fixated on and to the detriment of other parts of their life, I think financial security can be its own form of cage that people can become overly fixated on.

777
00:43:38.028 --> 00:43:38.528
Yes.

778
00:43:39.709 --> 00:43:41.550
And it can control other parts of their life.

779
00:43:42.010 --> 00:43:53.036
You know, I think it's I do think there's a very real question of like if you told people, hey, you could make 10 or 20 percent less money, but you could enjoy your job 20 percent more.

780
00:43:53.476 --> 00:43:55.297
I think a lot of people would take that trade.

781
00:43:55.457 --> 00:43:58.859
I think there's a lot of nuance around the financial stability question.

782
00:43:59.780 --> 00:44:03.302
You know, it is another tension in this question of like.

783
00:44:04.702 --> 00:44:12.765
How much are you willing to trade off and how much of that trade off is likely to happen by pursuing the thing that you're passionate about?

784
00:44:12.785 --> 00:44:20.768
I mean one thing that we've kind of danced around a little is that some pursuits have more brutal trade offs than others.

785
00:44:21.048 --> 00:44:21.348
OK. Yeah.

786
00:44:21.368 --> 00:44:22.669
I want to bring this up too.

787
00:44:22.709 --> 00:44:23.209
Yeah.

788
00:44:23.249 --> 00:44:26.250
Because I work in a profession that is a brutal trade off.

789
00:44:26.330 --> 00:44:26.530
Right.

790
00:44:26.570 --> 00:44:26.850
It's like.

791
00:44:27.718 --> 00:44:34.241
For every author that hits it big, there's a thousand authors that starve and don't sell any books.

792
00:44:34.621 --> 00:44:39.964
For every podcaster that blows up, there's thousands of podcasters that never get downloaded by anybody.

793
00:44:40.464 --> 00:44:43.786
I keep tabs with a lot of the people that I went to music school with.

794
00:44:44.466 --> 00:44:50.729
And just through my work, I've been fortunate enough to meet a lot of professional musicians, a lot of guys in bands that I love.

795
00:44:51.681 --> 00:44:53.743
And I talk to them and I hear about the music industry.

796
00:44:53.763 --> 00:45:00.831
And every time I talk to people in the music industry about the music industry, my first thought is like, oh, my God, thank God I quit music.

797
00:45:01.011 --> 00:45:05.516
Like it is so much harsher than other creative fields.

798
00:45:05.616 --> 00:45:08.739
And I think from what I've heard too is that acting is even –

799
00:45:09.767 --> 00:45:10.728
harsher than that.

800
00:45:10.828 --> 00:45:16.751
Like in music, there's probably a few thousand people that make a really good living and then millions and millions and millions who don't.

801
00:45:17.591 --> 00:45:20.553
I think you get the acting and you're probably into- A few hundred, yeah.

802
00:45:20.573 --> 00:45:23.154
Yeah, a few hundred to maybe a thousand at most.

803
00:45:23.355 --> 00:45:26.797
And then there's millions that make nothing.

804
00:45:26.877 --> 00:45:27.097
Right.

805
00:45:27.497 --> 00:45:27.777
Right.

806
00:45:28.017 --> 00:45:31.919
So there's different power law curves.

807
00:45:31.959 --> 00:45:34.641
At least with writing, you can start a sub stack and maybe make-

808
00:45:35.201 --> 00:45:37.022
a couple thousand bucks a year or something.

809
00:45:37.042 --> 00:45:40.124
Like there's a lot of intermediary paths that you can pursue.

810
00:45:40.184 --> 00:45:50.611
So what would you tell somebody then going into one of those like 0.1% fields, I guess we can call them, music or acting or visual arts of some kind?

811
00:45:50.631 --> 00:45:51.591
Yeah.

812
00:45:52.652 --> 00:45:54.916
I mean I'm not going to – I wouldn't say don't do it.

813
00:45:55.597 --> 00:45:56.798
That's not the argument I'm making.

814
00:45:57.580 --> 00:46:00.845
But I think at a certain point, you probably do have to get practical, right?

815
00:46:01.185 --> 00:46:07.434
Like if you're not getting really bright lights at some point, you should – yeah, that's probably time to move on.

816
00:46:08.317 --> 00:46:10.359
I, so there's two ways I approach this.

817
00:46:10.459 --> 00:46:12.681
I've gotten asked this question quite a, quite a few times.

818
00:46:12.801 --> 00:46:13.002
Yeah.

819
00:46:13.482 --> 00:46:15.824
Um, there's two ways I approach it.

820
00:46:16.485 --> 00:46:18.467
One is to bring Elon back up.

821
00:46:18.487 --> 00:46:21.169
I think he made a fantastic point about entrepreneurship.

822
00:46:21.630 --> 00:46:22.651
So he was at a talk.

823
00:46:22.671 --> 00:46:23.652
This is a long time ago.

824
00:46:23.692 --> 00:46:24.372
He was at a talk.

825
00:46:25.293 --> 00:46:36.242
And he was doing a Q&A and somebody stood up and asked Elon, he said, what words of encouragement or support would you give to aspiring founders and entrepreneurs?

826
00:46:36.943 --> 00:46:42.127
And Elon said, I wouldn't give any because if you need encouragement, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur.

827
00:46:42.607 --> 00:46:46.290
I would say that like I kind of feel the same way about creatives.

828
00:46:47.197 --> 00:46:47.918
For the most part.

829
00:46:47.998 --> 00:46:58.046
Like if you are really going to try to be an actor like and you're asking people for words of support and encouragement, I don't think you're going to make it.

830
00:46:58.066 --> 00:46:59.727
Same thing as a professional musician.

831
00:47:00.548 --> 00:47:01.448
Same thing as an author.

832
00:47:01.528 --> 00:47:03.350
Like I get it.

833
00:47:03.450 --> 00:47:03.950
It's hard.

834
00:47:03.970 --> 00:47:06.372
And sometimes you want like emotional support or you want your friends.

835
00:47:06.412 --> 00:47:06.853
But it's like –

836
00:47:07.744 --> 00:47:11.908
you know, reaching out to a stranger and saying like, what can you tell me that's going to keep me going?

837
00:47:12.088 --> 00:47:15.532
It's like, well, if you need somebody to keep you going, you're...

838
00:47:15.552 --> 00:47:16.232
Especially a stranger.

839
00:47:16.493 --> 00:47:16.693
Yeah.

840
00:47:16.733 --> 00:47:16.973
Yeah.

841
00:47:17.113 --> 00:47:20.116
It's like, I'm sorry, but like, that's not it.

842
00:47:20.276 --> 00:47:21.037
Like, this isn't it.

843
00:47:21.378 --> 00:47:23.440
It's probably not going to happen.

844
00:47:23.540 --> 00:47:25.181
The second thing I tell people...

845
00:47:25.922 --> 00:47:27.904
Because, again, there's a lot of intermediary.

846
00:47:28.405 --> 00:47:32.730
You could build a substack that makes you a – that could become a nice side hustle.

847
00:47:32.910 --> 00:47:40.178
Or maybe your attempt to become a professional DJ, like you actually end up working in a studio as an engineer and you make a good living that way.

848
00:47:40.198 --> 00:47:42.500
And you like help produce other artists.

849
00:47:42.560 --> 00:47:46.465
And there's all sorts of like little side paths and stuff that you can end up on.

850
00:47:47.974 --> 00:48:00.964
What I usually tell people is I say – like let's say kind of a prototypical person who will approach me with this question is they're usually like late 20s, early 30s.

851
00:48:01.124 --> 00:48:07.609
And they're like, I've been giving this a good-hearted go for X years, 10 years, 5 years, 8 years, whatever.

852
00:48:08.389 --> 00:48:09.330
It's still not working.

853
00:48:10.471 --> 00:48:12.532
I'm getting really frustrated and burnt out.

854
00:48:13.553 --> 00:48:16.955
Um, how do I know when it's right to give up?

855
00:48:17.596 --> 00:48:24.781
And I always tell them, I'm like, give yourself a deadline because it does, that does two things for you.

856
00:48:25.141 --> 00:48:28.823
One is it gives, first of all, it gives yourself clarity, right?

857
00:48:29.043 --> 00:48:32.786
It's like, all right, I've got till my 30th birthday to make a living.

858
00:48:32.806 --> 00:48:32.886
Um,

859
00:48:33.386 --> 00:48:41.713
doing this or doing something related to it, you know, it's no longer hanging over your head as this unanswered question of like, oh my God, what am I doing with my life?

860
00:48:42.313 --> 00:48:47.798
The other thing it does is that once you have a deadline, now you have, now you know, you know,

861
00:48:48.943 --> 00:48:54.186
all right, I got to throw everything at the wall in the next two years, right?

862
00:48:54.286 --> 00:49:00.329
It's like this is the date and I'm not going to leave any stone unturned.

863
00:49:00.989 --> 00:49:03.411
And again, it comes back to regret minimization, right?

864
00:49:03.451 --> 00:49:03.931
It's just like –

865
00:49:05.308 --> 00:49:13.437
You try every fucking thing between now and then just to make sure that you leave yourself no regrets so that when you're on the other side of that deadline, you're like, you know what?

866
00:49:14.018 --> 00:49:15.059
I tried the music thing.

867
00:49:15.820 --> 00:49:16.741
I did everything I could.

868
00:49:16.761 --> 00:49:19.784
I did this.

869
00:49:19.824 --> 00:49:20.244
I did that.

870
00:49:20.364 --> 00:49:21.105
I did the other thing.

871
00:49:21.145 --> 00:49:21.766
I networked.

872
00:49:21.966 --> 00:49:22.927
I produced.

873
00:49:23.147 --> 00:49:24.048
I did a single.

874
00:49:24.128 --> 00:49:24.829
I went on tour.

875
00:49:24.909 --> 00:49:25.109
Like –

876
00:49:25.929 --> 00:49:26.650
None of it stuck.

877
00:49:27.170 --> 00:49:27.870
None of it worked.

878
00:49:28.531 --> 00:49:29.331
I gave it my best.

879
00:49:30.872 --> 00:49:31.913
I can die happy.

880
00:49:31.993 --> 00:49:32.213
Yeah.

881
00:49:32.253 --> 00:49:32.453
Right?

882
00:49:32.493 --> 00:49:34.595
Like I don't regret anything.

883
00:49:35.095 --> 00:49:35.675
Now I know.

884
00:49:35.695 --> 00:49:36.676
Okay.

885
00:49:36.696 --> 00:49:39.738
And I felt that way with music school.

886
00:49:39.798 --> 00:49:47.984
Like when I dropped out, I was like, I know I've given everything I can and I know that's not enough.

887
00:49:48.104 --> 00:49:48.284
Mm-hmm.

888
00:49:48.784 --> 00:49:50.265
So I'm actually okay leaving.

889
00:49:51.406 --> 00:50:05.114
I think if I hadn't given everything, if I hadn't put like really stretched the limit or like pushed up against the limit of my ability, I don't think I would have had that peace or as much peace with it.

890
00:50:05.754 --> 00:50:12.678
I struggled with it for a while, but it was – the decision to drop out was it was pretty clean cut.

891
00:50:12.838 --> 00:50:13.018
Yeah.

892
00:50:13.178 --> 00:50:13.439
Okay.

893
00:50:13.699 --> 00:50:13.959
Okay.

894
00:50:14.840 --> 00:50:17.642
One thing you said earlier too, I just want to come back to you just real quick.

895
00:50:17.882 --> 00:50:21.085
You said having like an adjacent job or something like that.

896
00:50:21.125 --> 00:50:27.931
And, you know, if you're a writer, you go into some sort of writing job that's at least pays the bills and then you do your passion writing on the side, all that.

897
00:50:28.491 --> 00:50:30.772
I'm not so sure about that one either.

898
00:50:32.533 --> 00:50:33.894
Steven Pressfield talks about this a little bit.

899
00:50:33.914 --> 00:50:35.774
He calls them shadow careers, right?

900
00:50:36.015 --> 00:50:41.677
Where a writer gets into like a technical writing job that they don't necessarily really like the writing, but it's a writing job.

901
00:50:41.717 --> 00:50:42.918
It's like, hey, I'm doing what I love.

902
00:50:42.938 --> 00:50:44.198
And it's like, well, no, you're not.

903
00:50:45.759 --> 00:50:49.181
And actually what you're doing is you're just kind of sapping energy from that passion.

904
00:50:49.781 --> 00:50:59.030
I think if you are going to take that route though, I think if you do want some sort of like a stable life of some kind and still be able to pursue that, I think there's also an argument to be made.

905
00:50:59.070 --> 00:50:59.830
Maybe that works for you.

906
00:51:00.051 --> 00:51:06.136
Again, that's a very personality dependent, but maybe taking a job that's in a completely unrelated field.

907
00:51:06.417 --> 00:51:12.382
There's a lot of like cab drivers who might be writers or whatever, driving DoorDash or whatever it is.

908
00:51:13.103 --> 00:51:15.265
I think there's maybe something to be said for that too.

909
00:51:15.445 --> 00:51:16.906
I think there's some more nuance here.

910
00:51:17.367 --> 00:51:19.829
Keep in mind too, I'm very much on this side of the spectrum.

911
00:51:19.849 --> 00:51:22.892
Like I was happy to just burn the boats and go all in.

912
00:51:23.012 --> 00:51:23.552
Right, right.

913
00:51:24.373 --> 00:51:25.454
That's very much your personality.

914
00:51:25.534 --> 00:51:25.794
Yes.

915
00:51:25.875 --> 00:51:30.279
And that's not typical, but – and it worked out for me, but that's also not typical.

916
00:51:30.899 --> 00:51:37.865
I am personally though biased towards what – also what Stephen Bresfield calls turning pro, which is that you block out a certain period.

917
00:51:37.906 --> 00:51:39.007
Maybe you save up some money.

918
00:51:39.127 --> 00:51:39.327
Yeah.

919
00:51:39.607 --> 00:51:40.828
You block out a certain period.

920
00:51:40.848 --> 00:51:46.630
You're like, okay, 20, 27, I'm going to turn pro at the thing I want to be pro at.

921
00:51:47.050 --> 00:51:50.712
And then you actually treat it like a job before it's a job, right?

922
00:51:50.752 --> 00:51:53.333
So you have working hours.

923
00:51:53.433 --> 00:51:55.654
You have rehearsals.

924
00:51:55.694 --> 00:51:56.794
You book your time.

925
00:51:56.834 --> 00:51:58.395
You start pricing everything.

926
00:51:58.455 --> 00:52:01.376
You like set aside a desk in the side of your house.

927
00:52:01.536 --> 00:52:03.817
You create a calendar for yourself.

928
00:52:03.877 --> 00:52:05.978
You create an email and a website for yourself.

929
00:52:05.998 --> 00:52:06.879
Like you basically –

930
00:52:07.759 --> 00:52:12.163
Act as though you're already a professional even though you're not a professional for two reasons.

931
00:52:12.323 --> 00:52:17.507
One is it gets you to actually act and behave in the way that's going to get you hired for stuff.

932
00:52:17.888 --> 00:52:25.854
And then two is that you're actually going to see what it's like to be a pro because this is another thing that comes up a lot, especially in creative fields, is that the people who –

933
00:52:27.316 --> 00:52:37.425
The person who dreams of being an author is – it's because they just really like their creative writing assignments at school and it's like they hate the rest of school but they don't hate this one part.

934
00:52:37.445 --> 00:52:42.510
So they confuse that as a passion or something they can do sustainably for the rest of their life.

935
00:52:42.550 --> 00:52:48.175
And it's like actually no, that's actually not your passion or that's not something that you're deeply passionate about.

936
00:52:49.296 --> 00:52:57.941
If you try to turn pro and you actually force yourself to sit down at a desk and write for at least four or six hours a day, what you'll soon discover is like, oh, I actually don't like being a pro at this.

937
00:52:58.221 --> 00:52:59.322
I like this as a hobby.

938
00:52:59.802 --> 00:53:00.963
And that happens a lot too.

939
00:53:02.244 --> 00:53:10.368
I think that was very much true with me with music, which is that I loved being the talented guitar guy at parties in high school.

940
00:53:10.568 --> 00:53:15.391
I liked being able to play in a rock band and play covers at my friend's parties and –

941
00:53:17.032 --> 00:53:18.353
I liked the attention it got me.

942
00:53:18.493 --> 00:53:23.156
Once I got to music school and I actually had to turn pro, it fucking sucked.

943
00:53:23.176 --> 00:53:23.516
Right, yeah.

944
00:53:23.536 --> 00:53:28.299
Because being a pro musician means you're alone in a room practicing all day, every day.

945
00:53:28.839 --> 00:53:30.720
And it was miserable.

946
00:53:30.900 --> 00:53:39.885
So it's going pro, as Stephen calls it, I think it's advantageous just because it forces the question.

947
00:53:39.945 --> 00:53:40.266
Okay.

948
00:53:40.426 --> 00:53:41.646
And then again, it's about –

949
00:53:42.947 --> 00:53:44.448
leaving no regrets on the table.

950
00:53:44.669 --> 00:53:44.869
Right.

951
00:53:44.929 --> 00:53:50.474
It's like that, even though that is sad and disappointing that it turns out you don't love the thing you thought you loved.

952
00:53:51.374 --> 00:53:56.499
Now, you know, for the, for the rest of your life, you're like, oh no, I tried, I tried the author thing.

953
00:53:56.579 --> 00:53:57.620
I tried writing a novel.

954
00:53:58.100 --> 00:53:59.221
Didn't, didn't work out.

955
00:53:59.341 --> 00:53:59.922
Didn't love it.

956
00:54:00.642 --> 00:54:02.804
And you can move on and be at peace with it.

957
00:54:02.964 --> 00:54:03.324
Okay.

958
00:54:03.444 --> 00:54:07.508
The last thing, the last point I'm going to make in this rebuttal is aggressive.

959
00:54:09.300 --> 00:54:12.503
I was like, you're not getting away that easily, mister.

960
00:54:12.764 --> 00:54:15.746
I do have one more point and I'm excited.

961
00:54:15.766 --> 00:54:18.129
I'm wagging my finger because it's a good one.

962
00:54:18.990 --> 00:54:27.098
I think the reason I keep focusing on the regret minimization is because you can recover from financial ruin.

963
00:54:27.838 --> 00:54:30.141
You can be – like you can lose your money.

964
00:54:31.405 --> 00:54:36.248
and you can make it back later, if you lose time, you can't go get that back.

965
00:54:36.308 --> 00:54:36.889
Yeah, true.

966
00:54:37.269 --> 00:54:37.449
Right?

967
00:54:38.030 --> 00:54:46.455
So if you're a 40, 50-year-old who always wanted to be an actor and never went for it, like, you can't get that back.

968
00:54:47.016 --> 00:54:48.097
Whereas if you go broke at 25,

969
00:54:50.823 --> 00:54:52.564
you can find ways to make the money back later.

970
00:54:52.704 --> 00:54:53.365
Yeah, that's fair.

971
00:54:53.565 --> 00:54:53.945
That's fair.

972
00:54:54.586 --> 00:54:59.330
I will say too, I mean, I'm not sure that still requires passion though necessarily.

973
00:54:59.370 --> 00:55:05.115
Like, you know, I left a stable graduate program, you know, to come work with you.

974
00:55:05.135 --> 00:55:06.356
I don't know.

975
00:55:06.516 --> 00:55:08.858
I mean, I guess I was passionate about writing.

976
00:55:08.878 --> 00:55:15.284
That's really what I wanted to do was something in the writing field and I loved self-development, self-help stuff was big time.

977
00:55:15.324 --> 00:55:15.964
I liked all that.

978
00:55:16.405 --> 00:55:17.185
I don't know if I would say,

979
00:55:18.465 --> 00:55:19.245
I liked research.

980
00:55:19.305 --> 00:55:19.425
Yeah.

981
00:55:19.485 --> 00:55:24.647
I mean, I guess there was passionate elements to it, but I wouldn't like, I don't know.

982
00:55:24.967 --> 00:55:29.648
I just find myself, I don't know if I have a lot of passions necessarily or just a lot of interests, I guess I would say.

983
00:55:30.628 --> 00:55:33.649
And so that decision definitely minimized regret for me.

984
00:55:33.749 --> 00:55:36.229
I'm not sure if it was really steeped in passion though.

985
00:55:36.369 --> 00:55:38.450
So I think there's some subtlety around that too.

986
00:55:38.610 --> 00:55:39.730
So that's the only thing I'll say about that.

987
00:55:40.110 --> 00:55:42.551
My observation, since we're talking about you.

988
00:55:42.691 --> 00:55:42.871
Yeah.

989
00:55:43.251 --> 00:55:46.252
My observation is that you're very passionate about parts of the job, not...

990
00:55:46.907 --> 00:55:47.207
Yeah.

991
00:55:47.327 --> 00:55:47.848
All of the jobs.

992
00:55:47.868 --> 00:55:48.408
That would, yeah.

993
00:55:48.628 --> 00:55:50.429
Which is true for me as well.

994
00:55:50.449 --> 00:55:50.930
Sure, sure.

995
00:55:50.990 --> 00:55:51.250
Yeah.

996
00:55:51.570 --> 00:55:56.553
And I think I've probably told you before that like I like, I don't know, 60, 70 percent of my job and the other 30 percent is what you pay me for.

997
00:55:58.635 --> 00:56:03.720
And I'm totally cool with that too because I've had it the other way where it's like I like 10 percent of this job and that's it.

998
00:56:03.740 --> 00:56:05.321
Well, for what it's worth, I feel the same way.

999
00:56:06.603 --> 00:56:07.023
Yeah, for sure.

1000
00:56:07.043 --> 00:56:08.604
And I made my own job.

1001
00:56:08.624 --> 00:56:09.746
Yeah, yeah.

1002
00:56:09.766 --> 00:56:10.907
You made your bed there, didn't you?

1003
00:56:11.627 --> 00:56:13.749
But I just – I do think some of that's inevitable.

1004
00:56:14.150 --> 00:56:14.310
Yeah.

1005
00:56:14.450 --> 00:56:16.452
But – And yeah, and I'm totally cool with that.

1006
00:56:16.572 --> 00:56:18.234
I guess – and that's a personality thing too.

1007
00:56:18.374 --> 00:56:20.476
Like I can put up with – I can put up with that.

1008
00:56:20.496 --> 00:56:20.816
Yeah.

1009
00:56:21.416 --> 00:56:22.396
In exchange for what I get.

1010
00:56:22.476 --> 00:56:24.937
No, but I mean I'm being serious.

1011
00:56:25.017 --> 00:56:25.737
Like I'm making the point.

1012
00:56:25.757 --> 00:56:30.018
Like even, you know, it's like coming back to Kurt Cobain.

1013
00:56:30.198 --> 00:56:33.059
Like he fucking hated dealing with the record labels.

1014
00:56:33.119 --> 00:56:34.439
He hated touring.

1015
00:56:34.499 --> 00:56:36.339
He hated promotional stuff.

1016
00:56:36.359 --> 00:56:37.520
He hated going on MTV.

1017
00:56:37.540 --> 00:56:48.442
Like he – there was so many – like part of what burnt him out, he's actually a very interesting case study here because he was obsessively passionate about the music.

1018
00:56:48.502 --> 00:56:48.662
Mm-hmm.

1019
00:56:49.182 --> 00:56:53.944
and about making the music, writing, recording, performing the music.

1020
00:56:54.745 --> 00:56:58.407
It was everything else that came when he got famous that he fucking hated.

1021
00:56:58.687 --> 00:57:01.908
It drove him to suicide.

1022
00:57:02.089 --> 00:57:03.749
Like he hated it so much.

1023
00:57:04.790 --> 00:57:06.691
So it is another one of those –

1024
00:57:08.551 --> 00:57:10.733
be careful what you wish for type things.

1025
00:57:10.773 --> 00:57:15.697
Like, you know, turn pro before you turn pro because then that's actually gonna show you, do you like doing this?

1026
00:57:16.297 --> 00:57:19.300
Do you actually enjoy the job or do you enjoy the fantasy of the job?

1027
00:57:23.648 --> 00:57:25.089
We've covered a lot of ground already.

1028
00:57:25.189 --> 00:57:29.573
So some of this is going to be retreading a little bit of the nuance that we already got into.

1029
00:57:29.694 --> 00:57:35.619
But I want to return to taking a job adjacent to the thing that you're passionate about because I do think there is a lot of value in that.

1030
00:57:36.900 --> 00:57:37.821
Again, it depends.

1031
00:57:37.901 --> 00:57:39.022
It's personal and everything.

1032
00:57:39.102 --> 00:57:39.282
But –

1033
00:57:40.296 --> 00:57:55.893
I think for a lot of people, one of the things that I think is very true among a lot of people is when you feel deprived of the thing you care about, you think that you need to go all in and you need to completely rebuild your entire life around the thing that you're passionate about.

1034
00:57:56.413 --> 00:57:57.334
When actually like...

1035
00:57:58.214 --> 00:58:05.038
If you just get a little bit of a taste of it here and there, a lot of, I think for a lot of people, that's enough.

1036
00:58:06.319 --> 00:58:13.743
And again, like not to rely too much on anecdote, but like a number of my friends in music school, they have ended up in jobs adjacent to music.

1037
00:58:13.923 --> 00:58:16.765
Like they're not on stage performing at large festivals.

1038
00:58:17.485 --> 00:58:30.476
but they're working in a recording studio or they're a sound engineer at a media company or they're like a music director at like a large organization or at a church or something like that.

1039
00:58:30.536 --> 00:58:38.963
So it is – they have ended up in places adjacent to where they wanted to end up, but it is not exactly where they wanted to end up.

1040
00:58:39.103 --> 00:58:40.624
And the reason I bring this up is because –

1041
00:58:41.605 --> 00:58:43.747
Passion is actually a very fluid thing.

1042
00:58:43.927 --> 00:58:50.033
I think we tend to erroneously think of passion kind of the same way a lot of people think of soulmates.

1043
00:58:50.553 --> 00:58:56.298
Like you have this one fixed passion out in the world and I have to find it and I have to live it.

1044
00:58:56.739 --> 00:58:59.321
And if I don't, then my life is ruined.

1045
00:58:59.902 --> 00:59:04.746
And that's just a very Disney way of approaching passion in one's life.

1046
00:59:04.766 --> 00:59:05.827
I very much agree with that, yes.

1047
00:59:06.027 --> 00:59:08.288
It is – passion is complex.

1048
00:59:09.409 --> 00:59:10.329
It evolves.

1049
00:59:10.410 --> 00:59:11.090
It changes.

1050
00:59:11.410 --> 00:59:11.930
It shifts.

1051
00:59:11.990 --> 00:59:12.931
It changes shape.

1052
00:59:13.091 --> 00:59:14.432
It changes intensity.

1053
00:59:15.953 --> 00:59:23.137
It is – and it is something that as you go through your work life, it can – it is something that you can almost –

1054
00:59:23.977 --> 00:59:26.338
mold around what is available to you.

1055
00:59:27.458 --> 00:59:43.445
So as an argument for pursuing that adjacent position, I actually have a really great example of this, is that Jane Goodall originally took a secretarial job around animal researchers and,

1056
00:59:44.516 --> 00:59:50.338
Not because she wanted to be the world's preeminent primatologist, not because she like particularly cared about monkeys.

1057
00:59:50.718 --> 00:59:54.240
She just really liked exotic African animals.

1058
00:59:54.300 --> 00:59:56.181
She thought they were really cool and really interesting.

1059
00:59:56.221 --> 00:59:59.362
And so she took a secretarial job adjacent to that.

1060
00:59:59.842 --> 01:00:08.231
It was through her exposure in that job to all the different things that researchers were doing that she became incredibly interested in what was going on around her.

1061
01:00:08.791 --> 01:00:22.646
And then the real breakthrough is when she started observing chimpanzees frequently and started noticing that chimpanzees, very similar to humans, seem to have their own personalities and character traits and different proclivities and whatnot.

1062
01:00:23.166 --> 01:00:29.054
She would eventually go on and become the world's preeminent primatologist, a legend in her field.

1063
01:00:29.875 --> 01:00:32.318
But that was never the plan at the outset.

1064
01:00:32.438 --> 01:00:40.609
It was she just put herself in the vicinity of something she thought was pretty cool and was very interesting and she enjoyed thinking about it.

1065
01:00:41.290 --> 01:00:45.312
In many cases, you were referring to earlier, like people who don't know what they're passionate about.

1066
01:00:46.012 --> 01:00:51.936
I think that is probably the practical solution for most people is what do you think is cool?

1067
01:00:52.036 --> 01:00:53.156
What do you think is interesting?

1068
01:00:53.256 --> 01:00:55.377
What do you like to spend your time thinking about?

1069
01:00:55.677 --> 01:00:55.998
Awesome.

1070
01:00:56.158 --> 01:01:03.902
Like find a job that gives you more opportunities to think about that thing or be around that thing than most other jobs.

1071
01:01:04.838 --> 01:01:21.022
As a result, you create surface area for yourself to grow and develop a passion for something rather than necessarily like coming to it with this like preformed passion, which I honestly think is probably pretty rare.

1072
01:01:21.082 --> 01:01:24.623
Like I think examples like your ex-girlfriend, she's the exception.

1073
01:01:24.643 --> 01:01:25.584
100%.

1074
01:01:25.624 --> 01:01:30.025
Like most people don't wake up and know that they want to be something when they're three years old.

1075
01:01:30.905 --> 01:01:35.349
and pursue that for the rest of their life, most people, it's things come and go, right?

1076
01:01:35.389 --> 01:01:39.413
Like your obsession when you're a teenager is different than your obsession in your 20s.

1077
01:01:39.473 --> 01:01:42.055
And then you develop a slightly different obsession in your 30s.

1078
01:01:42.095 --> 01:01:43.997
And then you get really into something else.

1079
01:01:44.578 --> 01:01:48.962
Like throughout my career, I've watched my passion shift and change quite a bit.

1080
01:01:49.002 --> 01:01:50.903
You know, early on, it was very much writing.

1081
01:01:51.104 --> 01:01:56.088
Like my ideal career, you know, 10, 12 years ago when you started was –

1082
01:01:57.169 --> 01:02:03.913
I just want to write all day and I just want all this other stuff to work without me having to think about it.

1083
01:02:04.513 --> 01:02:10.816
And for many years, you and Philip basically ran the online business and I just wrote.

1084
01:02:11.276 --> 01:02:13.137
And that was how my life was.

1085
01:02:13.638 --> 01:02:17.560
As I've gotten older and my career has changed and shifted, I've been a little bit of a lot of time.

1086
01:02:18.540 --> 01:02:27.768
I found myself kind of thrust, you know, with doing video content and social media being more important and launching this podcast.

1087
01:02:27.808 --> 01:02:36.256
You know, I've found myself in the middle of like this little media company and I've had to spend a lot more of my time and energy focused on business.

1088
01:02:36.837 --> 01:02:40.520
And what I've discovered is that I actually really like the business side of business.

1089
01:02:40.620 --> 01:02:41.140
this career.

1090
01:02:41.160 --> 01:02:41.280
Right.

1091
01:02:41.661 --> 01:02:43.482
And it's super interesting to me.

1092
01:02:43.502 --> 01:02:49.145
And, and in many ways, like, and I still love writing, but it's, it's not as, as,

1093
01:02:50.429 --> 01:02:51.649
It's not my one and only, right?

1094
01:02:51.669 --> 01:02:55.790
It's not my soulmate that I like, I have to only do that for the rest of my life.

1095
01:02:55.830 --> 01:03:01.572
So it is, I've definitely felt my passion within my own career shift and evolve over time.

1096
01:03:02.192 --> 01:03:05.132
And I think that's probably true for, for, for most people.

1097
01:03:05.212 --> 01:03:13.334
And so I think it's just the reasonable way to approach passion isn't to just ditch everything and go all in on your acting aspirations.

1098
01:03:14.095 --> 01:03:18.716
It's probably put yourself adjacent to it, put yourself in the vicinity of it.

1099
01:03:20.576 --> 01:03:23.502
and then let it kind of grow and emerge as a side effect.

1100
01:03:24.652 --> 01:03:26.313
There's so many more examples of this.

1101
01:03:26.373 --> 01:03:37.921
I mean, I won't bore the listeners too much, but like Trent Reznor started as an engineer in a recording studio and he played in a 80s band on the side.

1102
01:03:37.941 --> 01:03:39.202
Oh yeah, I remember you showed me these videos.

1103
01:03:39.242 --> 01:03:40.343
I remember this, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1104
01:03:40.583 --> 01:03:45.246
And he worked these long hours in the recording studio and he was always the last to leave.

1105
01:03:45.306 --> 01:03:50.189
And so it was, he decided some of those nights, like it was him by himself in the recording studio.

1106
01:03:50.209 --> 01:03:52.171
He's like, well, why don't I just throw tape on the,

1107
01:03:52.791 --> 01:04:15.619
on the machine and record some of my own songs and see what happens and that eventually became his first album like it didn't it wasn't like this like predestined thing that he decided when he was 10 and every every choice he made throughout his life led to it it was just kind of like he was really good in the recording studio and as a side effect of that it made him it made it quite easy for him to record his first album okay yeah

1108
01:04:16.512 --> 01:04:16.912
I'm sorry.

1109
01:04:16.972 --> 01:04:19.554
Are you arguing still for passion or pragmatism here?

1110
01:04:19.574 --> 01:04:24.517
That sounded like one big be pragmatic argument.

1111
01:04:24.697 --> 01:04:26.098
Be passionate pragmatically.

1112
01:04:26.278 --> 01:04:27.158
Okay.

1113
01:04:27.619 --> 01:04:30.780
It's – let me point something out, I guess.

1114
01:04:31.101 --> 01:04:31.201
Yeah.

1115
01:04:31.221 --> 01:04:32.201
The Jane Goodall story.

1116
01:04:32.882 --> 01:04:33.742
You're absolutely right.

1117
01:04:33.762 --> 01:04:34.623
She got into something.

1118
01:04:34.643 --> 01:04:35.783
She found her passion through that.

1119
01:04:35.843 --> 01:04:39.786
She was in a kind of adjacent – she was on the periphery of the field anyway.

1120
01:04:39.806 --> 01:04:40.966
And then, oh, I like this thing.

1121
01:04:41.427 --> 01:04:43.588
She was also – she got a Leakey Foundation grant.

1122
01:04:43.608 --> 01:04:43.728
Yeah.

1123
01:04:44.590 --> 01:04:50.772
That provided her with some stability to be able to kind of play around in this area and figure out what she liked.

1124
01:04:51.332 --> 01:04:55.613
Trent Reznor was a sound engineer, worked as a sound engineer while he did this.

1125
01:04:56.413 --> 01:04:59.994
I'm hearing an argument for pragmatism first is what I'm hearing.

1126
01:05:00.014 --> 01:05:05.255
My argument here is that passion is something that can evolve and develop.

1127
01:05:06.395 --> 01:05:11.139
After you've taken that first step, you don't have to wait for the passion to take that first step.

1128
01:05:11.180 --> 01:05:16.965
You can take the first step in the direction that you think it's very, very likely the passion is.

1129
01:05:17.665 --> 01:05:20.688
And then the passion will evolve and develop from there.

1130
01:05:20.788 --> 01:05:22.069
So take that first step.

1131
01:05:23.073 --> 01:05:32.703
and take a pragmatic approach to finding out what area, the specifics of the passion.

1132
01:05:32.803 --> 01:05:39.951
The reason I bring this up to something like almost 50% of our waking hours as an adult is spent doing our job.

1133
01:05:40.612 --> 01:05:44.516
And it's not a difficult argument to say that liking what you do for work is,

1134
01:05:44.696 --> 01:05:47.317
is a very, very big value for your life.

1135
01:05:47.457 --> 01:05:47.657
Right.

1136
01:05:48.057 --> 01:05:58.662
So there is like a, a very serious sense of fulfillment and satisfaction, like a huge part of your subjective wellbeing probably comes from how satisfied you are with your job and your career.

1137
01:05:58.682 --> 01:05:58.902
Yes.

1138
01:05:59.382 --> 01:06:07.565
My point is, is, you know, we've been kind of dancing around this argument of like, you know, passion is too risky.

1139
01:06:07.685 --> 01:06:09.846
You have to kind of throw things by the wayside.

1140
01:06:09.886 --> 01:06:12.227
You got to be willing to like live and be broke.

1141
01:06:13.108 --> 01:06:13.208
Um,

1142
01:06:14.317 --> 01:06:17.839
Financial stability is important.

1143
01:06:18.499 --> 01:06:24.122
My point is that you can pursue passion in a piecemeal type of way.

1144
01:06:24.342 --> 01:06:27.764
You don't necessarily have to throw caution to the wind.

1145
01:06:28.724 --> 01:06:30.385
It's that lifelong fulfillment.

1146
01:06:30.785 --> 01:06:36.088
And you can accept the same way a lifelong marriage to somebody is.

1147
01:06:36.823 --> 01:06:38.263
not every year is a great year.

1148
01:06:38.363 --> 01:06:43.905
You go through high times and low times and it kind of, the marriage shifts and changes and evolves over time.

1149
01:06:44.265 --> 01:06:45.985
I think the same is true with one's passion.

1150
01:06:46.526 --> 01:07:00.209
And my only point, my argument here is that as long as you are doing something that you feel strongly about and that you care about, you will always find a way to evolve and kind of do that dance with it.

1151
01:07:00.609 --> 01:07:03.130
Whereas if you're doing something that you hate,

1152
01:07:03.955 --> 01:07:14.044
or don't like, or don't care about, and you're in a position, like let's say Jane Goodall didn't give a shit about monkeys, and was just like, just give me my paycheck, boss.

1153
01:07:14.084 --> 01:07:20.529
And then the foundation grant comes in, or like an opening comes in for like a new research position, or whatever.

1154
01:07:21.410 --> 01:07:22.671
She's not gonna jump at that.

1155
01:07:22.691 --> 01:07:25.734
She's not gonna put her hand up and say, well wait, can I try that?

1156
01:07:25.834 --> 01:07:28.096
Like, she's probably just gonna be like, whatever.

1157
01:07:28.356 --> 01:07:30.618
You know, it's, there's,

1158
01:07:32.397 --> 01:07:40.284
There's a certain amount of adaptability that comes with caring about the thing that you're working on that is going to serve you well over the long run.

1159
01:07:40.905 --> 01:07:53.256
That is going to make you make the career more sustainable, help you develop skills over a longer time horizon and basically be better at and enjoy more what you do.

1160
01:07:53.396 --> 01:07:53.616
Yes.

1161
01:07:53.797 --> 01:07:54.017
Yeah.

1162
01:07:54.677 --> 01:07:55.898
I don't disagree.

1163
01:07:55.958 --> 01:08:01.380
And I'm not saying like passion is just irrelevant in any way, shape or form.

1164
01:08:01.620 --> 01:08:05.522
I think it is very important and you should use it and you should fuel your motivation with it, all of that.

1165
01:08:06.308 --> 01:08:15.575
I'm just not so sure that, you know, what you're talking about is like this long-term fulfillment, a long-term satisfaction with your work specifically is kind of what we're talking about.

1166
01:08:15.615 --> 01:08:16.436
Oh, it doesn't have to be.

1167
01:08:16.756 --> 01:08:17.597
You acknowledge that too.

1168
01:08:18.217 --> 01:08:22.800
I'm just not so sure that passion is what actually fuels that in particular.

1169
01:08:22.900 --> 01:08:26.563
And I don't think it necessarily fuels whether or not you enjoy your job.

1170
01:08:26.984 --> 01:08:27.404
It can.

1171
01:08:27.544 --> 01:08:30.166
That can be a source of fulfillment in your work.

1172
01:08:30.246 --> 01:08:34.309
I would argue it's probably the most sustainable way to enjoy your job.

1173
01:08:34.449 --> 01:08:34.849
Okay.

1174
01:08:35.090 --> 01:08:35.390
Okay.

1175
01:08:36.649 --> 01:08:37.550
Yeah, OK.

1176
01:08:38.211 --> 01:08:39.193
I could see that argument.

1177
01:08:39.433 --> 01:08:46.603
I just think that this still though in the exploration of that passion, just like with Jane Goodall or Trent Reznor.

1178
01:08:47.328 --> 01:08:50.630
They still were doing that from a very stable base.

1179
01:08:51.311 --> 01:08:54.874
They found a way to enter into it from a very stable base.

1180
01:08:54.894 --> 01:08:55.114
Yes.

1181
01:08:55.594 --> 01:08:55.834
Yes.

1182
01:08:55.934 --> 01:08:57.696
And then they could go in and they could play around with it.

1183
01:08:57.736 --> 01:08:58.176
Yes.

1184
01:08:58.816 --> 01:09:07.543
So what I'm saying is like if they just followed their passion, quote unquote, they knew they were passionate about this field.

1185
01:09:07.983 --> 01:09:09.444
They had an idea, okay?

1186
01:09:09.464 --> 01:09:09.765
Right.

1187
01:09:09.785 --> 01:09:11.927
Which a lot of people don't, for one.

1188
01:09:12.087 --> 01:09:12.367
Okay?

1189
01:09:12.387 --> 01:09:14.869
So you do have to do some experimentation around that.

1190
01:09:15.129 --> 01:09:21.935
My argument is play around in a field or an area where you can have some stability.

1191
01:09:23.056 --> 01:09:28.041
And that allows – that stability is what gives you freedom to explore that passion.

1192
01:09:28.101 --> 01:09:30.443
That's kind of my – I think my argument here is –

1193
01:09:31.255 --> 01:09:31.596
Okay.

1194
01:09:31.816 --> 01:09:34.898
It sounds like we're in a you say potato, I say potato situation.

1195
01:09:34.918 --> 01:09:36.199
We are converging at the same point, I think.

1196
01:09:36.300 --> 01:09:39.282
Yeah, because I agree with that.

1197
01:09:39.422 --> 01:09:41.364
I just characterize it differently, right?

1198
01:09:41.404 --> 01:09:53.674
So it's like I imagine, I don't know this for sure, but I imagine Trent Reznor's thought process when becoming a sound engineer at a studio was not, oh, this will give me a steady paycheck so I can see what comes next.

1199
01:09:53.794 --> 01:09:54.655
It was probably like...

1200
01:09:55.888 --> 01:09:56.529
I love music.

1201
01:09:56.629 --> 01:09:57.610
I love technology.

1202
01:09:57.950 --> 01:10:03.717
This is the best opportunity I've come across so far that that allows me to to leverage those things and work on them.

1203
01:10:04.398 --> 01:10:09.984
Like, I don't think he felt any lack of passion around being a sound engineer in a studio.

1204
01:10:10.665 --> 01:10:16.531
It's not what he became most well known for, but it is still very much a huge part of what he does as a career today.

1205
01:10:16.551 --> 01:10:17.212
Yeah.

1206
01:10:17.312 --> 01:10:18.533
Jane Goodall, same thing.

1207
01:10:18.553 --> 01:10:27.898
I think there's – she knew she found animals really interesting and she liked being – she liked thinking about them, talking about them, being around them, right?

1208
01:10:27.918 --> 01:10:33.141
So it's like she put herself in the vicinity of something that she thought was exciting and interesting.

1209
01:10:33.161 --> 01:10:38.124
I don't think it was – I mean there was probably a million secretarial jobs she could have taken.

1210
01:10:38.784 --> 01:10:44.429
But she chose that one because that was the one she was that was adjacent to something that she was really interested in.

1211
01:10:44.529 --> 01:10:46.430
So, like, I hear you.

1212
01:10:47.031 --> 01:11:00.342
And I guess one way to characterize this is that I am conceding that, like, yes, you don't need to go the full fuck it, live in an abandoned warehouse like Dave Grohl path to passion.

1213
01:11:00.943 --> 01:11:03.284
You can you can find a foothold.

1214
01:11:03.965 --> 01:11:26.020
that's a little bit more practical, like being a sound engineer or, you know, getting a job in an office, that is adjacent or in the vicinity of the thing that you are actually deeply passionate or interested in as a way to like, as an entry point or as a way to give yourself surface area to like grow into that area of interest.

1215
01:11:26.320 --> 01:11:29.282
So it is – it is –

1216
01:11:30.701 --> 01:11:38.983
part emerging of our points, but I would say that the initial motivation and drive is very much on the passion side of the spectrum.

1217
01:11:39.044 --> 01:11:39.465
It's not-

1218
01:11:40.783 --> 01:11:44.126
Like they're not doing it because like, oh, well, I just needed a paycheck.

1219
01:11:44.386 --> 01:11:44.746
Yes.

1220
01:11:45.047 --> 01:11:46.068
OK.

1221
01:11:46.328 --> 01:11:46.908
I get that.

1222
01:11:47.609 --> 01:11:49.250
Maybe we'll get into this a little bit later too.

1223
01:11:49.290 --> 01:11:53.454
But like this gets into like kind of how does passion develop as well.

1224
01:11:53.734 --> 01:11:53.894
Yes.

1225
01:11:53.934 --> 01:11:54.175
Right.

1226
01:11:54.775 --> 01:11:57.017
Maybe we'll save that here for next round.

1227
01:11:57.117 --> 01:12:04.604
But I go back to this point that I made though that if you are in an unstable situation, it is just very hard to –

1228
01:12:05.244 --> 01:12:06.846
Like be fueled by passion.

1229
01:12:06.926 --> 01:12:08.807
I think for most people, there's exceptions.

1230
01:12:08.827 --> 01:12:09.228
I get that.

1231
01:12:09.248 --> 01:12:10.889
But the exception is not the rule.

1232
01:12:11.550 --> 01:12:12.391
Instability.

1233
01:12:12.891 --> 01:12:16.335
Like if you're starting from a point of instability, it's just hard.

1234
01:12:16.795 --> 01:12:21.199
It's like long term, that is going to weigh on you more than, oh, I followed my passion.

1235
01:12:21.820 --> 01:12:28.686
The financial stress, the stress of knowing whether or not you're going to make it, all of that weighs on you.

1236
01:12:29.639 --> 01:12:33.000
can bring you down just as much as a soul-sucking stable job, I think.

1237
01:12:33.320 --> 01:12:33.540
Sure.

1238
01:12:33.881 --> 01:12:34.981
At some point, at least.

1239
01:12:35.121 --> 01:12:35.361
Sure.

1240
01:12:35.621 --> 01:12:45.725
And so I think you do have to – I think for most people, exploring passions, exploring whatever you want to call it – again, we go back to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

1241
01:12:45.965 --> 01:12:51.507
You need to have some stable base from which to explore and from which you can –

1242
01:12:52.507 --> 01:12:54.890
Self-actualize even to as Maslow would put it.

1243
01:12:55.090 --> 01:12:55.270
Right.

1244
01:12:55.450 --> 01:12:56.371
That comes later.

1245
01:12:56.431 --> 01:12:59.795
But you have to have all these other things taken care of first for most people.

1246
01:12:59.835 --> 01:13:00.735
Not all of them.

1247
01:13:00.796 --> 01:13:01.696
It's never going to be perfect.

1248
01:13:01.736 --> 01:13:02.237
I get that.

1249
01:13:02.257 --> 01:13:04.940
You have to take some risks and you have to put yourself out there.

1250
01:13:05.240 --> 01:13:05.821
That's fine.

1251
01:13:06.621 --> 01:13:12.768
I'm just saying that for most people, they're going to do best when they have a stable foundation from which they can explore.

1252
01:13:13.548 --> 01:13:14.109
That's my point.

1253
01:13:15.522 --> 01:13:17.143
Isn't that the same point you made earlier though?

1254
01:13:17.283 --> 01:13:26.626
It is, but I bring it up again because if you're talking about long-term fulfillment, you're talking about – yes, you probably will look back and you're like, I made some mistakes.

1255
01:13:26.666 --> 01:13:28.007
I had some failures, this and that.

1256
01:13:28.027 --> 01:13:31.068
And you look back on those as kind of badge of honor if you made it through.

1257
01:13:32.228 --> 01:13:34.749
But I mean if you don't – like where –

1258
01:13:37.722 --> 01:13:42.063
What does it mean if you get to the end of your life and you tried your passion but like everything failed?

1259
01:13:42.143 --> 01:13:43.504
You lived in miserable poverty.

1260
01:13:44.744 --> 01:13:45.904
Nothing came to fruition.

1261
01:13:46.544 --> 01:13:48.765
There's plenty of stories like that, right?

1262
01:13:49.345 --> 01:13:49.765
What then?

1263
01:13:50.506 --> 01:13:50.846
You know?

1264
01:13:50.906 --> 01:13:56.827
I mean I just don't think passion is what should guide these decisions from the outset.

1265
01:13:56.987 --> 01:13:58.708
I think you can find passion later.

1266
01:13:59.548 --> 01:14:02.711
I just think you need to do it from like somewhat of a stable base.

1267
01:14:02.731 --> 01:14:03.712
It doesn't have to be perfect.

1268
01:14:03.732 --> 01:14:04.853
I'm not saying that.

1269
01:14:05.373 --> 01:14:13.480
I'm just saying that most people are going to need some form of stability in order to even find their passion and discover it.

1270
01:14:13.620 --> 01:14:15.622
Again, I go back to my example of like the woodworking.

1271
01:14:15.662 --> 01:14:20.026
I probably wouldn't have found that passion had I not had the resources to buy a bunch of expensive tools.

1272
01:14:20.106 --> 01:14:20.326
Yeah.

1273
01:14:20.466 --> 01:14:20.727
Right.

1274
01:14:20.907 --> 01:14:34.480
Well, now, now I feel like you and I are speaking to two different audiences because I, I feel like I'm speaking to the audience of people who have something that they, they're really passionate about and really interested in, but either don't have the courage or the, the,

1275
01:14:36.083 --> 01:14:45.549
the knowledge or, or don't have the starting point to like actually give it a shot or, or see or on like know what is a realistic way to, to pursue it.

1276
01:14:45.909 --> 01:14:54.514
I feel like you're speaking more to the people who don't maybe don't have a clear passion, but they also don't really love what they're doing now.

1277
01:14:55.734 --> 01:14:57.455
But they don't really know what the alternative is.

1278
01:14:57.616 --> 01:15:01.098
And so I, I think, I think your point is valid to those people.

1279
01:15:01.118 --> 01:15:01.498
Yeah.

1280
01:15:02.223 --> 01:15:02.403
Right?

1281
01:15:02.423 --> 01:15:12.428
Like if you are somebody who has no idea what you want to do, you have no idea what you like, then yeah, you should probably pay your bills first and like then start worrying about this stuff a little bit more.

1282
01:15:12.889 --> 01:15:23.714
Whereas like I'm speaking more to the people who they do have something that they deeply love and they do have something that like they really think about what if I found a job in that or what if I tried there?

1283
01:15:23.774 --> 01:15:25.395
What if I really went all in on it?

1284
01:15:25.455 --> 01:15:26.356
How far could I go?

1285
01:15:26.436 --> 01:15:27.336
Could I make it work?

1286
01:15:27.396 --> 01:15:28.417
Could I figure something out?

1287
01:15:29.417 --> 01:15:30.438
So, okay.

1288
01:15:30.900 --> 01:15:32.341
That I can get on board with that.

1289
01:15:32.401 --> 01:15:32.642
Okay.

1290
01:15:32.722 --> 01:15:32.962
Yeah.

1291
01:15:33.302 --> 01:15:37.305
I'd guess that it's more common that people just don't even know what their passions are necessarily.

1292
01:15:37.966 --> 01:15:43.471
Or they don't have a clear passion where it's very clear on what they should be doing about it.

1293
01:15:44.151 --> 01:15:51.437
Gets into another kind of point too that I think a lot of people use passion kind of as a stand-in for clarity.

1294
01:15:51.457 --> 01:15:52.578
You know what I mean?

1295
01:15:52.598 --> 01:15:55.761
Like that's what they're really looking for is clarity on what to do.

1296
01:15:56.021 --> 01:15:59.024
And if like passion gives them that emotional clarity basically –

1297
01:15:59.764 --> 01:16:03.085
And again, I just don't think that that's a sustainable long-term strategy.

1298
01:16:03.165 --> 01:16:03.865
Yeah.

1299
01:16:03.885 --> 01:16:13.908
I feel like most people do know what they're passionate about, but I think a lot of people, a large percentage of people who know what they're passionate about, I think they have a comfortable relationship with what they're passionate.

1300
01:16:13.928 --> 01:16:19.469
So for instance, like one of my best friends back home, he's extremely passionate about dancing and he's great at it.

1301
01:16:20.649 --> 01:16:23.170
And he even has like a little bit of a side hustle teaching it.

1302
01:16:25.053 --> 01:16:26.614
But he seems to have a great relationship with it.

1303
01:16:26.634 --> 01:16:37.002
Like he has a day job and then he like does all these like dance competitions and stuff on weekends and travels around the country to do them and books his vacations around them.

1304
01:16:38.122 --> 01:16:40.684
But he seems to have a very healthy relationship with it.

1305
01:16:40.704 --> 01:16:41.185
It's not –

1306
01:16:41.805 --> 01:16:46.407
He doesn't seem to have any aspirations of like trying to be a full-time dancer for the rest of his life.

1307
01:16:46.907 --> 01:16:52.609
He's like, no, I've got this really cool gig and I get to go to these cool events and I've got a bunch of friends, like a nice community.

1308
01:16:53.789 --> 01:17:03.393
So I agree with you that I think a lot of people have a healthy, like they've found a healthy slot in their life to like put their passion into.

1309
01:17:03.413 --> 01:17:08.135
And I think there's a lot of people that their passion is just purely a hobby, much like you in woodworking.

1310
01:17:10.881 --> 01:17:26.434
But I do think there is a category of person that hates their job, has something that they're very passionate about, has something that they maybe gave up, maybe regret not trying harder, maybe not – maybe wish they pursued a little bit more seriously.

1311
01:17:26.475 --> 01:17:29.377
And like this becomes an extremely salient question.

1312
01:17:29.597 --> 01:17:30.478
OK. OK.

1313
01:17:30.878 --> 01:17:38.505
So, OK. What would you say then to someone – let's say they're going to university or they're in grad school or something like that for –

1314
01:17:39.262 --> 01:17:39.562
I don't know.

1315
01:17:39.582 --> 01:17:40.783
It could be in any field.

1316
01:17:40.803 --> 01:17:43.625
But what they're really passionate about is say they're baking.

1317
01:17:44.366 --> 01:17:46.347
They love pastries and breads and all of this.

1318
01:17:46.568 --> 01:17:48.769
And so they decide to drop out and go start a bakery.

1319
01:17:49.330 --> 01:17:49.610
Okay.

1320
01:17:50.230 --> 01:17:55.434
And then two or three years later, they're just like completely stressed out because they're running this business.

1321
01:17:55.935 --> 01:17:57.276
This is a false dichotomy.

1322
01:17:57.356 --> 01:17:57.776
Okay.

1323
01:17:57.836 --> 01:18:02.399
This is a bit of a straw man because it's like you don't have to drop out of school to start –

1324
01:18:03.240 --> 01:18:05.722
experimenting with baking professionally.

1325
01:18:06.162 --> 01:18:09.724
It is as simple as... That's my point too.

1326
01:18:09.984 --> 01:18:10.885
Yes.

1327
01:18:12.166 --> 01:18:18.470
I'm glad you bring this up because I think a lot of people struggle with this question because of this false dichotomy.

1328
01:18:18.930 --> 01:18:20.872
If you're a grad student who's

1329
01:18:22.053 --> 01:18:25.537
like working really hard in school and you love baking, you're really passionate about it.

1330
01:18:25.957 --> 01:18:28.781
There's a way to experiment with both of those things simultaneously.

1331
01:18:28.821 --> 01:18:37.932
Like you can take part of your weekend, bake like a motherfucker, bring it to your classes, give it to a bunch of your classmates, ask them, you know,

1332
01:18:38.232 --> 01:18:40.532
Maybe sell it for five bucks per pastry or whatever.

1333
01:18:40.893 --> 01:18:41.973
See if people will pay you.

1334
01:18:42.133 --> 01:18:44.813
See if it's good enough that people are like, hell yeah, give me another one.

1335
01:18:45.093 --> 01:18:46.814
Like that's an easy way to test out.

1336
01:18:46.854 --> 01:18:57.756
That way you test out A, if there's market demand and B, you test out, do you actually like spending your entire Saturday doing this for people, seeing their response, getting feedback, trying to improve it.

1337
01:18:58.236 --> 01:19:01.937
So it is, there's so many ways to like test the waters with this stuff.

1338
01:19:02.037 --> 01:19:02.177
Mm-hmm.

1339
01:19:02.597 --> 01:19:09.424
And I do think the all or nothing mentality around this does more damage.

1340
01:19:09.844 --> 01:19:10.645
That I would definitely agree.

1341
01:19:10.845 --> 01:19:14.509
It harms – it definitely makes this decision harder for people.

1342
01:19:14.549 --> 01:19:14.849
Right.

1343
01:19:14.990 --> 01:19:15.390
I agree.

1344
01:19:15.410 --> 01:19:16.591
There's a bit of a false dichotomy.

1345
01:19:16.611 --> 01:19:18.553
It's not just passion or pragmatism.

1346
01:19:18.813 --> 01:19:21.756
Again, like I said, though, finding that balance is like the hard part.

1347
01:19:21.836 --> 01:19:21.956
Right.

1348
01:19:21.976 --> 01:19:22.137
Right.

1349
01:19:22.854 --> 01:19:23.814
But yeah, I don't know.

1350
01:19:23.854 --> 01:19:26.736
Maybe this is a good time too to bring up some Cal Newport and talk about Cal.

1351
01:19:26.976 --> 01:19:27.216
Sure.

1352
01:19:28.436 --> 01:19:32.258
One of my favorite books that he wrote anyway is So Good They Can't Ignore You.

1353
01:19:32.378 --> 01:19:32.518
Yeah.

1354
01:19:32.578 --> 01:19:35.700
And it really does address this question in a lot of different ways.

1355
01:19:35.760 --> 01:19:35.960
Yeah.

1356
01:19:36.020 --> 01:19:38.681
Now Cal definitely comes out of, he's a computer programmer.

1357
01:19:38.761 --> 01:19:42.483
He's a very systematic thinker, computer programmer and writer, right?

1358
01:19:42.563 --> 01:19:42.863
Yeah.

1359
01:19:43.403 --> 01:19:46.004
Writes books on productivity and all of that kind of stuff.

1360
01:19:47.004 --> 01:19:49.586
But his day job is a computer programmer at Georgetown.

1361
01:19:49.726 --> 01:19:49.886
Yeah.

1362
01:19:49.906 --> 01:19:50.626
Went to MIT.

1363
01:19:50.686 --> 01:19:52.327
He's a very smart guy, very accomplished.

1364
01:19:52.467 --> 01:19:52.707
Yeah.

1365
01:19:53.091 --> 01:19:57.136
Probably followed his passion in some way or another, but he's very much a practical guy at the same time.

1366
01:19:57.597 --> 01:20:00.861
He talks about – in that book, he talks about building career capital.

1367
01:20:01.422 --> 01:20:04.505
And I think this is probably most applicable for a lot of people.

1368
01:20:04.565 --> 01:20:06.107
Those two groups you were talking about –

1369
01:20:06.935 --> 01:20:09.959
The kind of people who got into something, maybe you've got a decent job.

1370
01:20:09.999 --> 01:20:10.840
It pays pretty well.

1371
01:20:11.401 --> 01:20:12.502
You're good at it too.

1372
01:20:12.662 --> 01:20:14.545
And it's not like soul sucking necessarily.

1373
01:20:14.845 --> 01:20:16.707
But you're like, ah, there's got to be something more.

1374
01:20:16.907 --> 01:20:17.188
Yes.

1375
01:20:17.248 --> 01:20:17.468
Right?

1376
01:20:17.889 --> 01:20:24.537
A lot of times what he argues too, especially like in the software development field or anybody who's in kind of one of those types of jobs, a white collar job.

1377
01:20:25.115 --> 01:20:26.596
They like their job enough.

1378
01:20:27.216 --> 01:20:31.498
They get enough satisfaction out of it, but they're always kind of like, ah, there's probably something over here.

1379
01:20:31.678 --> 01:20:31.878
Yeah.

1380
01:20:32.059 --> 01:20:35.140
An example he gives is like somebody who's like maybe a – I don't know.

1381
01:20:35.380 --> 01:20:37.541
They're a database engineer or something like that.

1382
01:20:37.561 --> 01:20:41.423
But what they really want to do is like front-end web development or something like that.

1383
01:20:41.503 --> 01:20:42.984
It's related, but they want to change.

1384
01:20:43.064 --> 01:20:43.264
Yeah.

1385
01:20:43.444 --> 01:20:44.705
He argues, no, don't do that.

1386
01:20:44.725 --> 01:20:49.447
You've built up all these years in your life of this – what he calls career capital.

1387
01:20:49.908 --> 01:20:52.329
And he says get so good at that they can't ignore you.

1388
01:20:52.349 --> 01:20:54.790
That's where the title comes from.

1389
01:20:55.290 --> 01:21:06.599
And then what you do is you leverage those skills that you have now, these high value, value-added skills that you have, and you leverage that into a lifestyle that is fulfilling for you.

1390
01:21:07.239 --> 01:21:14.605
So if you're talking about long-term fulfillment just in general, again, I'm just not sure if passion has to factor so heavily into the equation.

1391
01:21:15.305 --> 01:21:18.627
What he argues for – and I understand this is probably a certain type of person.

1392
01:21:19.028 --> 01:21:22.150
What he argues for is using that career capital you have.

1393
01:21:22.610 --> 01:21:24.572
Then you say you've worked at this job.

1394
01:21:24.692 --> 01:21:25.492
You've worked at it.

1395
01:21:25.532 --> 01:21:26.333
You went to university.

1396
01:21:26.353 --> 01:21:27.494
You worked really hard in university.

1397
01:21:27.954 --> 01:21:28.534
Got this job.

1398
01:21:28.554 --> 01:21:29.595
You're working really hard at it.

1399
01:21:29.815 --> 01:21:30.436
You keep learning.

1400
01:21:30.456 --> 01:21:34.719
You get better at it until you're so good that like you're almost indispensable to the company.

1401
01:21:35.099 --> 01:21:38.521
Now you can go to the company and be like, hey, I want to work my own schedule.

1402
01:21:38.541 --> 01:21:39.481
I want a flexible schedule.

1403
01:21:39.501 --> 01:21:42.683
Or I only want to work six months out of the year and I'll give you those six months.

1404
01:21:42.703 --> 01:21:46.584
But then the other six months out of the year, I'm going to go hiking in New Zealand or whatever.

1405
01:21:47.305 --> 01:21:58.890
That, I think, is a pretty practical way to live a very fulfilling life and have long-term fulfillment in your work and maybe even explore your passions in those times where you get to leverage some time off or something like that.

1406
01:21:58.910 --> 01:22:01.031
You get to negotiate some leverage time off.

1407
01:22:01.671 --> 01:22:06.894
If you ever try to work six months a year, I will drive to Colorado and fucking kill you.

1408
01:22:06.974 --> 01:22:07.975
There goes my idea.

1409
01:22:09.655 --> 01:22:11.356
Don't you get any ideas, Drew Burt.

1410
01:22:11.396 --> 01:22:12.017
It was funny.

1411
01:22:12.057 --> 01:22:13.398
I started thinking lately.

1412
01:22:13.458 --> 01:22:18.740
I was like – his idea though is like – again, we're talking about long-term fulfillment right now.

1413
01:22:18.981 --> 01:22:24.464
His idea is actually for long-term fulfillment, maybe what you really need to do is think about – think more in short term.

1414
01:22:25.425 --> 01:22:26.986
What do you want your days to look like?

1415
01:22:27.767 --> 01:22:28.067
Right?

1416
01:22:28.628 --> 01:22:37.196
And if you can get so good at your job that you get a lot of leverage over your schedule, you can kind of craft your life this way as long.

1417
01:22:37.296 --> 01:22:42.661
But you have to have that nice stable base, right, that I'm talking about from which to negotiate from.

1418
01:22:43.422 --> 01:22:46.124
So, yeah, I'm not going to ask for six months off of it.

1419
01:22:46.264 --> 01:22:54.007
Okay, so all the back-end developers who come back after their six-month sabbatical and discover Cloud Code took their jobs.

1420
01:22:55.967 --> 01:22:58.248
He wrote that book in 2012, all right?

1421
01:22:58.328 --> 01:23:00.029
He didn't see that one coming.

1422
01:23:00.129 --> 01:23:04.710
Okay, now we've bled into round four here.

1423
01:23:04.990 --> 01:23:06.051
Let's get into it.

1424
01:23:06.191 --> 01:23:08.811
We've kind of bled into your round four argument.

1425
01:23:09.592 --> 01:23:09.912
I have...

1426
01:23:10.855 --> 01:23:18.017
I have a rebuttal to that and then I'm actually going to bring up another one of Cal's points in that book.

1427
01:23:18.137 --> 01:23:18.357
Yeah.

1428
01:23:18.577 --> 01:23:18.777
Yeah.

1429
01:23:19.037 --> 01:23:19.517
Oh, yeah.

1430
01:23:19.537 --> 01:23:20.658
He could definitely go either way.

1431
01:23:21.218 --> 01:23:21.618
I'm sure.

1432
01:23:21.838 --> 01:23:22.338
No, no, no, no.

1433
01:23:22.418 --> 01:23:27.940
I think there's some very interesting nuance and distinctions that should be made here because what you said is not wrong.

1434
01:23:28.080 --> 01:23:28.360
Yeah.

1435
01:23:28.460 --> 01:23:31.021
I don't think – I think in that narrow context, right?

1436
01:23:31.081 --> 01:23:32.121
You're a back-end developer.

1437
01:23:32.141 --> 01:23:32.941
You're really good.

1438
01:23:33.481 --> 01:23:34.922
You want to get in the front-end development.

1439
01:23:37.113 --> 01:23:38.874
Yeah, his advice is probably correct.

1440
01:23:38.894 --> 01:23:39.395
Right, right.

1441
01:23:39.575 --> 01:23:43.337
It's – And I think that can be applied to a lot of people.

1442
01:23:44.438 --> 01:23:45.619
So that's where I disagree.

1443
01:23:45.679 --> 01:23:48.921
Like I think it's very – I think that advice is very context specific.

1444
01:23:48.941 --> 01:23:50.762
And I'll give you a couple reasons why.

1445
01:23:51.002 --> 01:24:00.749
Because it's – first of all, that is a person who has developed career capital in one area and wants to pivot into a very adjacent area.

1446
01:24:00.809 --> 01:24:02.270
So a very similar skill set.

1447
01:24:02.310 --> 01:24:03.231
Yeah.

1448
01:24:04.065 --> 01:24:09.969
What do you tell a person who's become very good as a back-end developer and is like, I fucking hate computer programming.

1449
01:24:10.069 --> 01:24:10.309
Yeah.

1450
01:24:10.649 --> 01:24:11.570
I hate programming.

1451
01:24:11.610 --> 01:24:12.330
I hate code.

1452
01:24:12.350 --> 01:24:13.151
They're good at it.

1453
01:24:13.291 --> 01:24:14.031
I hate software.

1454
01:24:14.072 --> 01:24:14.252
Yeah.

1455
01:24:14.532 --> 01:24:14.972
What do I do?

1456
01:24:15.152 --> 01:24:15.352
Yeah.

1457
01:24:15.552 --> 01:24:15.733
Right?

1458
01:24:15.813 --> 01:24:18.875
Like, that's not – you tell them to get so good they can't ignore you.

1459
01:24:18.975 --> 01:24:20.536
Like, no, you don't tell them that.

1460
01:24:21.496 --> 01:24:22.177
It doesn't apply.

1461
01:24:22.557 --> 01:24:28.021
And the other thing, the other caveat here is like that is great advice for extremely talented people.

1462
01:24:28.041 --> 01:24:28.741
Yeah.

1463
01:24:29.041 --> 01:24:32.804
Um, but it is not everybody is extremely talented.

1464
01:24:32.844 --> 01:24:35.366
Not everybody can be so good that they can't be ignored.

1465
01:24:35.386 --> 01:24:35.706
That's true.

1466
01:24:35.726 --> 01:24:38.848
You know, programming is an incredibly competitive field.

1467
01:24:39.529 --> 01:24:50.457
Um, there's plenty of fields that like you can be very good at, but it's very unlikely you're going to get to a place that you're so good that you can take six months off and your boss is going to be like, awesome.

1468
01:24:50.477 --> 01:24:50.937
Sounds good.

1469
01:24:51.017 --> 01:24:51.418
That's fair.

1470
01:24:51.678 --> 01:24:54.500
It's like, you have to be fucking world class.

1471
01:24:55.842 --> 01:24:56.243
do that.

1472
01:24:56.343 --> 01:25:03.856
And Cal's audience is full of like the computer programmer types and the graphic designers or whatever, people who are working those white-collar high-paying jobs.

1473
01:25:03.897 --> 01:25:06.842
Yeah, and I joked about Claude Code, but like,

1474
01:25:07.745 --> 01:25:11.968
Back when that book was written, there was a massive shortage of programmers.

1475
01:25:11.988 --> 01:25:12.288
Right.

1476
01:25:12.328 --> 01:25:12.549
Yeah.

1477
01:25:12.589 --> 01:25:12.769
Right.

1478
01:25:12.809 --> 01:25:18.873
So it's like if you were a plus programmer, you probably could go to your boss and be like, you know what?

1479
01:25:19.194 --> 01:25:19.414
Yeah.

1480
01:25:19.694 --> 01:25:20.795
It was the height of white collar work.

1481
01:25:20.895 --> 01:25:21.195
Yeah.

1482
01:25:21.215 --> 01:25:21.395
Yeah.

1483
01:25:21.435 --> 01:25:22.116
It's like, you know what?

1484
01:25:22.136 --> 01:25:23.817
I think I'm going to go to New Zealand for a few months.

1485
01:25:23.837 --> 01:25:24.438
Why don't you?

1486
01:25:25.859 --> 01:25:27.180
We'll pick this back up when I come back.

1487
01:25:27.220 --> 01:25:29.822
Like today, if you tried to do that today.

1488
01:25:29.842 --> 01:25:29.942
Yeah.

1489
01:25:31.401 --> 01:25:32.483
Like, good luck, dude.

1490
01:25:32.863 --> 01:25:35.587
AI is happy to take over your work.

1491
01:25:35.847 --> 01:25:39.512
Well, in unrelated news, we can cancel that meeting for after this.

1492
01:25:39.552 --> 01:25:40.153
Okay.

1493
01:25:41.936 --> 01:25:46.762
That really important thing you wanted to talk to me about is so long, no longer necessary.

1494
01:25:46.782 --> 01:25:47.583
Yeah.

1495
01:25:52.923 --> 01:25:53.763
Let's get into round four.

1496
01:25:53.783 --> 01:25:54.304
Round four.

1497
01:25:54.324 --> 01:25:54.784
All right.

1498
01:25:55.264 --> 01:25:59.526
And round four, what we're talking about here is what causes passion, actually.

1499
01:25:59.626 --> 01:25:59.906
Okay.

1500
01:25:59.926 --> 01:26:01.467
This is what I'm going to bring up anyway.

1501
01:26:01.607 --> 01:26:02.427
Awesome.

1502
01:26:02.587 --> 01:26:04.048
And we've been flirting around this.

1503
01:26:04.488 --> 01:26:05.929
Jesus Christ causes my passion.

1504
01:26:06.109 --> 01:26:06.429
Yes.

1505
01:26:06.929 --> 01:26:07.810
The big JC.

1506
01:26:09.335 --> 01:26:13.299
My argument really here is that passion isn't found.

1507
01:26:13.600 --> 01:26:15.121
You don't – and you've even already said this.

1508
01:26:15.161 --> 01:26:15.822
I agree with this.

1509
01:26:15.882 --> 01:26:16.403
It's not found.

1510
01:26:16.563 --> 01:26:17.404
It is developed.

1511
01:26:17.424 --> 01:26:18.064
It's developed, yes.

1512
01:26:18.104 --> 01:26:18.445
Okay?

1513
01:26:18.965 --> 01:26:25.913
And back to my old argument, you develop that from a place – you develop that best from a place of stability for most people.

1514
01:26:26.233 --> 01:26:29.016
You got your random loose cannons like you.

1515
01:26:29.176 --> 01:26:29.516
I get it.

1516
01:26:30.317 --> 01:26:31.919
So most people are not like that though.

1517
01:26:31.959 --> 01:26:36.124
Most of us have to develop a passion in some way and I think all passions are actually developed.

1518
01:26:36.584 --> 01:26:39.267
But take – here's an example.

1519
01:26:39.828 --> 01:26:41.850
Angela Duckworth, famous in psychology.

1520
01:26:41.890 --> 01:26:44.553
She came up with the idea for grit, the concept of grit, right?

1521
01:26:44.753 --> 01:26:44.973
Right.

1522
01:26:45.894 --> 01:26:49.877
Um, her dad had a very fixed mindset around what people are good at.

1523
01:26:49.897 --> 01:26:51.638
It's like, you're either good at something or you're not.

1524
01:26:51.698 --> 01:26:51.939
Yes.

1525
01:26:52.139 --> 01:26:52.519
That's it.

1526
01:26:52.619 --> 01:26:57.543
And so he was always telling her, Hey, Angela, you're no genius, you know, so you're gonna have to work really hard at something and this and that.

1527
01:26:57.783 --> 01:26:58.263
Well, she did.

1528
01:26:59.044 --> 01:27:01.445
She didn't go to grad school until she was in her thirties.

1529
01:27:01.646 --> 01:27:01.846
Okay.

1530
01:27:01.886 --> 01:27:02.226
Okay.

1531
01:27:02.306 --> 01:27:13.714
And then she found out, Oh my God, I'm incredibly passionate about psychology and not only that, but all these around motivation and, uh, resilience and all of these things that go into what she eventually formulated as grit.

1532
01:27:13.874 --> 01:27:14.094
Yep.

1533
01:27:14.174 --> 01:27:14.355
Right.

1534
01:27:14.375 --> 01:27:14.755
Yeah.

1535
01:27:15.563 --> 01:27:17.304
That took a very long time for her to develop.

1536
01:27:17.684 --> 01:27:21.767
And I think that's just – that's how it goes for almost all of us.

1537
01:27:22.047 --> 01:27:25.750
I could – I wasn't – I did not know what I was passionate about even when I got out of college.

1538
01:27:25.770 --> 01:27:28.912
I was just like, I know I'm interested in a lot of different things, which is part of it.

1539
01:27:28.932 --> 01:27:29.232
Right.

1540
01:27:29.272 --> 01:27:30.112
But that's only part of it.

1541
01:27:30.693 --> 01:27:32.174
You have to get out and experiment a lot.

1542
01:27:32.194 --> 01:27:35.716
And I know you agree with that for the most part.

1543
01:27:35.856 --> 01:27:36.036
Right.

1544
01:27:36.556 --> 01:27:42.320
In psychology, they talk about kind of the fixed versus developed passion.

1545
01:27:42.600 --> 01:27:42.800
Yeah.

1546
01:27:42.840 --> 01:27:44.842
It's kind of found versus developed, right?

1547
01:27:44.862 --> 01:27:45.302
Yeah.

1548
01:27:45.760 --> 01:28:01.003
And they've shown like – so Carol Dweck was in on this study as well, also a famous psychologist, where they ran these studies that people who believe that passions are innate, they have this fixed idea of it and they're just like waiting to be discovered.

1549
01:28:01.023 --> 01:28:01.704
They're out there somewhere.

1550
01:28:01.724 --> 01:28:02.644
They just need to find it.

1551
01:28:03.024 --> 01:28:07.125
They're more likely to expect kind of this effortless motivation.

1552
01:28:08.045 --> 01:28:11.348
And abandoned new interest wants to be – they lose interest in them.

1553
01:28:11.588 --> 01:28:11.848
Right.

1554
01:28:11.908 --> 01:28:15.912
Whereas people with a more like, oh, passions are developed are much more likely to stick with it.

1555
01:28:16.112 --> 01:28:16.272
Yeah.

1556
01:28:16.512 --> 01:28:19.174
And find that passion and grow their passion.

1557
01:28:19.314 --> 01:28:19.514
Right.

1558
01:28:19.655 --> 01:28:20.515
In those activities.

1559
01:28:20.775 --> 01:28:21.096
Okay.

1560
01:28:21.716 --> 01:28:27.841
Cal also argues that competence is actually what is the basis for passion.

1561
01:28:28.001 --> 01:28:28.121
Yeah.

1562
01:28:28.141 --> 01:28:28.442
Okay.

1563
01:28:28.482 --> 01:28:32.585
So getting really good at something, you like it more if you're better at.

1564
01:28:32.645 --> 01:28:40.029
See, this is what I think is the genius of that book is that in self-determination theory, like there's a theory of motivation.

1565
01:28:40.049 --> 01:28:46.373
Like there's a lot of studies and data around people who pursue excellence.

1566
01:28:47.794 --> 01:28:49.955
become intrinsically motivated around that, right?

1567
01:28:49.995 --> 01:28:54.398
And you could argue that like a lot of what we experience as passion is an intrinsic motivation.

1568
01:28:54.458 --> 01:28:57.460
It's just a desire to do a thing for the sake of doing the thing.

1569
01:28:57.901 --> 01:29:07.847
And so I think the genius of Cal's argument is that by trying to be so good that they ignore you, by reorienting your focus away from money and away from –

1570
01:29:09.708 --> 01:29:20.279
passion, quote unquote, and just towards being excellent, just being extremely good at this one thing, the passion emerges as a side effect, which I agree with that.

1571
01:29:20.319 --> 01:29:30.831
That's like, to me, that is, I think, not to derail you too much, but like, I think passion develops in a number of different ways, but I think the pursuit of excellence is absolutely one of them.

1572
01:29:30.851 --> 01:29:30.951
Yeah.

1573
01:29:31.571 --> 01:29:31.772
Yeah.

1574
01:29:32.642 --> 01:29:33.603
Yes, it is.

1575
01:29:34.704 --> 01:29:38.548
But they've also shown like there's a process to this as well.

1576
01:29:38.768 --> 01:29:39.049
Okay.

1577
01:29:39.489 --> 01:29:42.312
So for instance, there's some research done.

1578
01:29:42.332 --> 01:29:45.115
There's these four phases of passion development.

1579
01:29:45.235 --> 01:29:45.535
Okay.

1580
01:29:46.276 --> 01:29:48.358
One of them is a triggered situational interest.

1581
01:29:48.378 --> 01:29:50.701
So you just come across something that interests you.

1582
01:29:50.721 --> 01:29:51.121
Yep.

1583
01:29:51.201 --> 01:29:55.065
And if you repeatedly run into that, you engage with it more.

1584
01:29:55.105 --> 01:29:56.286
You become more interested with it.

1585
01:29:56.546 --> 01:29:59.168
And you have that maintained situational interest too.

1586
01:30:00.189 --> 01:30:00.530
Okay.

1587
01:30:00.790 --> 01:30:03.572
So you actively seek it out at that point.

1588
01:30:03.632 --> 01:30:05.874
You might not be passionate, but you're just curious still about it.

1589
01:30:06.795 --> 01:30:11.797
Emerging individual interest is when you begin to engage on your own, just independently.

1590
01:30:11.817 --> 01:30:12.417
You ask questions.

1591
01:30:12.437 --> 01:30:14.538
You enjoy the learning process for the sake of itself.

1592
01:30:15.118 --> 01:30:18.679
And then that develops into a more well-developed passion over time.

1593
01:30:18.999 --> 01:30:34.284
Angela Duckworth also had something kind of achievement and long-term achievement is achieved through kind of an initial interest, through practicing it, finding purpose in it, and then hope, what she calls hope, which is just perseverance and resilience through all that.

1594
01:30:34.324 --> 01:30:35.205
But it's developed.

1595
01:30:35.245 --> 01:30:39.328
The point is that all of these models that they come with, it is developed.

1596
01:30:39.849 --> 01:30:41.190
So I would say, yeah, go ahead.

1597
01:30:41.210 --> 01:30:42.251
Pay attention to your interests.

1598
01:30:42.271 --> 01:30:42.811
What sparks you?

1599
01:30:42.831 --> 01:30:43.612
That was the same thing with me.

1600
01:30:43.632 --> 01:30:46.775
It was like I think I needed to build a shelf or something like that in my house.

1601
01:30:46.855 --> 01:30:47.655
I don't remember what it was.

1602
01:30:47.675 --> 01:30:48.816
I was like, oh, my God, I love this.

1603
01:30:49.197 --> 01:30:50.157
I love these tools.

1604
01:30:50.217 --> 01:30:51.579
And I'm like, oh, I got to go buy some tools.

1605
01:30:51.599 --> 01:30:53.640
And I had the money to buy tools already at that point.

1606
01:30:53.680 --> 01:30:55.562
And then it developed into like, oh, my God, I love this.

1607
01:30:56.403 --> 01:30:59.505
Where it stopped for me, I didn't take that to –

1608
01:31:01.627 --> 01:31:11.294
Like I didn't start a business or a YouTube channel or anything around that because what I found – and I'll go back to what I said earlier – is that be careful what you're defining as your passion here.

1609
01:31:12.034 --> 01:31:13.395
I just like to make things.

1610
01:31:13.495 --> 01:31:14.776
That's what I like to do.

1611
01:31:15.677 --> 01:31:20.520
If I'm running a business around that, I don't like – I don't want to deal with a bunch of pain in the ass clients who want something ugly.

1612
01:31:20.540 --> 01:31:21.981
They want me to build something ugly.

1613
01:31:22.041 --> 01:31:22.301
Yes.

1614
01:31:22.342 --> 01:31:23.042
You know what I mean?

1615
01:31:23.062 --> 01:31:25.184
Like that's not what I'm passionate about at all.

1616
01:31:25.504 --> 01:31:26.765
I'm not passionate about like –

1617
01:31:27.745 --> 01:31:30.768
diving into YouTube dashboards around this is what I do for my day job.

1618
01:31:30.808 --> 01:31:32.850
And I like it for that good enough.

1619
01:31:32.910 --> 01:31:36.694
But like I don't want to – I just don't want to turn – it's a completely different activity is what I'm saying.

1620
01:31:37.054 --> 01:31:38.675
It's not actually what it's around.

1621
01:31:38.715 --> 01:31:42.419
So this is what I'm saying is be careful about what you're defining as your passion.

1622
01:31:42.439 --> 01:31:42.599
Yes.

1623
01:31:43.059 --> 01:31:43.300
Right?

1624
01:31:43.320 --> 01:31:43.600
Right.

1625
01:31:44.615 --> 01:31:47.898
And just know, again, it's developed.

1626
01:31:47.938 --> 01:31:48.798
It's something you develop.

1627
01:31:48.818 --> 01:31:50.139
It is not something you find.

1628
01:31:50.159 --> 01:31:51.420
It's not something that's out there.

1629
01:31:51.460 --> 01:31:54.243
You don't have one passion that just fits you perfectly.

1630
01:31:54.583 --> 01:31:55.624
You've said this before too.

1631
01:31:56.004 --> 01:32:01.608
How can you be passionate about whatever it is, playing the electric guitar or whatever it is, before the electric guitar was even invented?

1632
01:32:01.648 --> 01:32:05.691
Nobody knew they were bound to be an electric guitarist or anything like that, right?

1633
01:32:06.092 --> 01:32:07.113
It's just not a thing.

1634
01:32:07.833 --> 01:32:10.357
I have one single singular passion in your life.

1635
01:32:10.658 --> 01:32:11.859
I 100% agree.

1636
01:32:12.340 --> 01:32:18.390
I will concede two points or agree with you on two points and then I'm going to throw in a big butt afterwards.

1637
01:32:18.810 --> 01:32:19.511
100% agree.

1638
01:32:19.551 --> 01:32:20.393
Passion is developed.

1639
01:32:22.060 --> 01:32:24.743
For the most part, like it is – it's not something you're born with.

1640
01:32:24.783 --> 01:32:25.804
It's not something you find.

1641
01:32:25.824 --> 01:32:32.151
It's not something you just wake up one day and you're like, oh, this is what I do for the next – it is something that is incubated.

1642
01:32:32.171 --> 01:32:33.172
It is explored.

1643
01:32:33.192 --> 01:32:36.336
It is grown and it grows and evolves with you.

1644
01:32:36.676 --> 01:32:39.459
Your relationship with it changes over time.

1645
01:32:39.479 --> 01:32:40.440
So I 100 percent agree there.

1646
01:32:40.460 --> 01:32:40.921
Yeah.

1647
01:32:41.881 --> 01:32:56.367
The other thing that I will concede slash agree with is that, again, this assumption that whatever you're passionate about needs to be your job, I think, is something people need to be very, very careful about.

1648
01:32:56.487 --> 01:33:07.112
And you alluded to it there, but I'll expand on it a little bit, which is that a lot of things that people are passionate about, as soon as it becomes a profession, the experience changes completely.

1649
01:33:07.272 --> 01:33:07.472
Yeah.

1650
01:33:07.792 --> 01:33:07.972
Right?

1651
01:33:08.012 --> 01:33:09.293
So it is a Baker example.

1652
01:33:09.593 --> 01:33:12.095
Baker example is a perfect example.

1653
01:33:12.135 --> 01:33:19.862
Like if you take somebody starting a bakery, my guess is less than 10 or 20 percent of their time is spent actually baking things.

1654
01:33:19.942 --> 01:33:20.202
Oh, yeah.

1655
01:33:20.503 --> 01:33:21.564
It is probably – Or if that, yeah.

1656
01:33:21.584 --> 01:33:21.784
Yeah.

1657
01:33:21.924 --> 01:33:29.130
It's 80, 90 percent of their time is probably acquiring customers, handling overhead, dealing with banks, dealing with finances.

1658
01:33:29.150 --> 01:33:29.891
Employees.

1659
01:33:29.991 --> 01:33:31.852
Hiring people, employees, training them.

1660
01:33:32.793 --> 01:33:36.296
It's a completely different experience, even like being an author, right?

1661
01:33:36.316 --> 01:33:40.100
Like even before I started all the YouTube and podcast stuff.

1662
01:33:41.821 --> 01:33:43.542
less than half of my time was spent writing.

1663
01:33:44.022 --> 01:33:49.684
There's, I mean, there's publisher meetings, agent meetings, there's, uh, rights contracts to go over.

1664
01:33:49.704 --> 01:33:50.944
There's lawyers to meet with.

1665
01:33:50.964 --> 01:33:52.145
There's public appearances.

1666
01:33:52.185 --> 01:33:53.205
There's speaking gigs.

1667
01:33:53.965 --> 01:34:02.188
Um, there's like dealing with, uh, um, you know, all the taxes that come from 60 different selling your book in 60 different territories.

1668
01:34:02.528 --> 01:34:08.811
Uh, there's like so many things that you never think about, um, that, um,

1669
01:34:09.711 --> 01:34:11.171
is being an author, right?

1670
01:34:11.251 --> 01:34:18.873
So it is the experience of doing something professionally is often completely different than what it is doing it as a hobby or a passion project.

1671
01:34:18.933 --> 01:34:23.574
And so just people need to be very, very aware of that difference because a lot of people get blindsided.

1672
01:34:23.674 --> 01:34:29.216
And a lot of people, I see this a lot as well, is that there, I mean, there's a lot of famous stories of people

1673
01:34:29.936 --> 01:34:38.609
The Kurt Cobains of the world that as soon as they become famous or as soon as it takes off and it becomes a very lucrative profession, they're like, oh, wait, I don't like this.

1674
01:34:39.390 --> 01:34:40.933
This is not what I thought I signed up for.

1675
01:34:41.033 --> 01:34:42.976
So 100 percent on board there.

1676
01:34:43.076 --> 01:34:43.336
OK.

1677
01:34:43.557 --> 01:34:44.618
Here's my big but.

1678
01:34:45.760 --> 01:34:46.420
I agree with you.

1679
01:34:46.661 --> 01:34:48.042
You have to explore.

1680
01:34:48.062 --> 01:34:53.005
You have to find something that catches your interest, catches your eye.

1681
01:34:53.025 --> 01:34:54.165
You need to invest into it.

1682
01:34:54.205 --> 01:34:55.186
You need to get good at it.

1683
01:34:55.206 --> 01:35:02.251
And one of the things that Cal talks about is the research that shows that people tend to become passionate about the things that they're competent at.

1684
01:35:02.751 --> 01:35:06.974
People tend to find meaning in things that they are good at.

1685
01:35:07.794 --> 01:35:08.354
And so by –

1686
01:35:09.315 --> 01:35:16.543
becoming so good they can't ignore you, you basically take control of being able to direct where you find passion in your life.

1687
01:35:16.763 --> 01:35:17.464
That is all true.

1688
01:35:17.524 --> 01:35:17.744
Yes.

1689
01:35:18.225 --> 01:35:21.408
Except everybody has different aptitudes for different things.

1690
01:35:21.649 --> 01:35:23.851
So like while that is still true,

1691
01:35:24.852 --> 01:35:31.657
you still have certain talents and proclivities towards certain activities over others.

1692
01:35:31.697 --> 01:35:31.937
Yes.

1693
01:35:31.977 --> 01:35:32.097
Right?

1694
01:35:32.117 --> 01:35:45.566
Like I could start going to a basketball court every single day and practicing my free throws and three-pointers, and I could get really, really good at it, and I could start loving it, but that doesn't mean I'm ever going to make it to the NBA.

1695
01:35:45.646 --> 01:35:45.827
Okay.

1696
01:35:45.847 --> 01:35:46.487
That's a good point.

1697
01:35:46.507 --> 01:35:46.687
Yes.

1698
01:35:46.727 --> 01:35:50.150
So just because I am just physically not bestowed with –

1699
01:35:50.830 --> 01:35:53.411
the necessary equipment to become an NBA player.

1700
01:35:53.592 --> 01:35:57.133
And I think this realism is important on both sides of the argument.

1701
01:35:57.233 --> 01:35:58.674
Let's say you want to be a singer.

1702
01:35:59.995 --> 01:36:02.816
Singing is so fucking brutal.

1703
01:36:03.377 --> 01:36:10.040
Like it is the top 0.0001% of singers are able to make a living doing it.

1704
01:36:10.801 --> 01:36:13.782
And I think much like an NBA player, right?

1705
01:36:13.822 --> 01:36:18.325
Like you need to, at some point, take an extremely honest look at yourself and say, okay,

1706
01:36:19.202 --> 01:36:19.963
I'm good at singing.

1707
01:36:20.703 --> 01:36:21.984
I might even be great at singing.

1708
01:36:22.124 --> 01:36:23.705
I might even be the best singer I know.

1709
01:36:24.206 --> 01:36:27.108
But am I 0.0001% of singers?

1710
01:36:28.869 --> 01:36:29.910
Probably not, right?

1711
01:36:29.950 --> 01:36:35.233
Like it is – and if there's any evidence that you're not, then like that should tell you something.

1712
01:36:35.273 --> 01:36:37.015
Like you need to be realistic about that.

1713
01:36:37.435 --> 01:36:44.880
For the passion seekers, I think that's a very important – like aptitude is a very, very important variable that doesn't get considered enough.

1714
01:36:44.900 --> 01:36:45.100
Right.

1715
01:36:45.120 --> 01:36:45.321
Right.

1716
01:36:46.143 --> 01:36:51.247
On the practical side, aptitude is an important variable that doesn't get considered often enough.

1717
01:36:51.628 --> 01:36:59.695
I would say one of the most common versions of this question that we're debating here that I get from is from Indians.

1718
01:37:00.542 --> 01:37:06.283
Because in India, the culture is very much your parents decide your profession and you have to go do it.

1719
01:37:06.944 --> 01:37:09.264
And usually it's doctor, engineer, lawyer.

1720
01:37:09.924 --> 01:37:18.286
And I can't tell you how many emails I get from young Indian people being like, my parents are making me go to this engineering school.

1721
01:37:19.047 --> 01:37:20.087
I hate engineering.

1722
01:37:20.507 --> 01:37:21.567
I'm not very good at it.

1723
01:37:22.408 --> 01:37:23.648
My grades are not very good.

1724
01:37:24.635 --> 01:37:27.217
I really want to go do some creative thing.

1725
01:37:28.338 --> 01:37:28.859
What should I do?

1726
01:37:29.579 --> 01:37:37.666
And it is, so to come back to Cal's point of like, you've got this backend developer who's like, maybe I want to get in the front end, front end development.

1727
01:37:38.247 --> 01:37:43.431
And Cal's point is, we'll just become the best fucking backend developer the planet's ever seen.

1728
01:37:43.471 --> 01:37:47.054
And then you can use that capital to parlay it into this or that.

1729
01:37:47.074 --> 01:37:48.775
The other thing, sure.

1730
01:37:48.896 --> 01:37:52.198
If you're a super talented programmer and you like programming, great.

1731
01:37:52.278 --> 01:37:52.459
Mm-hmm.

1732
01:37:52.979 --> 01:38:03.864
But if you're one of those Indian kids who got shoved through a computer science program or a software engineering program, never liked it, was never good at it.

1733
01:38:04.064 --> 01:38:04.745
Just got by.

1734
01:38:05.045 --> 01:38:05.805
Just got by.

1735
01:38:05.905 --> 01:38:09.787
And now you've got this bullshit back-end development job that you hate.

1736
01:38:10.107 --> 01:38:20.832
And you're like, well, what's the most practical thing I can do that has some creativity to it, that has some sort of like something that I'm at least interested in?

1737
01:38:21.352 --> 01:38:22.213
Front-end development.

1738
01:38:22.453 --> 01:38:24.074
Because then I can be a little bit creative.

1739
01:38:24.134 --> 01:38:26.416
I can be a little bit artistic with what I work on.

1740
01:38:26.817 --> 01:38:31.241
And so that person, I would say, yes, you should pivot to front-end development.

1741
01:38:31.281 --> 01:38:35.524
You should take the hit to your career and probably pivot to front-end development.

1742
01:38:36.565 --> 01:38:46.413
If you believe that is going to be emotionally sustainable enough in the long run, like it's worth giving up that career capital you accrued over however many years and starting over –

1743
01:38:47.795 --> 01:38:54.002
Just because A, it's going to be way more sustainable and then B, you're going to be happier doing it.

1744
01:38:54.182 --> 01:38:54.482
Okay.

1745
01:38:54.782 --> 01:38:55.083
Okay.

1746
01:38:55.703 --> 01:39:02.551
I think we might be converging then on instead of finding your passion, developing your passion.

1747
01:39:02.571 --> 01:39:02.711
Yeah.

1748
01:39:02.811 --> 01:39:03.291
I like that.

1749
01:39:03.371 --> 01:39:04.952
You and I can both agree on that.

1750
01:39:05.032 --> 01:39:05.452
I like that.

1751
01:39:05.552 --> 01:39:07.313
And I think there's a lot more avenues.

1752
01:39:07.633 --> 01:39:07.833
Yes.

1753
01:39:07.933 --> 01:39:09.673
Like it doesn't pigeonhole you as much.

1754
01:39:10.113 --> 01:39:11.714
And then the aptitude comes into that.

1755
01:39:11.734 --> 01:39:13.455
The competence comes into all of that as well.

1756
01:39:13.875 --> 01:39:16.035
Very similar, like what you were saying earlier.

1757
01:39:16.095 --> 01:39:21.577
When I was a little kid, you know, growing up in Nebraska, like especially in the 90s, like football was everything.

1758
01:39:21.617 --> 01:39:22.257
You know about it.

1759
01:39:22.317 --> 01:39:23.338
You grew up in Texas.

1760
01:39:23.358 --> 01:39:23.818
Very similar.

1761
01:39:23.838 --> 01:39:24.058
Yeah.

1762
01:39:24.278 --> 01:39:25.378
I wanted to be a football player.

1763
01:39:25.438 --> 01:39:25.939
Yeah, me too.

1764
01:39:26.119 --> 01:39:26.479
I would.

1765
01:39:27.119 --> 01:39:29.800
And like I would, my dad, I would have him, we would play catch all the time.

1766
01:39:29.820 --> 01:39:32.921
When he wasn't home, I would go out by myself, throw the football up in the air, run and catch it.

1767
01:39:32.941 --> 01:39:34.701
And like, I was obsessed with it.

1768
01:39:34.761 --> 01:39:36.302
I was just, I was dead set.

1769
01:39:36.322 --> 01:39:37.342
I was going to be a football player.

1770
01:39:38.903 --> 01:39:42.844
Even to the point to my, my dad explained to me when I was like five or six, what red shirting was.

1771
01:39:42.884 --> 01:39:51.027
So in that collegiate program in the United States, you can, you can red shirt, which means you sit out for a year and you get an extra year on to your eligibility for, for sports.

1772
01:39:51.087 --> 01:39:51.307
Okay.

1773
01:39:52.230 --> 01:39:55.722
And so my dad explained that to me and I just looked him dead in the eyes and said, should I red shirt, dad?

1774
01:39:56.303 --> 01:39:57.186
You know, when I was like five.

1775
01:39:57.467 --> 01:39:58.771
I was that serious about it.

1776
01:39:59.620 --> 01:40:00.160
You know what I mean?

1777
01:40:00.180 --> 01:40:01.081
I am not a big guy.

1778
01:40:01.201 --> 01:40:07.046
I would die if I was in anything above high school footballs and the guy hit by one of those guys, I'd be dead.

1779
01:40:07.186 --> 01:40:07.386
Yeah.

1780
01:40:07.426 --> 01:40:07.686
Right?

1781
01:40:07.766 --> 01:40:11.209
Like my aptitude for football was not there.

1782
01:40:11.309 --> 01:40:13.971
But I was very, very passionate about it as a kid.

1783
01:40:14.451 --> 01:40:15.112
Probably a smart thing.

1784
01:40:15.132 --> 01:40:16.132
I didn't try to go to the NFL.

1785
01:40:16.172 --> 01:40:16.833
Right.

1786
01:40:16.853 --> 01:40:17.113
Okay?

1787
01:40:17.293 --> 01:40:18.194
Like it just was.

1788
01:40:18.954 --> 01:40:20.796
So there's an aptitude on side of it too.

1789
01:40:20.976 --> 01:40:24.258
I had to develop other passions in my life.

1790
01:40:24.338 --> 01:40:26.340
And I think that's where we can maybe converge on this one.

1791
01:40:26.745 --> 01:40:32.169
I like the word develop because, again, I grant that there are practical considerations in all these things.

1792
01:40:32.209 --> 01:40:33.971
I think passion should be the long-term priority.

1793
01:40:34.011 --> 01:40:43.818
Like you should find something or multiple things in your life that you feel passionately about that you deeply enjoy doing that you're very intrinsically motivated by.

1794
01:40:43.838 --> 01:40:49.202
And if you can find a way to make a career out of them, even better because I do think the –

1795
01:40:50.783 --> 01:40:56.585
The data is that like you probably will be a more satisfied, fulfilled person if you do that and you'll probably go further.

1796
01:40:57.105 --> 01:40:58.926
So like if you can make that work, great.

1797
01:40:59.586 --> 01:41:02.367
But I agree with you that it is a complicated process.

1798
01:41:02.567 --> 01:41:09.270
And I think especially when dealing with some of these fields like professional football or professional music.

1799
01:41:10.170 --> 01:41:25.809
Like you have to be extremely realistic and you have to definitely think about a plan B, plan C, plan D. And then if you're a person who it's not obvious to you what your passion is or what you want to be doing with your life, make it a goal to develop a passion in something –

1800
01:41:26.710 --> 01:41:31.014
And then take the practical approach to doing what Jane Goodall did, right?

1801
01:41:31.054 --> 01:41:37.300
Which is like, okay, well, at least take a step towards something that seems interesting or something that sounds exciting to you.

1802
01:41:37.660 --> 01:41:39.522
And then just see what emerges from there.

1803
01:41:40.002 --> 01:41:40.863
I can get on board with that.

1804
01:41:41.123 --> 01:41:41.544
All right.

1805
01:41:41.684 --> 01:41:41.924
Yeah.

1806
01:41:42.364 --> 01:41:44.827
We are landing the plane in the same spot.

1807
01:41:45.547 --> 01:41:50.792
In a vacuum, I think both of these approaches are important but incomplete.

1808
01:41:51.233 --> 01:41:51.353
Yeah.

1809
01:41:51.852 --> 01:41:56.855
Follow your passion in a vacuum is important, but it's also incomplete.

1810
01:41:56.915 --> 01:41:59.596
And it could definitely lead you down a bad path.

1811
01:42:00.097 --> 01:42:04.519
You could mess up your life, waste a bunch of years, so on and so on.

1812
01:42:05.160 --> 01:42:07.501
I think pursue financial stability.

1813
01:42:07.801 --> 01:42:08.722
Don't take too many risks.

1814
01:42:09.522 --> 01:42:13.163
in a vacuum is also true, but also incomplete.

1815
01:42:13.303 --> 01:42:18.665
Like if you only pursue that, you're probably going to leave a lot of life satisfaction on the table.

1816
01:42:18.745 --> 01:42:19.366
Yeah.

1817
01:42:19.446 --> 01:42:21.607
And have a lot of regrets when you're older.

1818
01:42:21.627 --> 01:42:21.767
Yeah.

1819
01:42:22.087 --> 01:42:25.828
And even there though, I'm all for like taking big swings, like absolutely do that.

1820
01:42:26.488 --> 01:42:28.789
That doesn't necessarily have to be around passion though either.

1821
01:42:28.949 --> 01:42:29.129
Yeah.

1822
01:42:29.149 --> 01:42:29.309
Right.

1823
01:42:29.369 --> 01:42:33.831
Like I'm all for taking risks and taking big swings and like putting yourself out there and going for it.

1824
01:42:33.991 --> 01:42:34.271
Sure.

1825
01:42:35.172 --> 01:42:38.693
I just don't think passion is a great guiding principle for that even necessarily.

1826
01:42:38.713 --> 01:42:38.873
Yeah.

1827
01:42:39.442 --> 01:42:41.623
It will fuel you along the way for sure.

1828
01:42:41.923 --> 01:42:42.123
Yeah.

1829
01:42:42.223 --> 01:42:42.764
It really depends.

1830
01:42:42.804 --> 01:42:43.444
It really depends.

1831
01:42:43.584 --> 01:42:51.268
And it is, I think the other thing that we agree on is that just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean it should necessarily be your job.

1832
01:42:51.288 --> 01:42:51.828
Yes, right.

1833
01:42:52.088 --> 01:42:52.648
Like there is something.

1834
01:42:52.688 --> 01:42:53.689
I'm going to be a football player.

1835
01:42:53.709 --> 01:42:55.590
And it's funny because it's, I've had the conversation.

1836
01:42:55.630 --> 01:43:02.313
So one of my good friends here in LA, he works for one of the biggest video game companies in the world.

1837
01:43:02.613 --> 01:43:06.295
And he's like one of the high end entrepreneurs.

1838
01:43:06.455 --> 01:43:07.556
marketing directors at it.

1839
01:43:07.996 --> 01:43:13.822
And so he is, every time we hang out, we just talk video games for hours and hours and hours and hours.

1840
01:43:14.462 --> 01:43:19.787
And I have all these, like, thoughts and opinions and takes on video games because I play fucking all of them.

1841
01:43:20.468 --> 01:43:29.436
And he lives in the video game marketing world, so he's always, he knows all the influencers, he knows all the streamers, he knows all the big...

1842
01:43:30.216 --> 01:43:32.098
um, you know, all the marketing campaigns and everything.

1843
01:43:32.578 --> 01:43:39.643
And I can't tell you how many times I've been talking to him and I'll like tell him, I'll like make an observation about a game or about a company or something.

1844
01:43:39.743 --> 01:43:40.804
And he he'll just look at me.

1845
01:43:40.844 --> 01:43:44.206
He's like, he's like, man, you got to start a video game YouTube channel.

1846
01:43:44.306 --> 01:43:47.849
He's like, you would crush, you would have such a good video game YouTube channel.

1847
01:43:47.929 --> 01:43:53.113
And every time, every time I look at him, I'm like, I was like, I will never do that to myself.

1848
01:43:53.613 --> 01:43:55.595
I will never like video games are my safe space.

1849
01:43:55.615 --> 01:43:56.255
That's your, that's your

1850
01:43:56.315 --> 01:43:56.795
pure.

1851
01:43:56.875 --> 01:44:00.138
That's where I go where it's just like nothing exists.

1852
01:44:00.738 --> 01:44:07.343
Like I don't want to ruin that by, by putting all these incentives and motives and shit on top of it.

1853
01:44:07.603 --> 01:44:10.185
And it's just like my video, my video games are for me.

1854
01:44:10.405 --> 01:44:10.625
Right.

1855
01:44:10.805 --> 01:44:12.307
Kind of like your woodworking is for you.

1856
01:44:12.387 --> 01:44:13.187
It's too special.

1857
01:44:13.467 --> 01:44:15.369
Like you can't share it with the world.

1858
01:44:15.849 --> 01:44:18.311
So it's, I totally get where you're coming from with that.

1859
01:44:18.431 --> 01:44:20.633
And I do think that is, um, um,

1860
01:44:21.914 --> 01:44:24.136
I think that's the right option for a lot of people.

1861
01:44:24.316 --> 01:44:30.120
Like there's a lot of passions in people's lives that that is actually the optimal selection.

1862
01:44:30.140 --> 01:44:34.182
Because if you did try to make a profession out of it, you would taint it in some way.

1863
01:44:34.303 --> 01:44:35.824
You would ruin it in some way.

1864
01:44:35.984 --> 01:44:36.584
I have found that.

1865
01:44:36.604 --> 01:44:41.768
Like I've done jobs for friends or friends of friends and stuff like that where I'll go in and build my cabinet, install it, all that kind of stuff.

1866
01:44:42.388 --> 01:44:44.049
Um, some of that, some of it's fun.

1867
01:44:44.150 --> 01:44:45.250
Some of it, it just wasn't.

1868
01:44:45.811 --> 01:44:52.796
And then I've gone the other way too, where I've just like, I haven't had time to even participate in, you know, go out into my shop or anything like that.

1869
01:44:53.377 --> 01:44:57.960
I have found that balance where it's like, I need a little bit of this and I need enough of it in my life and I'm good.

1870
01:44:58.281 --> 01:44:58.481
Yeah.

1871
01:44:58.501 --> 01:45:01.803
So I know, I know that's, again, that's an individual personality based thing too.

1872
01:45:01.923 --> 01:45:02.264
I get it.

1873
01:45:02.324 --> 01:45:04.746
But for me, yeah, that works.

1874
01:45:05.502 --> 01:45:09.443
We've established that there is a tension between these two things.

1875
01:45:09.783 --> 01:45:12.204
Do you think it's necessarily a one-to-one tradeoff?

1876
01:45:14.224 --> 01:45:15.805
I feel like it doesn't have to be.

1877
01:45:16.325 --> 01:45:16.825
Yeah.

1878
01:45:17.005 --> 01:45:18.966
I think it depends on the job and the person.

1879
01:45:19.086 --> 01:45:19.466
Yes.

1880
01:45:19.666 --> 01:45:20.946
I think there's a big part of that too.

1881
01:45:21.627 --> 01:45:24.347
There are just – there are people who just need a lot of stability in their lives.

1882
01:45:24.407 --> 01:45:24.967
I get that.

1883
01:45:25.288 --> 01:45:27.888
And passion doesn't factor into it as much.

1884
01:45:27.908 --> 01:45:29.329
It's kind of like with like relationships.

1885
01:45:29.909 --> 01:45:32.550
Some people need a lot of sex in their relationship, but some people don't.

1886
01:45:32.730 --> 01:45:32.950
Yeah.

1887
01:45:33.050 --> 01:45:33.390
Yeah.

1888
01:45:34.070 --> 01:45:35.812
Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a one-to-one.

1889
01:45:36.292 --> 01:45:41.378
I don't know what the right mix is, and I don't know how you would determine that necessarily.

1890
01:45:41.438 --> 01:45:45.642
But again, it is hard finding that balance for most people anyway.

1891
01:45:45.942 --> 01:45:46.142
Yeah.

1892
01:45:46.203 --> 01:45:47.724
It takes a lot of experimentation.

1893
01:45:48.165 --> 01:45:48.565
It does.

1894
01:45:49.466 --> 01:45:54.131
It's almost – it's like almost finding a route through a maze.

1895
01:45:54.351 --> 01:45:56.673
Well, and like, you know, what if your passion is like –

1896
01:45:58.714 --> 01:46:02.899
financial like trading stocks or you know like that's a okay then go into that.

1897
01:46:02.939 --> 01:46:03.179
Amazing.

1898
01:46:03.219 --> 01:46:03.720
Absolutely.

1899
01:46:03.740 --> 01:46:05.702
But what if it's you know crocheting?

1900
01:46:06.263 --> 01:46:11.349
You know there's that Hey there's some people crushing on Etsy

1901
01:46:13.387 --> 01:46:14.948
You watching those YouTube videos too?

1902
01:46:14.988 --> 01:46:15.448
No, I'm not.

1903
01:46:15.508 --> 01:46:16.188
But it's funny.

1904
01:46:16.208 --> 01:46:19.009
So actually my brother, it's actually a really funny story.

1905
01:46:19.789 --> 01:46:23.990
My brother and his wife were friends with a guy and his wife.

1906
01:46:24.190 --> 01:46:33.593
And it was, I don't remember the exact details, but it was funny because he told me that the wife started getting really into crocheting and knitting and selling her stuff on Etsy.

1907
01:46:33.673 --> 01:46:38.075
And it like took off in such a big way that like now she's making like.

1908
01:46:39.055 --> 01:46:50.806
millions tens of millions of dollars or whatever i take it back never mind then all right and then of course the the husband apparently like disapproved of it and was like why are you wasting your time doing this and then as soon as it took off like she divorced him

1909
01:46:54.521 --> 01:46:54.881
for her.

1910
01:46:55.022 --> 01:46:56.183
Yeah.

1911
01:46:56.643 --> 01:46:57.183
Some story.

1912
01:46:57.244 --> 01:46:59.005
It was some facsimile of that story.

1913
01:46:59.045 --> 01:47:00.787
I probably messed up a detail there.

1914
01:47:01.267 --> 01:47:05.451
But yeah, apparently you can make tens of millions of dollars crocheting and knitting and selling it online.

1915
01:47:05.651 --> 01:47:10.175
Well, okay, so what do you think the right balance is, I guess, or how do you determine the right balance?

1916
01:47:10.355 --> 01:47:10.535
Um...

1917
01:47:11.576 --> 01:47:18.398
So again, I think the two variables here are the person in the field of where the passion is.

1918
01:47:18.458 --> 01:47:20.738
So on the person, there's a spectrum, right?

1919
01:47:20.758 --> 01:47:28.640
Some people, I think some people just have to live their passion and really can't compromise on it.

1920
01:47:28.880 --> 01:47:32.581
If you're one of those people, like, I can't not do this, then go all in.

1921
01:47:32.661 --> 01:47:40.783
And the irony is that if you're one of those people, like to Elon's point, you're probably not listening to those podcasts and you're probably not even asking the question in the first place.

1922
01:47:41.543 --> 01:47:46.688
Similarly, I do think there's a group of people on the other end of the spectrum that are just happy to get a paycheck.

1923
01:47:46.708 --> 01:47:47.849
They don't really care.

1924
01:47:48.649 --> 01:47:49.950
They're like, I'm fine.

1925
01:47:50.090 --> 01:47:51.151
I don't really think about this.

1926
01:47:53.093 --> 01:47:56.296
Most people are somewhere in the middle and they're somewhere along that spectrum.

1927
01:47:56.316 --> 01:48:01.780
So there's going to be a lot of people who really defer towards financial stability and they just probably just want a job they don't hate.

1928
01:48:01.800 --> 01:48:01.961
Mm-hmm.

1929
01:48:03.273 --> 01:48:18.307
And then there's a lot of people that are like feel very strongly that they need to care about their work or care about something they're doing, but they don't know how to compromise or balance or negotiate the financial concerns and the practicalities with technology.

1930
01:48:18.387 --> 01:48:19.409
doing something that they love.

1931
01:48:20.270 --> 01:48:24.797
So that's the first, I guess, kind of axis of concern.

1932
01:48:24.817 --> 01:48:27.801
The second axis is what is the thing that you're passionate about?

1933
01:48:27.821 --> 01:48:29.964
Like some things can be very lucrative.

1934
01:48:30.525 --> 01:48:33.630
Some things have very clear career paths to them.

1935
01:48:34.110 --> 01:48:40.512
If you're really into spreadsheets and organization, like, my God, there's probably a million companies that are happy to hire you.

1936
01:48:40.952 --> 01:48:44.733
If you love software engineering, there's a million companies that are probably happy to hire you.

1937
01:48:44.753 --> 01:48:48.314
So, like, that side of the spectrum, I think it's kind of a no-brainer.

1938
01:48:48.334 --> 01:48:51.655
It's like, go do the thing you love because there's plenty of opportunities out there.

1939
01:48:51.675 --> 01:49:00.057
I think where it gets very complicated is when you are on the other side of the spectrum where this is something that is not obviously lucrative or it is a –

1940
01:49:01.418 --> 01:49:12.712
like a power law market, like a creative field like acting or music or something where 0.0001% of the people accumulate 99.99% of the success.

1941
01:49:14.053 --> 01:49:16.316
I think in those cases, then you have to take a really hard look

1942
01:49:17.583 --> 01:49:24.028
And I think there's probably two kind of hedges there rather than going all in.

1943
01:49:24.748 --> 01:49:28.431
One is find the adjacent job or position like we talked about.

1944
01:49:28.511 --> 01:49:30.132
You know, if you love music.

1945
01:49:31.233 --> 01:49:37.877
So one of my really good friends from music school, he had a similar experience to me.

1946
01:49:37.937 --> 01:49:38.998
He got about halfway through.

1947
01:49:39.018 --> 01:49:41.720
He realized like I'm not going to make it.

1948
01:49:41.740 --> 01:49:42.381
I'm not good enough.

1949
01:49:43.194 --> 01:49:55.250
But he noticed that he had a really good ear and he could – he like really picked up a lot on like Sonic subtly and he liked the kind of the engineering side, the sound engineering side.

1950
01:49:55.711 --> 01:49:58.134
So now he actually does sound design at a video game studio.

1951
01:49:58.635 --> 01:49:59.315
And he loves it.

1952
01:49:59.335 --> 01:49:59.575
Oh, okay.

1953
01:49:59.635 --> 01:50:00.476
And he's great at it.

1954
01:50:00.576 --> 01:50:00.756
Yeah.

1955
01:50:00.876 --> 01:50:03.676
And never thought he'd end up there.

1956
01:50:03.816 --> 01:50:15.280
And all the music training actually paid off perfectly because it's – he had to learn about all the different softwares and the way sound waves work and the way our ears process sounds and music and tones and all that stuff.

1957
01:50:15.340 --> 01:50:15.700
Okay.

1958
01:50:15.780 --> 01:50:17.900
So that's an example, right, of like a hedge.

1959
01:50:19.121 --> 01:50:24.142
And sure enough, he ends up in a place where he's doing sound design for another thing that he loves, which is video games.

1960
01:50:24.162 --> 01:50:26.083
So like he's happy as a fucking clam.

1961
01:50:26.103 --> 01:50:26.263
Mm-hmm.

1962
01:50:27.203 --> 01:50:37.351
The other hedge, I think, is understanding that you can do the thing you love, but you're also probably going to have to do a bunch of things that you don't love, which is like the bakery example, right?

1963
01:50:37.391 --> 01:50:45.337
Where it's like, okay, you can make baking work, but you're going to have to be willing to do a lot of other things that you might not love or –

1964
01:50:46.518 --> 01:50:48.139
Uh, might even hate, right?

1965
01:50:48.159 --> 01:50:49.379
You're going to have to go hire people.

1966
01:50:49.439 --> 01:50:50.460
You're going to have to train people.

1967
01:50:50.500 --> 01:50:59.064
You're going to have to go get a loan and deal with the bank and, uh, rent out of space and do branding and marketing and promotion and online ads and all this stuff.

1968
01:50:59.804 --> 01:50:59.924
Um,

1969
01:51:01.396 --> 01:51:13.002
I think what will happen to some people, and I would include myself in this case, is that you will have the pleasant surprise that you actually really enjoy lots of different parts of the business as well.

1970
01:51:13.102 --> 01:51:15.624
So it's like maybe you love the baking.

1971
01:51:15.644 --> 01:51:16.944
That's what you're really passionate about.

1972
01:51:16.964 --> 01:51:21.247
But in the process of promoting trying to get the baking out to the world –

1973
01:51:21.967 --> 01:51:25.070
You discover that like you really like branding and design too.

1974
01:51:25.690 --> 01:51:26.391
And so great.

1975
01:51:26.771 --> 01:51:33.678
You can really focus on that aspect of the business and then just go find a business partner or hire somebody to handle all the boring back end stuff that you don't want to deal with.

1976
01:51:35.099 --> 01:51:37.121
You see that happen a lot.

1977
01:51:37.301 --> 01:51:39.102
I would characterize myself as that.

1978
01:51:39.142 --> 01:51:41.625
Like obviously writing is, was the passion.

1979
01:51:41.645 --> 01:51:42.565
Yeah.

1980
01:51:43.326 --> 01:52:00.723
As a side effect, I found that I really enjoy a lot of the system building operational side of like building out a content business and a media business and understanding all the numbers and analytics and growth that goes into a business like this.

1981
01:52:00.763 --> 01:52:02.024
Like it's fun for me.

1982
01:52:02.144 --> 01:52:03.246
Yeah.

1983
01:52:03.306 --> 01:52:04.527
That makes works for you too.

1984
01:52:04.847 --> 01:52:05.688
It works very well for you.

1985
01:52:05.808 --> 01:52:09.912
Yeah, there's aspects of the business that I hate and I go and hire people to do those.

1986
01:52:09.932 --> 01:52:10.933
So that's the other hedge.

1987
01:52:11.134 --> 01:52:18.361
And it's realistically, I think, anywhere you end up optimal is probably enjoying what you do 70 to 80 percent of the time.

1988
01:52:18.681 --> 01:52:18.841
Right.

1989
01:52:18.862 --> 01:52:22.045
Like I think it's every job, no matter how much you love it or care about it.

1990
01:52:22.085 --> 01:52:25.448
You're probably not loving it 20 percent of the time.

1991
01:52:25.929 --> 01:52:28.491
And there's probably things attached to it that you don't love to do.

1992
01:52:29.232 --> 01:52:40.879
Um, and so I, I think just realism around that understanding, like, even if you land your dream job, uh, working at your dream gig, there's going to be days where you're like dragging yourself out of bed.

1993
01:52:40.899 --> 01:52:41.840
You're like, this sucks.

1994
01:52:42.760 --> 01:52:43.401
That's just life.

1995
01:52:43.481 --> 01:52:44.001
That's normal.

1996
01:52:44.341 --> 01:52:48.084
Even when you do what you love, even when you do what you love, you, you will hate this.

1997
01:52:48.544 --> 01:52:48.824
Yes.

1998
01:52:49.164 --> 01:52:50.505
That, that quote is not true.

1999
01:52:50.565 --> 01:52:50.845
Yeah.

2000
01:52:51.406 --> 01:52:51.866
Uh, yes.

2001
01:52:51.966 --> 01:52:53.447
The, the, you'll never work a day in your life.

2002
01:52:53.467 --> 01:52:53.627
Yeah.

2003
01:52:53.727 --> 01:52:53.907
Right.

2004
01:52:53.967 --> 01:52:54.628
Bullshit.

2005
01:52:54.848 --> 01:52:55.308
Yeah.

2006
01:52:56.167 --> 01:52:57.528
Work very hard, actually.

2007
01:52:58.049 --> 01:52:58.369
Yeah.

2008
01:52:58.890 --> 01:53:06.736
Ultimately, I think, you know, considering those two dimensions, I think listeners should ask themselves where they are in those two dimensions, right?

2009
01:53:06.756 --> 01:53:08.538
Like, what's your risk appetite?

2010
01:53:09.118 --> 01:53:12.941
How uncompromising do you feel you are around your passion?

2011
01:53:12.961 --> 01:53:13.582
Yeah.

2012
01:53:13.662 --> 01:53:18.966
And then secondarily, like how extreme, how all in is the thing that you love doing?

2013
01:53:19.246 --> 01:53:27.172
Like how much can you hedge against it or how many like adjacent avenues are there to doing something?

2014
01:53:27.533 --> 01:53:28.914
So this is – now this is my bias.

2015
01:53:29.394 --> 01:53:34.898
You mentioned that you feel like most people don't know what they're passionate about or have mild passions and they're like –

2016
01:53:36.119 --> 01:53:40.024
You worry about them getting led astray into making bad decisions based on emotion.

2017
01:53:40.524 --> 01:53:43.667
I'll tell you where my bias is and what I worry about people doing.

2018
01:53:44.088 --> 01:53:53.078
I think probably the most common story in the world is that people have a passion or they have something that they really wanted to do.

2019
01:53:54.122 --> 01:53:56.245
They couldn't really do it or it didn't work out.

2020
01:53:57.066 --> 01:54:02.893
And so they found something that's maybe a little bit adjacent or kind of in the same vicinity of the thing that they wanted to do.

2021
01:54:04.094 --> 01:54:10.322
And in the process of doing that and getting good at it or finding kind of their niche that they get good at –

2022
01:54:11.605 --> 01:54:13.988
they slowly grow to love that thing.

2023
01:54:14.028 --> 01:54:14.949
Right, right.

2024
01:54:15.289 --> 01:54:18.793
Kind of like my friend who ended up doing sound design at the video game studio.

2025
01:54:19.734 --> 01:54:24.239
I think that's probably the most common story that happens.

2026
01:54:24.479 --> 01:54:24.660
Yeah.

2027
01:54:25.360 --> 01:54:27.443
And I think I have a very similar story too.

2028
01:54:27.503 --> 01:54:28.544
Woodworking isn't my only passion.

2029
01:54:28.824 --> 01:54:48.022
yes that was when I got into this industry and got into working with you I I was excited I didn't know what to really expect but I did definitely develop like the better we got at it the more I understood about it more I learned about it uh like all the behind the scenes stuff that goes on like yes I developed more of a I guess you could call it passion for it yeah okay all right you can stay yeah

2030
01:54:50.604 --> 01:54:50.965
Okay.

2031
01:54:51.165 --> 01:54:51.405
Okay.

2032
01:54:51.925 --> 01:54:59.370
My, my take on me, I really do think I've just kind of found this like best of both worlds type of situation because I enjoy my job very much.

2033
01:54:59.490 --> 01:55:01.011
I find a lot of reward.

2034
01:55:01.111 --> 01:55:02.712
It's a rewarding job that I have.

2035
01:55:02.932 --> 01:55:03.533
Yeah.

2036
01:55:04.513 --> 01:55:06.594
You just gave me a raise up to $12 an hour.

2037
01:55:06.614 --> 01:55:08.436
So like I'm making, look at you.

2038
01:55:08.456 --> 01:55:09.176
Big bucks now.

2039
01:55:09.196 --> 01:55:11.498
Time to go get the big tool, big boy tools.

2040
01:55:12.658 --> 01:55:18.622
No, but like it does, like I said, it's been a stable enough environment for me.

2041
01:55:18.702 --> 01:55:19.703
I know it's not always stable for you.

2042
01:55:20.243 --> 01:55:23.387
Um, but, but you provide this like layer of stability for us.

2043
01:55:24.007 --> 01:55:25.028
Um, and I get to do that.

2044
01:55:25.089 --> 01:55:31.496
And then I do, there's a lot of freedom in my job that, um, I, I get to kind of set my own days and what they look like.

2045
01:55:31.516 --> 01:55:35.200
And there's a lot of creative freedom within that kind of set the bounds for it, but we get to play around in that.

2046
01:55:36.077 --> 01:55:42.241
And then I have enough time and the resources to go out and like kind of just have other things that I can focus on.

2047
01:55:42.561 --> 01:55:47.224
One of the things too that I like about woodworking is it gets me away from a screen because I just sit on a screen so much.

2048
01:55:47.704 --> 01:55:49.925
And so like I think that's part of why I like it too.

2049
01:55:49.945 --> 01:55:53.267
Why I've developed such a passion for it is because it gives me a nice balance there.

2050
01:55:53.707 --> 01:55:54.428
So I don't know.

2051
01:55:54.448 --> 01:56:01.592
I feel like I'm just incredibly fortunate in that where I've been able to kind of like piece this together in a way that really works for me.

2052
01:56:01.752 --> 01:56:03.433
So yeah, it's been great.

2053
01:56:03.877 --> 01:56:16.994
Yeah, it's when I think about all the people that I know that seem very happy with how they spend their time and happy with their lives, they're all over the map on this.

2054
01:56:17.014 --> 01:56:19.217
Like it's like – Lots of avenues to get there.

2055
01:56:19.237 --> 01:56:21.280
Yeah, like I said, I have a really good friend who –

2056
01:56:22.061 --> 01:56:23.021
Has a job he doesn't hate.

2057
01:56:23.161 --> 01:56:23.901
Yeah.

2058
01:56:23.981 --> 01:56:27.102
And spends all of his free time doing the thing that he loves.

2059
01:56:27.342 --> 01:56:28.362
And that works.

2060
01:56:28.723 --> 01:56:30.543
He seems very happy with it.

2061
01:56:31.103 --> 01:56:38.505
I think I'm definitely at the extreme of both ends in that I think I'm a personality that really couldn't live any other way.

2062
01:56:40.385 --> 01:56:45.807
And it just happened to work out that I made it at the thing that I really love doing.

2063
01:56:52.288 --> 01:56:54.390
Your books never took off or became popular.

2064
01:56:55.091 --> 01:56:57.093
And it's like, it's hard to know.

2065
01:56:57.874 --> 01:57:03.419
Honestly, I'd probably be writing a sub stack, grinding away 40K or something.

2066
01:57:03.479 --> 01:57:04.320
I, you know, I don't know.

2067
01:57:04.580 --> 01:57:08.624
I, it's, um, I can't imagine doing anything else.

2068
01:57:08.885 --> 01:57:13.609
Like I just, the thought of doing another job makes my head explode.

2069
01:57:13.910 --> 01:57:14.130
So.

2070
01:57:16.453 --> 01:57:17.114
be in the NFL.

2071
01:57:17.334 --> 01:57:18.555
So you'd be in the NFL.

2072
01:57:18.955 --> 01:57:21.698
You'd be a red shirted, still red shirt.

2073
01:57:21.718 --> 01:57:22.098
Yeah.

2074
01:57:22.158 --> 01:57:24.320
For the university in Nebraska.

2075
01:57:26.442 --> 01:57:27.383
All right.

2076
01:57:28.364 --> 01:57:32.628
Any final takeaways, any lessons that you took from this episode?

2077
01:57:33.749 --> 01:57:35.990
I mean, I do go back to that.

2078
01:57:36.550 --> 01:57:39.632
The point you brought up repeatedly about like, hey, this is a pretty individual thing.

2079
01:57:39.672 --> 01:57:46.297
There's a lot of like that was really reinforced through all this research because some people just have more of a penchant for risk.

2080
01:57:46.497 --> 01:57:46.877
Yeah.

2081
01:57:46.897 --> 01:57:50.019
Or they really are clear on what they want to do or they've already developed.

2082
01:57:50.039 --> 01:57:55.062
They develop their passion from a very young age to, you know, like my ex-girlfriend with a vet thing.

2083
01:57:57.304 --> 01:58:00.786
But yeah, the avenues by which you can get to like a –

2084
01:58:02.207 --> 01:58:05.968
a fulfilling life where you're working on things that are meaningful to you.

2085
01:58:06.028 --> 01:58:07.468
There, those are numerous.

2086
01:58:07.748 --> 01:58:12.689
There are so many ways that you can get and do this, uh, get into this, do this the way that you want to do it.

2087
01:58:12.789 --> 01:58:16.770
And that to me, I was just like, okay, that's actually kind of, it's very reassuring.

2088
01:58:16.810 --> 01:58:19.230
It's like, I think we do get a little bit pigeonholed.

2089
01:58:19.250 --> 01:58:21.151
It's either all passion and go for it.

2090
01:58:21.171 --> 01:58:26.712
You know, you just have to go for it, dude, and just, just lock it down and grind and you don't have to do it that way.

2091
01:58:26.872 --> 01:58:27.052
Yeah.

2092
01:58:27.212 --> 01:58:28.912
And so that was, that was refreshing to see.

2093
01:58:29.072 --> 01:58:33.414
I think my big takeaway is that this is just a false dichotomy.

2094
01:58:33.615 --> 01:58:34.035
Yeah.

2095
01:58:34.315 --> 01:58:37.517
It's funny because the story behind this entire episode is actually kind of funny.

2096
01:58:38.397 --> 01:58:44.020
So this was originally pitched to me, my former YouTube director.

2097
01:58:44.160 --> 01:58:45.061
Shout out to Devin.

2098
01:58:45.121 --> 01:58:46.241
He's out there listening.

2099
01:58:47.002 --> 01:58:48.202
So Devin, as you know.

2100
01:58:49.403 --> 01:58:51.004
fucking lives and breathes YouTube.

2101
01:58:51.104 --> 01:58:56.106
Like he was, he is the most obsessed person with YouTube I've ever met in my life.

2102
01:58:56.866 --> 01:59:03.929
And he worked with us and, you know, ran our YouTube channel for a number of years.

2103
01:59:04.129 --> 01:59:08.051
And so he originally pitched this as a YouTube video for us to do last year.

2104
01:59:08.731 --> 01:59:13.694
And he had all like outline, intro and outline and like kind of bullet points of like what he thought would be really good.

2105
01:59:13.734 --> 01:59:16.435
And I remember I sent it back to him and I was just like,

2106
01:59:17.375 --> 01:59:21.178
I'm not buying it because it was very much like a, you know, take the risk.

2107
01:59:21.218 --> 01:59:22.699
You know, it's just like just go for it.

2108
01:59:22.719 --> 01:59:23.319
You'll be happy.

2109
01:59:23.339 --> 01:59:25.541
You regret minimization type stuff.

2110
01:59:25.561 --> 01:59:28.403
Like you'll be happy you tried even if it doesn't work out.

2111
01:59:28.943 --> 01:59:32.205
And I was like, yeah, I don't I don't know, man.

2112
01:59:32.405 --> 01:59:34.667
I think that I think we need a little more nuance here.

2113
01:59:34.787 --> 01:59:38.589
And then he ironically, he was very passionate about the concept.

2114
01:59:38.609 --> 01:59:39.310
So he was like.

2115
01:59:39.790 --> 01:59:41.211
He's like, no, I'm going to make it work.

2116
01:59:41.312 --> 01:59:42.733
You know, give me another shot at it.

2117
01:59:42.793 --> 01:59:47.758
And so he went and revised a bunch of stuff, dug up some research, sent it back to me again like a month later.

2118
01:59:47.778 --> 01:59:54.004
And I was like, yeah, I don't know.

2119
01:59:54.024 --> 01:59:57.788
I think this should be a podcast.

2120
01:59:57.808 --> 01:59:58.028
Yeah.

2121
02:00:00.341 --> 02:00:09.148
Sure enough, after all the research and digging into it for like two and a half hours, yeah, I think it's a false dichotomy.

2122
02:00:09.168 --> 02:00:16.554
And I think that's why I – because a YouTube video, it's like you get 15, 20 minutes and you usually need to kind of pick a side and argue it.

2123
02:00:16.574 --> 02:00:17.515
Yeah.

2124
02:00:17.907 --> 02:00:24.572
I was like, no, this feels like this is like a very nuanced thing with a lot of variables, a lot of considerations.

2125
02:00:24.632 --> 02:00:26.673
And it is a very personal thing.

2126
02:00:26.913 --> 02:00:28.354
YouTube does not like nuance.

2127
02:00:30.336 --> 02:00:31.336
No, unfortunately.

2128
02:00:31.616 --> 02:00:35.339
So, yeah, I think that's my biggest takeaway is that it's – this is a false dichotomy.

2129
02:00:35.959 --> 02:00:38.441
I like the phrase develop your passion.

2130
02:00:38.641 --> 02:00:39.542
Yeah, don't follow it.

2131
02:00:39.742 --> 02:00:39.902
Yeah.

2132
02:00:39.982 --> 02:00:40.242
Yeah.

2133
02:00:40.303 --> 02:00:43.345
Instead of following it or choosing it or finding it.

2134
02:00:43.365 --> 02:00:46.868
I think that is probably the most accurate way to.

2135
02:00:47.108 --> 02:00:50.911
It highlights the process oriented nature of, of the whole thing.

2136
02:00:50.931 --> 02:00:51.231
Yes.

2137
02:00:51.331 --> 02:00:52.812
It's not passion is an event.

2138
02:00:52.912 --> 02:00:53.653
It's not an event.

2139
02:00:53.793 --> 02:00:54.073
Yes.

2140
02:00:54.133 --> 02:00:54.854
It's a process.

2141
02:00:55.134 --> 02:00:58.937
And then it also implies that you can develop it in a place that it wasn't before.

2142
02:00:59.037 --> 02:00:59.217
Yeah.

2143
02:00:59.478 --> 02:00:59.698
Yeah.

2144
02:00:59.898 --> 02:01:01.059
Which is also true.

2145
02:01:01.079 --> 02:01:01.439
That's awesome.

2146
02:01:01.739 --> 02:01:01.879
Yeah.

2147
02:01:01.920 --> 02:01:02.940
The world is your oyster.

2148
02:01:05.022 --> 02:01:06.103
Well, yeah.

2149
02:01:06.163 --> 02:01:12.208
Well, hopefully the audience has developed an intense passion for us during this episode.

2150
02:01:12.228 --> 02:01:14.850
And if you have, be sure to leave a review.

2151
02:01:14.950 --> 02:01:16.911
Follow us on whatever platform you're listening on.

2152
02:01:17.452 --> 02:01:18.393
Anything else you want to say, Drew?

2153
02:01:18.573 --> 02:01:19.213
I think that's it.

2154
02:01:19.513 --> 02:01:19.854
We did the pod.

2155
02:01:19.874 --> 02:01:20.294
We did the pod.

2156
02:01:20.394 --> 02:01:21.376
I think you can go home now.

2157
02:01:21.396 --> 02:01:22.057
You can fly home.

2158
02:01:22.617 --> 02:01:23.579
Start your six months off.

2159
02:01:23.599 --> 02:01:24.080
That's right.

2160
02:01:25.381 --> 02:01:26.183
Thank you, everybody.