Passion Is Suffering, Not Happiness | Ep 935
episodePreviously titled “Passion Is Suffering, Not Happiness | Ep 993” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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What does suffering have to do with pursuing passion?
If you're suffering right now in pursuit of the thing that you find meaningful, there is nothing wrong with you. You are not on the wrong path. And this is how it works. And the people who try to tell you otherwise either don't know better or actively are trying to destroy you. People want to follow their passion but don't even know what it actually means. The root of the word, passio, is Latin for suffering. So it's not about doing what you love, it's about finding something that you love enough that it's worth suffering for. And so pick something worth suffering for. The first usage of the word passion came from Passion of Christ, which was literally Jesus Christ's crucifixion story. And so it's interesting that this has been bastardized into
Following your passion means doing what you love. I had a young man stop me, say that he quit his job, went all in on entrepreneurship, but then he didn't like what his life looked like. He asked me what he should do. And the reality was that he quit because He thought that he was doing something wrong because he wasn't loving every second of it. And so here's the big problem.
Why is the concept of passion often misunderstood?
Your passion only exists in the vague, not in the specific. So even if you start a business around what you believe to be your passion, 95% of what you do every day, if you're successful, will not be your passion. You'll just have very brief moments where you'll do that specific thing, if at all. And so what's short-lived is... This kind of like passion window is very short-lived or it's only possible as an employee where you actually stick to doing the same thing every single day within a larger machine or a solopreneur that chooses not to scale. Not a business owner unless you choose to love business ownership as the thing you're passionate about, which means that you're willing to suffer for it.
If you keep doing the thing that you suffer for for a long period of time, eventually you can get to true ownership where something operates on its own and then you have all your time back. So I run every month, I meet with 10 entrepreneurs. It's the most expensive service that we sell. It's obviously unscalable, but I meet with bigger businesses. Usually the average business size is around 10-ish million. And we meet in a group of 10. And it's something that I absolutely love doing. I look forward to the days whenever they're coming up.
How can suffering lead to meaningful achievements?
But I would absolutely hate it if I had to do it every day. And so how can that be true? How can I love something, but if I did a lot of it, I would hate it? There's a certain pizza place that I love going to once or twice a year. And it's amazing. If I was forced to eat it every single meal, I wouldn't like it as much. And so we have this misconception about... following your passion. And in both scenarios, if you do the same thing all the time that you love, you'll stop loving it because you'll get so much of it. The fact that it's rare is what makes you love it. And if it stays rare, then it means that the vast majority of your time, you're not really doing it. And so it's just a complete myth. And I understand why people tell younger people or other newer entrepreneurs like, oh, follow your passion.
It's just because it's politically correct and it's easy to say, but it's not the truth, right? And so you're not going to have the perfect amount of sunshine for the perfect amount of time And so let me reframe how I think through this is that you want moments. You want good days, not a never ending work state of this jolly thing that you love, because eventually you'd adapt and you would get bored just like everything else. And so here's the underline. You're using the excuse of a lack of passion to disguise your inability to handle difficulty. to handle hardship, to handle enduring, to handle being able to repeatedly do things that you don't enjoy, to have something that you do find meaningful have happened, to make it real.
What happens when passion becomes a job?
And so this is what actually happens in the real world, right? So unless you get very good at your passion, you will have to do things that you like less to pay your bills, period.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does suffering have to do with pursuing passion?
0:00–1:01
2
Why is the concept of passion often misunderstood?
1:01–2:10
3
How can suffering lead to meaningful achievements?
2:10–3:33
4
What happens when passion becomes a job?
3:33–6:37
5
Why is it important to choose a path worth suffering for?
6:37–7:27
6
How does one find joy amidst hardship?
7:27–12:04
7
What is the relationship between ambition and suffering?
12:04–25:41