STOP Following Your Passion | 830
episodePreviously titled “STOP Following Your Passion | 854” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the argument against following your passion?
0:02–1:16
2
Why is following your passion considered bad advice?
1:16–2:56
3
What is the role of grit in achieving success?
2:56–6:11
4
How does competence relate to passion?
6:11–9:17
5
Why is it problematic to define passion too vaguely?
9:17–12:15
6
What does Warren Buffett teach about competence and passion?
12:15–13:30
7
How does hard work relate to passion?
13:30–19:27
8
What mindset shifts can enhance your approach to work?
19:27–28:30
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Game with Alex Hormozi
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