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Chapter 1: What is the argument against following your passion?
Hey guys, I heard a great little snippet from Ben Horowitz, where he talks about how follow your passion is bad advice. And I started thinking a lot about it. And I've been a big advocate of not following your passion, but I wanted to take the time to break down a logical argument for why I think it's a bad idea. I feel like the argument is fairly compelling and it's not what you think.
It's not me just saying, Hey, just go make lots of money. And that's the only thing that matters. It's not that, or maybe if that is what you think, then you don't understand me well at all. Anyways, Please enjoy this. I think that it really applies to anyone at all levels of business. Because even this morning, I was talking to a good friend of mine who's very successful.
They reached out to me and said, like, why do you still work? They're struggling because they're just like, I don't need to do anything anymore. And I'm just kind of struggling to find my why. But I think that these stopping points happen at all points in life. And so sometimes it's good to reflect. And so that's why I made this pod.
Following your passion keeps people poor or at least poor than they ought to be. And maybe you feel lost right now. I get it. I've been there. I was dead broke in my early twenties and I read all the self-help books I could get my hands on. And a lot of them said, follow your passion. And ironically, that didn't help me. Then I started changing what I did and my life changed as a result.
Chapter 2: Why is following your passion considered bad advice?
So today I own acquisition.com, a portfolio of companies that makes more money than I could ever possibly use. And I have this gazillion dollar, I'm gonna say laboratory, but it's not a laboratory, it's a studio.
Anyways, and nobody cares, but what I can help you with is potentially explain a different path that might help you if the following your passion thing, or not knowing what your passion even is, is something that's gotten in the way. So problem number one with follow your passion, it gets cause and effect backwards. So often we become passionate about things after we get good at them, not before.
So there's a great book by Angela Duckworth called Grit, and I'm going to summarize that entire thing in the next like two minutes so you don't have to read the book. And so she's this fancy PhD professor, did a bunch of research about why do successful people succeed? Because it's obviously not intelligence. It's not all these other things that they try to isolate.
It's not how good they are at sports or academia or arts or business. She tried to look at all these different things and found that there was something that was unique that she was able to identify. And she referred to it as grit. And so there's four stages of development for grit. So number one is that you have some sort of initial discovery. So that's exposure, usually by chance.
Maybe your brother's into cars, or your friend really likes Pokemon, whatever, right? You have some chance discovery of something. Then you develop some sort of competence through deliberate practice. The key word there is deliberate practice, meaning you start, you get feedback, you get better. You change and iterate what you do.
Then, and this is key point number three, is that you start to recognize the value of your new skills that you're developing. And then because you recognize the value of those skills, you start a second feedback loop, which then deepens your passion. And then from that passion and those continuous loops of you going deeper and deeper and getting more and more repetitions creates mastery.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of grit in achieving success?
And guess what? Now you have passion. And so competence plus time leads to passion. And so that's what a very fancy PhD person came up with, even though, here's the crazy part, You will hear people say, follow your passion. You'll hear really smart people, very successful people say that. And think about why they might say that. They're like, well, let me look at myself.
I'm passionate about what I do. So just do what I do. Be passionate. The thing is, is it's just like saying, hey, if you want to be rich, fly private. Or if you want to be tall, go play basketball. It doesn't work that way. You get rich. And then as a result of being rich, you can fly private. It's not that flying private is the reason that you're rich.
right so you will do the work to become passionate not that being passion is necessarily the thing now here's the thing some people are like well some people just naturally have a passion no they found the thing earlier they had their chance experience when they were in their early toddler years or their five six seven they start painting and it's like oh god so they follow the same process they had some sort of chance encounter they start doing a little bit of deliberate practice
All of a sudden, they realize there's value in their skill. Their parents, their friends are like, oh, you're good at drawing. Oh, you must really like this. And then boom, all of a sudden, deeper passion emerges. They start identifying as it. And then boom, competence, skill, and then passion.
And so I say this to say that some of you, myself included, like never really had something that just magically occurred. You have to start stuff that you're not necessarily as good at and have broader exposure so that you can have a loud chance to take root. Number two, it's too vague and assumes everyone has a clear passion and many people have no idea, right?
So it's hard to say that you like X more than Y. You might like both, right? And so it's very hard to quantify. It makes it hard to decide. And so how good you are at something is a little bit easier to make an AB decision on, right? So if I said, you know, do you like pizza more than you like tacos? You would be like, I don't know. Like I kind of like both of them, right? But if I said,
are you better at english than you are at math it's probably easier for you to make a call there right and so preferences versus skills are easier to determine a decision path which then gives you clarity on what next steps to take so even examples of bill gates tried a bunch of different things so he tried law i tried mathematics he tried programming before he found his direction and he wasn't following a clear passion but he was exploring his abilities and opportunities and i'll give you a personal example
So I was interested, like back in the day before I started business, I was like, well, I kind of like Froyo and I learned a little bit about that. I was like, I like fitness and I like test prep. And so I kind of had these different skill sets in these different domains, but I was only able to have clarity once I started and then took action on it because then the feedback loop begins.
And so the objective of developing passion is to get a feedback loop started. So third reason that follow your passion at the onset is terrible advice. Liking something doesn't make you good at it. All right, so think about it like this. Being passionate doesn't even guarantee that you have the skills for it. And sometimes it's better to have a career and enjoy your passions in your free time.
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Chapter 4: How does competence relate to passion?
Now, some people are like, those things can be one in the same, but I'll tell you what, My dad loves what he does. I'll tell you that he didn't start it because he loved it. He started because he wanted to be a productive member of society. Maybe it's a little bit that immigrant in me, but like the rest of the world isn't so comfortable that they're sitting in sunshine and rainbows.
But here's the crazy part. Many of them are more fulfilled than we are because they don't see anything wrong with doing the work. Doing the work is seen as a very, like it's seen as a dutiful responsibility. It's seen as a good thing. Guy provides for his family. Nothing wrong with that. So I'll give you a little example here.
So Warren Buffett follows a philosophy that he calls the circle of competence, which is focusing not on what excites you, but on what you understand best. And his passion follows his competence, not the other way around. So for example, me personally, all the gym owners I know love fitness. But many of them were very broke.
And so they said, hey, I should start a business around fitness because I'm passionate about it. And then made no money because they had to realize, oh, wait, I don't know anything about business. And so it's like understanding fitness is like 5% of the fitness business. It's just kind of like, oh, I like cooking. I should start a restaurant. It's like, well, it's about 5%.
And what's crazy is the thing that you're actually passionate about cooking or doing fitness has almost nothing to do with monetizing that skill. So here's the fourth reason I think it's bad advice. Follow your passion skips the hard work part. So getting really good at something means practicing the boring or the hard parts too.
So for example, I actually really like playing ping pong, something that I enjoy. So I decided, I was like, oh, I'm going to look into what it would take to get better at ping pong because I do like it and I play it a lot when I can. And I started watching what some of the teams do and they're like, all right, 500 forehands, 500 backhands in a row. And I was like, oh yeah, I don't want to do this.
And so I may be passionate about it, but I don't want to do the work that is required to go from passionate to like world-class or state level or whatever, right? And so, like I mentioned earlier with grit, all of the research on deliberate practice shows that it's not an enjoyable process. I want to say this again.
The research on deliberate practice, which is what is required to gain competence, which competence is required to become passionate. Okay, cut that out because that's not true because we just made the point about being passionate.
And so all the research on deliberate practice, which is required for competence, and competence is certainly required for making money in whatever career you want, is that it is not an enjoyable process. This is what the research showed. I was actually kind of blown away by that. And so when you're repeating the same sales script over and over again, it's not that fun. It's very tedious.
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Chapter 5: Why is it problematic to define passion too vaguely?
And then for 26.1 miles, basically no one cares. You're running and you're like, wow, this is really long. And then you're like, oh my God, I have to do four more of these one-fifths, right? And you're like, holy God, this is, or five more of these one-fifths is tough.
And then at the very end, right as you're about to accomplish, people just see you sprint the last bit and they're like, oh, congrats. Congratulations. But you're like, it's the mundane middle. You have to master the middle. That's where all the gains come in. So I'll share a rule that has worked very well for me for developing skills. And so this is the $100 million leads book.
Step four of Outbound, I talk about this, which is reach out to them 100 per day. And so I call this the rule of 100. I talk about it at length a little further in the book. But when I did my book launch, actually for this book, I practiced the presentation that I did 90 times before I actually did it live, right? Now the rule of 100 is about doing 100 per day, right?
So it's hard for me to do the entire operation 100 times a day because there's literally not that many hours. But I did it three full times per day and it was a 90 minute presentation. So about four and a half hours of deliberate practice per day. And I would watch the recording and then I would tweak the presentation where I stumbled or I felt like I needed a better visual, whatever.
And I did that every single day. And so the idea is that it just requires significantly more work and it's also not going to be fun. And the more practice you have at practicing, the better you get at it. Because I know that practice precedes excellence.
And so the more times you start practicing and realizing that that practice leads to winning, you start to get excited to practice, not for the practice itself, but because what practice means to you, because you know what comes after practice, which is winning. Here's the fifth reason that I think follow your passion is terrible advice. It also sets false expectations.
So it makes you feel like work should always be fun and exciting, and it isn't. An early mentor of mine told me, and I will never forget this, he said, Never try to make money out of something you love. He said, because then you'll just ruin it and turn it into work. And he was so interesting because he was a very successful guy. And of course, you're going to have people on both sides of this.
And again, I want to be clear. I think that you want to do things you enjoy. I just think that it takes time of not enjoying it to get to the part where you enjoy it because it takes time to get good. And so for anybody who's going to like try and blow me up on this, by all means do it. We're all going to die. No one's going to remember us.
But like the point is you have to develop passion rather than follow it. You have to create it. And so I'll give you a different example. Many Hollywood actors realize that it sucks and that many acting careers involve more waiting, rejection, and business administration than actually creative fulfillment. And so Jeff Bezos talks about this where he said, everything is overhead.
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Chapter 6: What does Warren Buffett teach about competence and passion?
And I think that if you do nothing or you hate everything you do, that there's probably a middle path. And I'll also say something that I think most people will disagree with, but I'll just shoot, I'm gonna shoot my shot. I think that the way that you approach the work you do can fundamentally change the work itself.
And so there's this great, I think it's a parable or analogy, maybe it's a story, basically of this man who basically swept floors for like 35 years. And he just did an amazing job. It's a Japanese story. And the way that he approached this and was like, how are you, like, there's no way that this is fun or interesting.
And he ends up saying, I imagine that they're paying me a million dollars every single day to sweep the floors. And so I think, how would I sweep them if they paid me a million dollars every day to sweep? And so it changed his entire perception of how to approach the work. I saw this little post that went viral the other day of a waiter that had a tip that said, do better.
Right, so instead of having money there, it said basically zero dollars and the person said, do better. And he said, normally, you know, I could, you know, take this and be like really offended or say these people sucked, but he decided to take it to heart. And so the next day he showed up to work and was like, I'm just gonna try and be the best. He's like, I'm gonna try to remember names.
Chapter 7: How does hard work relate to passion?
I'm going to try and smile, be charismatic. He's like, and the craziest thing happened. All of a sudden people were telling me I was so nice and they started giving me bigger tips and they started talking to me about other opportunities. And the thing is, is that he was still doing the same job, but he was, the way he approached it was different.
And so like, would you say that you're, was he, did he become passionate about his work or did he just decide to see the larger picture that the work we do works on us more than we work on it? That leads me naturally to the sixth reason that I think follow your passion is terrible advice. It also just ignores money realities, right?
Just because you love something doesn't mean you can make enough money doing it. So just look at American Idol tryouts, right? Ain't nobody trying to see them sing, right? Even though those people love it. And so I remember for me early in my career, I wasn't driven really by a specific passion. I just didn't really want to be broke anymore.
As terrible as this sounds, like people used to ask me like, what's the mission of Gym Launch? The mission of Gym Launch when I started Gym Launch was Alex not being broke. That was the mission of Gym Launch. Now, here's the thing. As I developed the business, it did become to take an industry from its knees to its feet.
But at the moment when I started Gym Launch, I just lost everything for the second time. And I was like, I am not doing this again. I was like, this has to work. And so I say this, that a lot of people have a lot of romanticism, but it's just not based in reality. And people doctor their memories. They look back and it feels different than when you're going through it.
And I'll give you a simple example of this. When you look back on some of the hardest things you've gone through, you probably have a sense of pride for having gotten through them. But the thing is that when you actually think about what it was like when you're doing it, it sucked. But you're proud in retrospect. And so if someone says, hey, you know, what's it like? It's like, oh, you know what?
You just got to enjoy the moment. You got to revel in it. It's like you're not reveling in it. It sucks. But you keep going. You persist because of what you know it's building inside of you. The skill sets so that you can persevere at a higher level. So I'll give you a business example. So there's a very harsh reality of supply and demand.
And so if your passion is something that a lot of people like to do, there's probably a lot of people wanting to do it. And so that means there's a lot of supply. And so it's going to be super, super competitive. Think acting, think singing, think painting. And so it might not be the most realistic path for making money.
And like one of my early mentors said, it's like, well, what stops you from just painting when you want to paint and then making money when you want to make money?
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Chapter 8: What mindset shifts can enhance your approach to work?
And there's tons of research that says that people who focus on others are the happiest. And so we tend to look back and are proud of the hard things that we overcame, especially in service of other people or a larger mission. So for me, I would make real business education accessible for everyone. And the thing is that I don't always want to record content.
I don't always want to think about what we're going to talk about today or what we're going to put out. But the service of that mission is very valuable for me. And there's a different body of research. I can't tell you where it is, so you can choose to believe it or not. but that people can actually endure a significantly larger amount of pain for other people. So hear me out.
So if you got hooked up to an electric shock machine and they said, cool, we're just going to turn this up and just tell us when to stop, people stop. But if you tell the person that their loved one is in the other room and that every shock that you take, they don't have to take, People's tolerance for pain goes up like tenfold.
And so to me, I see that as an allegory for how we can choose to live our lives. So that person who's experiencing the pain for let's say their loved one, their wife, their spouse, their daughter, their son, do you think that in that moment when they feel like they're shielding the storm from the people they love, that they don't feel like they have purpose? But objectively, they're suffering.
See how there's layers to this? And so the idea is, I think that saying follow your passion is very self-interested. It actually doesn't allow you to plug into a much stronger motivation or fuel. And so I would prefer follow your purpose. And so the fancy, if you want to Google that and find out more about it, it's called the martyrdom effect.
But basically, you can handle way more pain in the service of others, which is wild. But the thing is, if you're like, man, I'm struggling to get motivated, it's because you're trying to get motivated for you. rather than get motivated for other people. And I know that sounds a little foo-foo, but at the end of the day, like the research is the research, right? Like we are built this way.
We're social creatures. And it would make sense that people get applauded for sheltering and protecting and serving the community. And I think that that's so woven into our culture or most cultures that we're willing to do so much for it. I can tell you right now, I absolutely can take more pain for Layla than I can for me and just replace Layla with whatever that thing is that you love.
I want to tell you this story because I think it's a parable that really resonates deeply with me. And it's similar to that Japanese man who sweeps the floors, which is a traveler came upon three stonecutters working at a quarry. And so he asked them what they were doing. The first stonecutter replies, I'm cutting stone. I'm exhausted. It's backbreaking work. I'm miserable.
He goes to the second stonecutter and he says, what are you doing here? He says, I'm earning a living to support my family. And cool. He goes to the third stonecutter and he says, what are you doing?
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