SOLVED with Mark Manson - Passion, Solved: Is It Really Worth Pursuing?

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Nearly 60% of American workers are checked out at their jobs. Meanwhile, every graduation speech in history tells you to follow your passion and you'll never work a day in your life. So which is it? In this episode, Drew and I debate both sides. I argue for passion. He argues for practicality. And what we discover along the way is that the whole question is kind of a false dichotomy. We get into the psychology of harmonious vs. obsessive passion (and why one leads to fulfillment while the other led Kurt Cobain to write "I don't have the passion anymore" in his suicide note). We talk survivorship bias, Maslow's hierarchy, and why financial stress literally impairs your ability to think creatively. I share the story of quitting my investment bank job at 24, living on a friend's futon, and knowing within a month that I was never going back. We look at how Jane Goodall took a secretarial job and stumbled into becoming the world's preeminent primatologist. And we land on a phrase I think is way more useful than "follow your passion": develop your passion... because passion isn't something you find, it's something you grow. Get your free episode guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/passion/ • Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩ • Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁨https://www.purpose.app⁩ Check out our sponsors: • Factor: Get 50% off and free breakfast for a year at https://www.factormeal.com/solved CODE: solved202650off. • Shopify: Get your $1-per-month trial at https://www.shopify.com/solved. • 80,000 Hours: Pre-order your copy of their updated Career Guide at https://www.80000hours.org/Solved. • Wispr Flow: Wispr Flow is faster and more efficient than any other built-in dictation tool. Download today to try Wispr Flow Pro for one month free using promo code MARKMANSON (redeem on desktop checkout only): https://ref.wisprflow.ai/markmanson-podcast #WisprFlowPartner Chapters: 0:00 CHAPTER 1: Introduction 5:15 CHAPTER 2: Round One – The Case for Passion 12:49 CHAPTER 3: Rebuttal – Obsessive vs. Harmonious Passion 24:09 CHAPTER 4: Round Two – Financial Stability and Survivorship Bias 39:03 CHAPTER 5: Rebuttal – Regret Minimization and Turning Pro 1:00:48 CHAPTER 6: Round Three – Passion Is Fluid, Not Fixed 1:18:39 CHAPTER 7: Rebuttal – Career Capital and Getting So Good They Can't Ignore You 1:31:23 CHAPTER 8: Round Four – What Actually Causes Passion? 1:47:09 CHAPTER 9: Synthesis – Develop Your Passion Follow Mark Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at autotrater.ca, Canada's car marketplace. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 60% of U.S. workers are either disengaged or actively

dislike their job. They're checked out mentally. They are completely absent emotionally. They are simply going through the motions. 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. So today, Drew and I are going to butt heads. We're going to look at the question, when considering your career, should you pursue passion or should you be practical?

Should you do something because you love it? As the cliche goes, if you love what you do, then you'll never work a day in your life. Or should you be practical, get paid, and then use the extra of money and free time to go do what you enjoy instead. My name is Mark Manson. I am three-time number one, New York Times best-selling author. And don't you forget it. This is my co-host, producer, longtime lead researcher, Drew Bernie. 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.

Should I pursue something for the love of it or should I be practical? I probably get emailed some variation of this question at least once a week. Yeah, if not more. Oh, yeah. For a decade now. Yeah. And it generally comes from young people too. but even a lot of older folks, people stuck in dead-end jobs, people wondering if they should

change their career, a lot of people wondering if it's too late. We're going to get into a lot of different nuances and sides of this question. It's a bit of a complicated question. I think there's a lot of individual variation. There's a lot of context dependence. The science says quite a bit about both of these decisions. There's good reasons to pursue each of these two decisions. There's also good reasons to not pursue each of these two decisions. And Drew and I are each going to take up the flag on one side of the debate. So me, I'm going to argue that you should be passionate, 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. And Drew is going

to take the flip side of the equation. He's going to argue that people should be more practical. The voice of reason. The voice of reason. Obviously. Okay. Yes, I will be the emotional head case in this episode. And, you know, last episode, we did a debate and we, the roles were reversed. We argued whether romantic love was overrated or not.

I was the stonehearted, cold bastard who argued that love was very much overrated. And you defended it like a knight defending his virgin bride's chastity. Okay, well, that makes perfect sense to me. Something you're very used to. That's right. I'm sure. 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.

In this case, I take the proposition, which is that one should follow their passion when deciding their career path. And Drew takes the opposition, which is people should be more practical and reconsider. We go for four rounds total. each of us presents two arguments and the other one can counter-argue each of those arguments. So it will open up with me. I'll give the first argument.

Drew will rebuttal and then Drew will open with his first argument and then I will give a rebuttal 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 one cohesive takeaway for the audience of like, okay, 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? And then, of course, we'll all agree that I won and we'll move on. We'll see. Anything you want to say before we jump into our debate before you get absolutely throttled

by my airtight arguments. I mean, obviously, there is a lot of nuance that goes into this and we'll get into that. I think there is just, there's an inherent tension. There's different tensions

around this question. And I think when people think about this, sometimes they aren't aware that there's, of what tension they're trying to reconcile. Okay. So I would just say, kind of pay attention to that

as we go through this. Okay. Yeah. All right. So in other words, you're wrong. Got it. Is that why we're starting this one already?

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right, everybody. The question, should we be passionate or should we be practical

on this episode of Solved? Quick reminder. If you love the show, please give us a follow and a like. So many people listen to this show every single month, and yet they are not subscribed. They don't follow us. Please, it's the best thing you can do to support us.

Without further ado, let's get into it. Round one. We need to get some bikini girl in here with, you know, one of those little, no? Okay. I can do it. All right. Clearly, clearly, this is the passionate side of the table.

obviously. I'm being pragmatic already. Yeah. All right. The case for passion. I'm going to open up with the story of one very famous

J.K. Rallin. J.K. Rallin, a lot of people have heard this story. I'll give a very quick overview version of it. J.K. Rowling was a struggling teacher. She was a single mother.

She was incredibly depressed. She was deep in debt. She would write, She started writing this novel that she felt very, very deeply about. It was kind of the only thread that kept her going through this period of her life. She was the survivor of domestic abuse. She had gone through all sorts of hardship. She had moved different countries.

And she barely had two pounds to rub together. She would go sit at this cafe in Edinburgh and type away on her keyboard, writing this novel about a young wizard named Harry. and all she had money for was literally one cup of copy each day. She was barely eating because she was so broke. Yet, she showed up and wrote every single day. And the result, of course, it's Harry Potter. And what's striking about this story, there's two things I think that stand out.

One is, I think there's kind of an almost a therapeutic case that you could make, which I actually is beyond the bounds of this argument for this episode. 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. So I think that's one very important facet of this. The other important facet of this is just the absolute persistence and resilience

that comes as a natural byproduct of carrying very, very deeply about what you work on. 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. She would have given up at multiple places. She would have probably gone and found something else to do. She probably would have tried to pay her bills. Instead, she had something that was very deeply moving to her and kept her steady and persistent throughout this entire period. And of course, this turns up in the research itself. 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, they tend to work harder, they tend to deal with setbacks better, and they tend to be more successful.

So it's, it's funny, it's 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. And that was always my argument. 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, you're going to work longer at it, you're going to deal with setbacks better, you're going to come up with more solutions, you're going to stick with it much more consistently. And that consistency over time is going to eventually result in more success. The other thing that I'll add to this is that we opened up the top of the show with the fact that 60% of U.S. workers feel disengaged from whatever they're doing. They don't see any meaning in it. They're basically going through the motions. If you look at the definition of the word passion, its root actually comes from Latin and means to suffer. And for much of the first millennia, it was used as interchangeably with the word suffering. It wasn't until the medieval period. that it started to represent something that was more like worth suffering for, something noble,

something important, meaningful, that the suffering actually had a value to it. And I would personally argue, you know, we did a full episode on purpose. 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. There's like some sort of sacrifice that is a component of it. Kind of predicting your counter argument here of like financial stability, the mental health that comes with financial stability. I would argue that some of the stress and hardship that comes from pursuing something

you're passionate about is a feature, not a bug. Because it does make it feel more meaningful. It does make it feel highly personal. And it does create that sense of purpose in your life, regardless of what's going on around you. And so despite the stress, despite the anxiety, despite the depression, like J.K. Rallying, there's something deep and important about having a practice in your life like that that you can stay tethered to.

The last thing I'll say about this about my opening argument is this is this is something that I felt very personally as well. So I graduated from university in 2007. I initially thought I was going to go in the finance. Aha. Got a job at an investment bank right as the great recession was starting. Everything was a shit show. I was getting paid nothing.

I was working horrible hours. Absolutely miserable. I hated my job. And I'd been kind of doing some of this, some web design work on the side. I've been doing some dabbling a little bit in affiliate marketing. And had just read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week, had some friends that were really getting into like online marketing and e-commerce. And I almost irresponsibly looking back, just cut the cord and went for it.

I was like, you know what? I'm 24. I'm broke. 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. So I was like, let me go try for a year and fail at it. And it was funny because when I started, I had almost no money to my name. I was living on a friend's couch.

I was like doing odd part-time jobs, you know, working a little bit of 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. And then as an offshoot, started blogging as well. And it was funny because I remember I got not even a month into it. And I remember sitting there on my friends Futon working and just thinking to myself, I don't think I'm ever going back. I remember in that moment, I realized I would rather be broke and doing this than to be, then to be at an office job that I hate and have all the money in the world. Like, I'm good with this. This subject is, hits close to home for me in that sense.

Okay. Is that all you got for that one? That is my opening argument, sir. That is my opening argument. All right. Okay. What say you, sir? Well, okay, I'm not going to actually argue that, I mean, passion is good fuel.

Don't get me wrong. What you're making the argument for is that it's a source of motivation, prevents burnout, all of that kind of stuff, right? 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. We kind of tap that deep well of passion, right? I'm actually not going to make the monetary, the money, stability argument just yet. Okay. I actually want to step back just a minute and look at another famous example. Okay.

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. Now, Nirvana's like in my top 10. Yeah, they're great. Love it. Okay. Kirk Cobain was notoriously a pain in the ass to work with.

Okay. And but a machine. People talked about him like in the rehearsal studio. Like he would have these marathon, 18 hour sessions sometimes, right? Like just wouldn't quit. 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? When he took his own life, he left a suicide note. And one of the lines he wrote in it was, I don't have the passion anymore. And so remember,

it's better to the burnout than to fade away. That was a famous line. They actually stole it from Neil Young, a Neil Young song, but still, uh, the passion part, though. I don't have the passion anymore. Yeah. 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? Um, yes, J.K. Rowling, she, she, like, definitely got through a lot of hardship,

but more hardship than most people would ever face. She got through that, uh, came out the other side of a billionaire, too at the same time. Sure. And we'll talk about a little bit about selection bias or the suffering. survivorship bias and stuff like that. But really what I want to focus on is like how much of your identity gets swept up in a passion or how much it can. Okay. Now, there is a little bit of nuance here too because psychologists distinguish between harmonious passion and obsessive passion. Okay. That obsessive passion is the kind I'm talking about where your identity gets fused with

this. Right. So you have nothing else going on in your life. You're just obsessive, can't put it down, can't step away. Right. Right. Right. As you can imagine, a harmonious passion, though, on the other end is you have a good balance with it. You see it as something that you do. It is a passion of yours. You are very emotionally attached to it even too, but you're not like your identity isn't so wrapped up in it that any step back to it is just going to send you into a downward spiral like it did with Kirk Cobain. Got you. It fuels kind of workaholism, like a toxic form of workaholism too.

Again, you get so attached to that. This contrasts with that whole do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Right. Right. Kind of flies in the face of that when it's like, actually, all I ever do is work. It ends up feeling like that after a while, right? There is no work-life balance. And we can talk about the nuances of work-life balance, too.

And I get it if you're going to achieve anything wildly abnormal, right? Right. That's not something extraordinary. You're probably going to have to have some imbalance in your life. 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. And also, not only that, it can, it, it doesn't necessarily protect against burnout. It can actually lead to burnout, right? If you are so obsessed with it,

you can't put it down. You can't, you can't separate your work life from your home life or any other things that you just need to get done. It all revolves around this one passion that you have. You're so wrapped up in it that everything else gets pushed to the side and your life gets really out of balance. Yep. 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 work more.

They put more effort into it. They produce better work. Absolutely. Both harmonious and obsessive types of passion do that. But harmonious passion leaves to better satisfaction with your work. So work satisfaction or job satisfaction really only comes from more of a harmonious passion. And we'll talk a little bit more about how that's developed later. but obsessive passion actually more likely and more frequently leads to burnout.

Yes, you work harder, but you end up feeling worse for it. Right. You're never satisfied. You're never satisfied. Never good enough. You can't. You just can't put it down. Right?

And an ex-girlfriend of mine, she was a veterinarian. Okay. She wanted to be a vet since she was three years old. All right. When she was three, she told everybody, I want to be a veterinarian. She loved animals. She'd pick up every dog and cat she found. Any animal, she just loved it.

She couldn't stand to see an animal suffer. knew from when she was three and she became a veterinary. That's what she did. She followed her passion since she was a little girl. It's very rare to find that kind of thing, but she did it. By the time she got to, she was doing a residency in surgery and small animal surgery. By the time she got to that, she was actively telling other people who were thinking about being vets not to do it. Wow. Because I think you got to be careful like what you're actually calling your passion here too. Okay. A lot of times what we think is our passion isn't necessarily, uh, doesn't translate into the real world very well.

So for her, it was this, she was actually passionate about animals, taking care of animals. Doing good for animals was basically like her passion. She wanted to do that. Being a vet is not, a lot of it is dealing with difficult owners. A lot of it's dealing with the bureaucracy of either a university hospital, which a lot of them are or some small practice too, even a lot of bureaucracy. So I think you just have to be very careful about what you're calling your passion and not getting that confused with all. all the other things that actually go into living out that quote-unquote passion.

Yeah, I'll agree. We'll come back to that because I do think there's a lot of truth in that. Yeah. Basically, though, for this first round, I just, I want to highlight that. It was like the harmonious versus obsessive passion. Okay. There's a way to do passion that contributes to job satisfaction and overall life satisfaction, too. And there's a way to do it where it consumes you.

And that's where I think we have to be a little bit careful. So, yeah, J.K. Rowling, great example of fashion. Kurt Cobain, terrible example of passion. Right. So you can't tell me it's just the passion. Yes. Fair enough. All right.

Fair enough. I also, that's someone who has burnt himself out on multiple occasions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right.

Okay. So I think, you know, what's really going on here is that you have to balance this. There is attention here. 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, that they're trying to reconcile anyway. Yes, like I said, extraordinary achievements require some sort of obsessive approach to them, but that also often proceeds like a spectacular burnout too. At the same time, too, just like the Kirk Cobain thing, right? Like the thing that made him incredibly passionate about his work was also the thing that made him

ultimately take his own life. So I think what the real conflict is is the balance between like sustaining engagement with your work and compulsive overwork, right? Compulsively doing it versus being like healthily engaged with it. So that's that harmonious versus the obsessive passion there. And this is where it's not a simple choice necessarily between passion and pragmatism, but just like maintaining that healthy relationship between the two. I talked about this before and I used to think this argument was such a cop-out, like finding that balance, right?

Right. It's actually really, really hard to find that balance. It is. And that's actually the most difficult way to go about it. is finding a healthy balance with something. It's way easy to just go extreme one way or the other. Extreme pragmatism, extreme passion.

What's harder is finding that balance. Yeah. The other thing, too, is just that the tying yourself worth to what you do, to the performance of what you do to, that's just you're opening yourself out for burnout. And like Kirkobane said, burning out rather than fading away, opening yourself up to that. Okay, so the last thing I'll say about this, too,

is that not we we also celebrate this kind of like obsessive type of passion we look at somebody and they're like oh my god they're so dedicated right they're so passionate about the world there's all these stories about like Elon and you know Steve Jobs and right bill Gates sleeping under his desk and yeah yeah and I remember it it wasn't just a few years ago where somebody was asking you know Elon went to do a talk or something like that and and somebody asked him about you know oh, you know, I want to do some version of what you do at some point. He's just like, don't. Don't do it.

Just like my girlfriend who was vet, says, don't do it. It's not worth it. Go volunteer in an animal shelter, you know, rather than go spend your life being a, spending all these hours and years and money like training to be a vet or whatever it is. Yes, again, I get it. Passion is a great fuel. It can be a great source of motivation. I don't think it's that sustainable, for one.

It's not consistent either, the emotions that are attached to your passion. You said that, you know, oh, is this passion that got her through? I'm not so sure that passion's what got JK rolling through all the time. I thought it's probably more of a discipline for her than it was necessarily passion. So I just don't think you can rely on that as a source of motivation consistently anyway. This obsessive type of passion is masquerading as like healthy productivity or whatever it is. I think that's an issue too that we have. We celebrate it a little too much.

Okay. All right. That's fair. All right. All right. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. So here is the part that nobody tells you when you follow your passion. The passion part is easy.

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All right. This is where I want to bring up issues of stability, issues of money. This is often framed as like the passion versus paycheck. Yes. Argument, right? Okay. The first thing I want to point out about the JK Rolling story or any story, even the Kirk Cobain story too, around passion is survivorship bias. Okay.

This is a very real thing. Most people probably know about this right now. But, you know, we get all these stories of people who made it. And then they say, oh, yes, I was very passionate about it. I followed my passion. I did what I love. Right. And I made it.

And so you should too. What they don't tell you is that there's probably 10,000, 100, that millions of people who did the exact same thing. Right. Didn't make it. Okay. There's a luck component to it, definitely. And just, you know, J.K. Rowling, Kirk Cobain, those are outliers of outliers. Right.

I mean, they're generational talent. that just don't come around that often anyway. 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. So there's a survivorship bias that's going on here. 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. 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. So there's that, all right? Not only that, though, too, like, financial stress is a passion killer as well. So if you jump into it, you know, if you want to be an artist of some kind, especially in the early days, there's not a whole lot of money in that anyway.

Very few people make it. So you have the survivorship bias as well. Very few people make it to the top. And then along the way, you're financially stressed. and we know from research that financial stress leads to cognitive impairments. 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. It's just not going to happen. It's kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing going on here, right?

Yeah. 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. You're going to be worried about finding shelter, you know? getting something you eat, just general safety concerns and survival concerns, that's going to take up a lot of mental bandwidth. You're not going to have time to dedicate to your passions at all in that situation, right? I think that financial stability in many cases, in some form or another anyway, is actually a prerequisite for creative expression and passion projects, even too. One historical example I thought of that you've written about a lot actually,

too is Charles Bukowski. So the story goes, anyway, the lore goes with Bukowski. He was a novelist, a poet. For the longest time, up until he was like in his 50s, I think. He was a nobody. He worked at post office. He worked all these odd jobs, basically, right? All of his writing was rejected for the first 34 years.

Right, right. He was passionate about writing. Don't leave me wrong. He was very much passionate. And, you know, you wrote a great article, still one of my favorite articles you ever wrote called, find what you love and let it kill you. Yeah.

Kind of an argument for, passion, but in a very also practical way, like, hey, this is going to suck, right? At the same time, too, what I would argue, the real story is, you know, his, his kind of agent publisher, John Martin, came along, right? This is when Bukowski was working at the post office and he was hating it and was looking for something else to do. John Martin came along. He saw this guy.

He saw his talent and he said, okay, I'm going to give you, I think it was $150 a month to just write full time and whatever you produce, I'll publish. And that's going to be our deal. right? Well, at that time, $150 a month covered his rent, it covered his food, it covered his cigarettes, it covered his beer. Like, he was good to go. He actually had some form of a financial stability. He wasn't getting rich. I get that. But once he had that, then like three weeks later, he produced his first novel post office, I think, right? Like, once he had that financial stability, once he knew that, okay, I can put a roof over my head, I can, I can eat, I can have my

cigarettes and beer, I'm fine. Now I'm going to go off and really work on this passion project that you've been working for for 50 years up to that point. So I think that's actually this, like there has to be some stability somewhere, okay? The economics of creative work are pretty brutal for the most part. So if we're talking about passions where you are seeking some sort of creative career. Which, let's be honest, for most people, it's what it is, right. 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.

Right, right. So like for instance, for writers, I think this was in 2024. The median annual wage for writers was around $70,000. Which is, oh, that's not bad. The thing is, if you look at the distribution, very few writers make $70,000 a year. Okay. Excuse me while I crawl under the table. Yeah.

There's a few at the top that really pull that out. of, okay. Most of, most writers don't make a whole lot at all. So most of the great works in literature, if you think about it too, were written by people who had day jobs. Right. So another, another famous one, J.R. Tolkien, he did not have a J.K. Rowling's story. Right. He was a professor. He spent a decade writing Lord of the Rings. He had the time and the mental clarity and he wasn't stressed. Yes. He kept writing after he even became famous.

I'm sorry, 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. Yeah. Okay. Later on. I'll give you another example, Mark. Me, right? I've talked about this a lot.

I love work working. I would call it a passion of mine. Right. In my garage right now, which is my wood shop, I can't even park in it because I have so any tools. I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools in here. 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, right? I wouldn't have been able to probably even find this passion had I not had that financial stability. Are you saying you're

not passionate about this podcast? Is that what I'm hearing? I'm going to, I'll argue later that I have the best of both worlds. Audience, I would like you to know that I am deeply passionate about this. podcast and you mean everything to me. Thank you. This job only fuels my passion for workworking. No. You are Drew's side chick. I just want you to know. No, no, no, no. I'm just saying there's a lot of times there are, there are financial barriers to get into our passion. I think you raise a really interesting and useful point for this discussion, which is, and it's funny because I wrote an article, ironically, I wrote an article in 2015 called Screw Finding Your Passion, which I argued that you don't, now.

necessarily need to make your passion the thing that you also make most of your money. Yes. There are ways to, and I'm going to talk about this in a little bit, there are ways to take a job that's adjacent to a passion like token did. There are ways to simply use a steady day job that you don't hate to fund a passion. And I do think there's probably kind of two subcategories of argument here. One is, does your passion need to be your primary profession or the primary way you make money? I'm much more amenable to that argument that that is probably not realistic for everybody. Right.

For most people. For most people. I would make the argument that I think anybody in doubt of whether to pursue it or try it should probably try it. If for anything just to minimize future regrets, which is going to be part of my counter argument here in a minute. But I do think there is a kind of a branched 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. Yeah. And it could be a side hustle or it could just be a hobby. And I agree with that.

Like I think having a passion in your life is, in my opinion, just kind of non-negotiable. Like you everybody should have something in their life that they just, they enjoy simply for the sake of doing it. I agree. That's 100%. 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. But is that the goal? Like, is that ideal? Okay.

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? is like, okay, go get a desk job at an insurance company and then, you know, enjoy your passion on the side. Or do you take the shot and go and try to make the passion your thing. 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. Okay. And see where it goes. So 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, I would argue that that should not be the default choice.

Okay, okay. Yes, I mostly agree with that. You're absolutely right. If a 22-year-old comes to me and say, what should I do? I'm probably going to tell them. Go for it, man. Like you said earlier, what's the difference between like I broke 22-year-old and the part, like 25-year-old? Nothing.

Take a few years and try it. If you've got to start over at 25, you can start. And honestly, as an employer, if I get a job application from a 25-year-old who did take a shot and try to do the thing that they care about and failed at it, I will actually probably look at that as more of a positive than a 25-year-old that worked some dead-in job at a desk that they hated. Definitely. Totally agree with that. Okay. 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. You know, I've told you before. I came from pretty humble means. So I'm like, okay. Yep. I still had to balance that. Yeah. I found a way eventually to be like, okay, I'm going to go after the things I need to go

after. But I first had to take care of that, again, going back to the Maslow's hierarchy and needs type thing. Like, I need a roof over my head first. Yeah. 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. I agree when you're younger.

Yes. There's a lot more leeway to that. And that's a whole discussion around like what stage of life you're at and everything we can get into. This is, I didn't plan to get into this. Yeah. But I do think it's probably worth bringing up. Yeah. Because I think that's a really important point. Like you, you grew up, you didn't have that backstop.

I always knew I did. Yeah. Like when my business got tough, I moved back in with my mom for a year. And like it wasn't really a problem. It sucked. Don't get me wrong. I didn't really want to be living with. my mom at 25, but I did, and it was okay. 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. So yeah, if you don't have that luxury or that privilege, it changes the calculus a certain amount. It also changes the calculus. If you're coming out of school with like heaps and heaps of debt, right, that changes the calculus as well. Like 100% concede that even having the option to pursue a passion as a career is to a certain extent, a bit of a luxury. Yes. Yeah, I'm more of a modern luxury, too, I think. For sure.

For sure. This is the thing to, I don't think people quite understand is that we even have this option to think about this, right? This is a good problem to have. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Anything else you want to say for your argument in round two before?

One example I didn't throw in there from the writing world again, Ernest Hemingway. Right. Okay. So one of the most famous American writers to live. Right. He was a journalist. That was his day job for the longest time. When he wrote many of the most famous works, he was still working as a journalist.

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. Right. But you didn't need a lot of times it was like maybe you had a high school education to be a journalist or a reporter back then. So even Hemingway. Like he still had to have a job to pay the business. bills while he wrote some of the most, the greatest American novels there are. Yeah.

There. Okay. Totally fair. I hear you loud and clear. Yes. The survivorship bias is a very real thing. It's very real. This episode is brought to you by 80,000 hours.

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That's 80,000hours.org slash solved. I would throw that back at you, though, a little bit in that this idea that you have a safe, comfortable job that buys you the comfort to be able to pursue a passion on the side is potentially a little bit of survivorship bias as well. Again, I don't think a lot of people don't have that flexibility in their work. They don't have the time. They're juggling full-time job, family obligations. You know, they got to take their kids to school. They've got health issues, all sorts of stuff. So I don't think it's as simple as you make the case.

And again, you know, I would come back to that data point that, you know, almost 60% of the U.S. workforce is currently disengaged and uninterested in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Right? And I would imagine a very large percentage of those people do have dreams. They do have ambitions. They do have passions that they care about. and they probably struggle with the weather to pursue them, how much to pursue them. Do they pursue them on the side?

Do they go all in? So it is like, I do think it is a complicated question. 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, I would argue that that is probably personality dependent. 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. Ironically, Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain's bandmate, Nirvana, tapped to try out to be drummer of Nirvana. I believe he was squatting in an abandoned warehouse in Amsterdam with like 20 other musicians.

like literally sleeping with a leaky roof and like nothing to his name more than a sleeping bag and a couple t-shirts. 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, he just wanted to play drums. So I think there are some people that are a little bit more built for it. and built to handle the chaotic nature of that lifestyle who are totally fine, just, all right, I'm going to be a starving artist for the rest of my life. And I'm okay with that. Okay. Yeah.

You know, I went to music school with some guys that were definitely, I would say that it's that type of personality too. It's like, it's more like they just can't not do it. Okay. Right. I was going to bring this up to. Yeah. Like when I think about some of the guys I went to music school with who, who,

continued down 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, but I don't care. But I can't not do this. Yes. This is the only thing I like. This is the only thing I want to do. It's the only thing I'm good at. I spend my time doing. It's the only thing I care about. Mark Andreessen of Andrewsson Horowitz, the famous venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley, he said, you know, when they are evaluating whether to fund a business or not, they look at the founder. Like, who the founder is is very important. Yes.

And he said you can almost, he's like, he's got it down to, he can tell within just a few minutes. Is this person somebody who just, they can't do anything but this? Right. Like they can't not do it what you're talking about. Yeah. I totally agree that there is a personality type out there that's like that. And if that's you, that's great. I think the vast majority of people are not like that.

They don't know what their passion is necessarily. True. And that's where they get confused. with a lot of these things. Agreed. Yeah. And there are, so yeah,

most people are somewhere in the middle and it's confusing. So picking up where you just left that off. I'll give you another example of somebody who seemed to not really give a fuck, which is Thoreau. You know, went out lived at Walden Pond, gave up all of his possessions,

lived on the land. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Look, I think he was a bit of a pose or two. That's a... I love Thoreau.

Don't give me. I'm not shitting on Thoreau, but the story has got a lot of legend. Yeah, yeah, let's But go on, sorry, sorry. Topic for another podcast. But yes, let's just say, I am not the most sympathetic to Thoreau either, but he did make a very good point. And the huge point in Walden is that he believed that most people lived 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 they, meanwhile, they either ignore or just are in complete denial about the things that they actually want from their lives. 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. Yes. Of like, oh my God, there are these things that I want my life to be that I've never allowed myself to consider that my life could have these things or could be built around these things. Similarly, there was a post that went mega, mega, mega viral maybe 15 years ago. It was called the five most common regrets of the dying. 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 who were about to die or on the cusp of death.

And so she wrote the piece of the five most common regrets that she heard her patients talk about. And the number one regret is, I wish I'd live for myself and not tried to make everybody else happy. That's the number one thing that comes up. The second one, which I think this could potentially support both of our arguments, is I wish I didn't work so much. I wish I didn't spend so much time at the office. And then number three was, I wish I listened to my own feelings more. And I wish I gave myself more credit. Like the love question, this is a question that for the vast majority of the population, it's not a simple yes or no.

There's probably a small sliver of the population that it is just an obvious yes, pursue your passion. There's probably also a segment of the population that it's a very obvious, just be practical. 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. I get the sense that there's a significant percentage of people in the world who are totally fine just doing a random job for a paycheck and have no problem with it and are perfectly happy to pursue their interests on the side. I think the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle. Yeah. 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, you know, 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, 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 this other stuff. 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.

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. There are a lot of people in that side of the spectrum that this is a very, very important and legitimate topic. decision in conversation, I would argue that it is probably more valuable to minimize the chance of regret than to maximize stability, security, you know, subjective well-being and whatnot. 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 us and and uh and it can control other parts of their life 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 i think a lot of people would take that trade yeah i think there's a lot of nuance around the financial stability question um you know it is another tension in this question of like how much are you willing to tradeoff and how much of that tradeoff is likely to happen by pursuing the thing that you're passionate about. I mean, one thing that we've kind of danced around a little is that some pursuits have more brutal tradeoffs than others.

Okay, yeah, I want to bring this up too. Yeah, because I work in a profession that is a brutal tradeoff, right? It's like for every author that hits it big, There's a thousand authors that starve and don't sell any books. For every podcaster that blows up, there's thousands of podcasters that never get downloaded by anybody. I keep tabs with a lot of the people that I went to music school with. 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. And I talk to them and I hear about the music industry. 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. Like, it is so much harsher than other creative fields. And I think from what I've heard, too,

is that acting is even harsher than that. 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. I think you get to acting, and you're probably into... A few hundred to maybe a thousand at most, and then there's millions that make nothing.

Right. Right. So there's different... power law curves, you know, at least with writing, you can start a substack and maybe make a couple thousand bucks a year or something. Like there's a lot of intermediary paths that you can pursue. So what would you tell somebody then going into one of those like, you know, 0.1% fields, I guess we can call them, but you get music or acting or visual arts of some kind. I mean, I'm not going to disagree. I wouldn't say don't do it. That's not the argument I'm making.

Yeah. But I think at a certain point, you probably do have to get practical, right? Like if you're not getting really bright lights at some point, you should, yeah, that's probably time to move on. So there's two ways I approach this. I've gotten asked this question quite a few times. There's two ways I approach it. One is to bring Elon back up. I think he made a fantastic point about entrepreneurship.

So he was at a talk. This is a long time ago. He was at a talk 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? And Elon said, I wouldn't give any because if you need encouragement,

you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. I would say that, like, I kind of feel the same way about creatives, for the most part. 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. Same thing as a professional musician.

Same thing as an author. Like, I get it. It's hard. And sometimes you want like emotional support. You want your friends. But it's like, you know, reaching out to a stranger and saying like, what can you tell me that's going to keep me going? It's like, well, if you need somebody to keep you going, you're...

Especially a stranger. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I'm sorry. But like that's not it. Like, this isn't it. It's probably not going to happen. The second thing I tell people,

Because again, there's a lot of intermediary. You could build a substack that makes you a, that could become a nice side hustle. Or maybe your attempt to become a professional DJ, like you actually end up working in a studios and engineer and you make a good living that way. And you like help produce other artists. And there's all sorts of like little side paths and stuff that you can end up on. What I, 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. And they're like, I've been giving this a good hearted go for X years, 10 years, five years, eight years, whatever.

It's still not working. I'm getting really frustrated and burnt out. How do I know when it's right to give up? And I always tell them, I'm like, give yourself a deadline. Because that does two things for you. One is, first of all, it gives yourself clarity, right? It's like, all right, I've got until my 30th birthday to make a living, 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?

The other thing it does is that once you have a deadline, now you have, now you know, all right, I got to, I got to throw everything at the wall in the next two years, right? It's like, this is the date and I'm not going to leave any stone unturned. And again, it comes back to regret minimization, right? It's just like you try every fucking thing between now and then just to make sure that you leave yourself no regret so that when you're on the other side of that deadline, you're like, you know what? I tried the music thing. I did everything I could. I did this. I did that.

I did the other thing. I networked. I produced. I did a single. went on tour like none of it stuck none of it worked I gave it my best I'm I can die happy yeah right like I don't regret anything now I know okay and I I felt that way with music school like when I dropped out I was like I know I've given everything I can and I know that's not enough so I'm actually okay leaving I think if I hadn't given everything if I hadn't

put like really stretched the limit of like pushed up against the limit of my ability. I don't think I would have had that piece or as much peace with it. I still I struggled with it for a while, but it was the decision to drop out was it. It was pretty clean cut. Yeah. Okay. Okay. One thing you said earlier too, I just want to come back to just real quick. You said having like an adjacent job or something like that 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. I'm not so sure about that one either. Okay. Stephen Pressfield talks

about this little bit. He calls him shadow careers, right? Where, you know, a writer gets into like a technical writing job that they don't necessarily really like the writing, but it's a writing job. It's like, hey, I'm doing what I love. And it's like, well, no, you're not. And actually what you're doing is you're just kind of sapping energy from that passion. So I think if you are going to take that route, though, I think if you do want some sort of like stable life of some kind and still be able to pursue that, I think there's also an argument to be made, maybe that works for you. Again, that's a very personality dependent, but maybe taking a job that's in a completely unrelated field. You know, like there's a lot of like cab drivers, you know, who might be writers or whatever,

you know, driving door dash or whatever it is. I think there may be something to be said for that too. I think there's some more nuance here. Keep in mind, too, I'm very much on this side of the spectrum. Like I was happy to just burn the boats and go all in. Right, right. That's very much your personality. Yes, and that's not typical, and it worked out for me, but that's also not typical. I am personally, though, biased towards what also what Stephen Presfield calls turning pro, which is that you block out a certain period, you know, maybe save up some money.

Yeah. You block out a certain period. You're like, okay, 20, 27, I'm going to turn pro at the thing I want to be pro at. And then you actually treat it like a job before it's a job, right? So you have working hours, you have rehearsals, you book your time, you start pricing everything, you like set aside a desk in the side of your house, you create a calendar for yourself, you create an email and a website for yourself. Like you basically act as though you're already a professional, even though you're not a professional,

for two reasons. One is gets you to actually act and behave in the way that's going to get you hired for stuff. And then two, is that you're actually going to see what it's like to be a professional. Because this is another thing that comes up a lot, especially in creative fields, is that the people who, you know, 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 the school, but they don't hate this one part. So they confuse that as a passion or something they can do sustainably for the rest of their life. And it's like, actually, no, that's not actually not your passion or that's not something that you're deeply passionate about. 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. I like this as a hobby. And that happens a lot too. 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. I liked being able to play in a rock band and play covers at my friend's parties. And I like the attention it got me.

me. Once I got to music school and I actually had to turn pro, it fucking sucks. Because being a pro musician means you're alone in a room practicing all day every day. And I, it was miserable. So it's turning, going pro as Stephen calls it, I think is it's advantageous just because it forces the question. Okay. And then again, it's about leaving no regrets on the table. Right. 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, now you know. For the rest of your life, you're like, oh, no, I tried, I tried the author thing. I tried writing a novel. Didn't work out.

Didn't love it. And you can move on and be at peace with it. Okay. The last thing. The last point I'm going to make in this rebuttal. That was aggressive. I was like, you're not getting away that easily, Mr. I do have one more point.

And I'm excited. I'm wagging my finger because it's a good one. I think the reason I keep focusing on the regret minimization is because you can recover from financial ruin. You can lose your money and you can make it back later. If you lose time, you can't go get that back. Yeah, true. Right. 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. Whereas if you go broke at 25, you can find ways to make the money back later. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I will say too, I mean, I'm not sure that still requires passion, though, necessarily. Like, you know, I left a stable graduate program, you know, to come work with you. I don't know. I mean, I was, I guess I was passionate about writing.

That's really what I wanted to do was something in the writing field and had loved self-development, self-help stuff was big time. I liked all that. I don't know if I would say, I liked research. Yeah. I mean, I guess there was passion elements to it, but I wouldn't like, I don't know. 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. Yeah. And so that decision definitely minimized regret for me. I'm not sure if it was really steeped in passion, though. So I think there's some subtlety around that too. So that's the only thing I'll say about that. My observation, since we're talking about you. Yeah. My observation is that you're very passionate about parts of the job, not all of the job.

That would, yeah. Which is true for me as well. Sure, sure. Yeah. And I think I've probably told you before that like, I don't know, 60, 70% of my job and the other 30% is what you pay me for. So yeah, yeah. And I'm totally cool with that too, because I've had it the other way where it's like, I like 10% of this job and that's it. Well, for what it's worth, I feel the same way. Yeah, for sure. And I made my own job. I knew. Yeah. Yeah. You made your bed there, didn't you? But I just, I do think some of that's inevitable. Yeah. But I, and yeah, and I'm totally cool with that.

I guess, and that's a personality thing too. Like, I can put up with, I can put up with that in exchange for what I get. No, but I mean, I'm, I'm being serious. Like, I'm making the point. Like, even, you know, it's like, coming back to Kurt Cobain, like, he fucking hated dealing with the record labels. He hated touring. He hated promotional stuff. He hated going on MTV.

Like, there was so many, like, part of what burnt him out, he, he, he, he was. He's actually a very interesting case study here because he was obsessively passionate about the music and about making the music, writing, writing, recording, performing the music. It was everything else that came when he got famous that he fucking hated. It drove him, it drove him the suicide. Like, he hated it so much. So it is another one of those, be careful what you wish for type things. Like, you know, turn pro before you turn pro, because then that's actually going to show you, do you like doing this? Right.

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Make healthier eating easier with Factor. We've covered a lot of ground already. So some of this is going to be retreading a little bit of the nuance that we already got into. 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. Again, it depends. It's personal and everything. But 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 when actually like If you just get a little bit of a taste of it here and there a lot of for I think for a lot of people That's enough okay and 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. Like they're not on stage performing at large festivals, 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 a large organization or at a church or something like that. 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. And the reason I bring this up is because passion is actually a very fluid thing. I think we tend to erroneously think of passion kind of the same way a lot of people think of soulmates.

Like you have this one fixed passion out in the world and I have to find it and I have to live it. And if I don't, then my life is ruined. And that's just a very Disney way of approaching passion and in one's life. I agree with that, yes. It is passion is complex. It evolves. It changes. It shifts.

It changes shape. It changes intensity. It is, and it is something that as you go through your work life, it can, it is something that you can almost mold around what is available to you. 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, not because she wanted to be the world's preeminent primatologist, not because she particularly cared about monkeys.

She just really liked exotic African animals. She thought they were really cool and really interesting, and so she took a secretarial job adjacent to that. 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. 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, you know, different proclivities and whatnot. She would eventually go on and become the world's preeminent primatologist, a legend in her field. But that was never the plan at the outset.

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. In many cases, you were referring to earlier, like people who don't know what they're passionate about, I think that is probably the practical solution for most people, is what do you think is cool? What do you think is interesting? What do you like to spend your time thinking about?

Awesome. Like, find a job that gives you more opportunities to think about that thing or be around that thing than most other jobs. As a result, you create surface area for your, 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. Like, I think examples, like your ex-girlfriend, she's the exception. 100%. Like, most people don't wake up and know that they want to be something when they're three years old and pursue that for the rest of their life. Most people, it's things come and go, right?

Like, your obsession when you're a teenager is different than your obsession in your 20s, and then you develop a slightly different obsession in your 30s, and then you get really into something else. Like, throughout my career, I've watched my passion shift and change quite a bit. You know, early on, it was very much writing. Like, my ideal career, you know, 10, 12 years ago,

when you started was I just want, I just want to write all day, and I just want all this other stuff to work without me having to think about it. And for many years, you and Philip basically, ran the online business and I just wrote. And that was how my life was. As I've gotten older and my career has changed and shifted, I found myself kind of thrust with doing video content

and social media being more important and launching this podcast. 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. And what I've discovered is that I actually really like the business side of this career. And it's super interesting to me. And in many ways, like, and I still love writing, but it's, it's not as, it's not my one and only, right? It's not my soulmate that I like, I have to only do that for the rest of my life.

So it is, I've definitely felt my passion within my own career shift and evolve over time. And I think that's probably true for, for most people. 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. It's probably put yourself adjacent to it, put yourself in the vicinity of it, and then let it kind of grow and emerge as a side effect. There's so many more examples of this. I mean, I won't bore the listeners too much, but like Trent Rezner started as an engineer in a recording studio. and he played in an 80s band on the side. Oh, yeah, I remember you showed me these videos.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he worked these long hours in the recording studio, and he was always the last to leave. And so he decided some of those nights, like it was him by himself in the recording studio. He's like, well, why don't I just throw a tape on the machine and record some of my own songs and see what happens? And that eventually became his first album.

Like, it wasn't like this, like, predestined thing that he decided when he was 10 and 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 it made it quite easy for him to record his first album.

Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry, are you arguing still for passion or pragmatism here? That sounded like one big, be pragmatic argument. Be passionate pragmatically. Okay. It's...

Let me point something out, I guess. The Jane Goodall story. You're absolutely right. She got into something. She found her passion through that. She was in an kind of adjacent. She was on the periphery of the field anyway. And then, oh, I like this thing.

She was also, she got a leaky foundation grant. That provided her with some stability to be able to kind of play around in this area and figure out what she liked. Trent Resner was a sound engineer, worked as a sound engineer while he did this. I'm hearing an argument for pragmatism first is what I'm here. My argument here is that passion is something that can evolve and develop after you've taken that first step. Yes. You don't have to wait for the passion to take that first step. You can take the first step in the direction that you think it's very, very likely the passion is.

And then the passion will evolve and develop from there. So take that first step and take a pragmatic approach to finding out what area the specifics of the passion. The reason I bring this up to something like almost 50% of our waking hours as an adult is spent doing our job. And it's not a difficult argument to say that liking what you do for work is a very, very big value for your life. Right. So there is like a very serious sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. Like a huge part of your subjective well-being probably comes from how satisfied you are with your job and your career.

Yes. My point is, is, you know, we've been kind of dancing around this argument of like, you know, passion is too risky. You have to kind of throw things by the wayside. You've got to be willing to, like, live and be broke. You know, financial stability is important. It's my point is, is that you can pursue passion in a piecemeal type of way. You don't necessarily have to throw caution to the wind. Like it's that lifelong fulfillment and you can accept like the same way a lifelong marriage to somebody, not every year is a great year.

You go through high times and low times and it kind of the marriage shifts and changes and evolves over time. I think the same is true with one's passion. 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. Whereas if you're doing something that you hate 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. And then the foundation grant comes in or like an opening comes in for like a new research position

or whatever. She's not going to jump at that. She's not going to put her hand up and say, well, wait, can I try that? Like she's probably just going to be like, whatever, you know, it's, there's a, 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. 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.

Yes. Yeah. I don't disagree. And I'm not saying like passion is just irrelevant in any way, shape, or form. I think it is very important. And you should use it and you should fuel your motivation with it, all of that. I'm just not so sure that what you're talking about is like this long-term fulfillment. A long-term satisfaction with your work specifically is what we're talking about. Oh, it doesn't have to be. You acknowledge that too. I'm just not so sure that passion is what actually fuels that in particular. And I don't think it necessarily it fuels whether or not you enjoy your job. It can. That can be a source of fulfillment in your work. I would argue it's probably the most sustainable way to enjoy your job. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I could see that argument. I just think that this still, though, in the exploration of that passion, just like with Jane Goodall or Trent Reznor, they still were doing that from a very stable base. they found a way to enter into it from a very stable base.

Yes. Yes. And then they could go in and they could play around with it. Yes. And that is. So what I'm saying is like if they just let like followed their passion. Right. Quote unquote. They knew they were passionate about this field.

They had an idea. Okay. Right. Which a lot of people don't for one. Okay. So you do have to do some experimentation around that. My, my argument is play around in in a field or an area where you can have some stability

and that allows, that stability is what gives you freedom to explore that passion. That's kind of my, I think my argument here. Okay, it sounds like we're in a, you say potato, I say potato situation.

We are converging at the same point, I think. Yeah, because it's, it's, I agree with that. I just characterize it differently, right? So it's like, I imagine, I don't know this for sure, but I imagine Trent Resner'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. It was probably like, I love music, I love technology, this is the best opportunity I've come across so far that allows me to leverage those things and work on them. Like I don't think he felt any lack of passion around being a sound engineer in a studio. 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. Jane Goodall, same thing.

I think there's, you know, she knew she found animals really interesting and she liked being, or she liked thinking about them, talking about them, being around them, right? So it's like she put herself in the vicinity of something that she thought was exciting and interesting. I don't think it was necessary. I mean, there's probably a million secretarial jobs she could have taken, but she chose that one because that was the one she was adjacent to something that she was really interested in. So like, I hear you. 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, you can find a foothold 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 that area of interest. Yeah. So it is it is 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. it's not like they're not doing it because like oh well I just needed a paycheck. Yes. Okay. I get that.

Maybe we'll get into this a little bit later too. But like this gets into like kind of how does passion develop as well? Yes. Maybe we'll save that here for next round. 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 like be fueled by passion. I think for most people. There's exceptions. I get that, but the exceptions, not the rule.

Instability, like if you're starting from a point of instability, it's just hard. It's like long term, that is going to weigh on you more than, oh, I followed my passion. The financial stress, the stress of knowing whether or not you're going to make it, all of that weighs on you can bring you down just as much as a soul-sucking, stable job, I think. Sure. At some point, at least. Sure. 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 in needs.

You need to have some stable base from which to explore and from which you can self-actualize even to, as Maslow would put it. That comes later, but you have to have all these other things taken care of first for most people. Not all of them. It's never going to be perfect. I get that. You have to take some risks and you have to put yourself out there. that's fine. 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. That's my point. Isn't that the same point you made

earlier, though? It is, but I bring it up again because if you're talking about long-term fulfillment, right? You're talking about, yes, like you probably will look back and you're like, I made some mistakes. I had some failures, this and that, and you look back on those as kind of badge of honor if you made it through, right? But I mean, if you don't, like where, where what does it mean if you get to the end of your life and you tried your passion but like everything failed you lived in miserable poverty um nothing came to fruition there's plenty of stories like that right what then you know i mean i just don't think passion is what should guide these decisions um from the outset i think you can find passion later i just think you need to do it from like

somewhat of a stable base it doesn't have to be perfect i'm not saying that 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. Again, I go back to my example of like the woodworking. I probably wouldn't have found that passion had I not had the resources to buy a bunch of expensive tools. Yeah. Right. Well, now I feel like you and I are speaking to two different audiences because I feel like I'm speaking to the audience of people who have something that they're really passionate about and really interested in, but either don't have the courage or the, you know, the knowledge or don't have the starting point to like actually give it a shot or see or like know what is a

realistic way to pursue it. 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. But they don't really know what the alternative is. And so I think I think your point is valid to those people. right? 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 then start worrying about this stuff a little bit more. 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? What if I really went all in on it? How far could I go? Could I make it work? Could I figure something out? Okay. Okay. I can get on board with that. Okay. Yeah.

I'd guess that it's more common that people just don't even know what their passions are necessarily. Or they don't have a clear passion where it's very clear on what they should be doing about it. Gets into another kind of point to that I think a lot of people use passion kind of as a stand-in for clarity. You know what I mean? Like that's what they're really looking for is clarity on what to do. And if like passion gives them that emotional clarity, basically. And again, I just don't think that that's. It's a sustainable long-term strategy.

Yeah, 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. So for instance, like one of my best friends back home, he's extremely passionate about dancing, and he's great at it. And he even has like a little bit of a side hustle teaching it. But he seems to have a great relationship with it. Like he is 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. But he seems to have a very healthy relationship with it. He doesn't seem to have any aspirations of like trying to be a full-time dancer for the rest of his life. 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. 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. And I think there's a lot of people that their passion is just purely a hobby, much like you and woodworking. 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. And like this, this becomes is an extremely salient question. Okay. Okay. So, okay, 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, I don't know, it could be in any feel.

But what they're really passionate about is say they're baking. They love pastries and breads and all of this. And so they decide to drop out and go start a bakery. Okay. And then two or three years later, they're just like completely stressed out because they're running this business. This is a false dichotomy. Okay.

This is a bit of a straw man because it's like you don't have to drop out of school to start experimenting with baking. Right. Like, professionally, right? Like, it is as simple as. That's my point, too. Yes. And it's, but I mean, this is, I mean, I'm glad you bring this up because I think a lot of people struggle with this question because of this false dichotomy, right?

Like, if you're a grad student who's like working really hard in school and you love baking, you're really passionate about it, there's a way to experiment. with both of those things simultaneously. 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, maybe sell it for five bucks per pastry or whatever.

See if people will pay you. See if it's good enough that people are like, hell yeah, give me another one. Like that's an easy way to test out. 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, improve it. So it is, there's so many ways to like test the waters with this stuff. And I do think the the all or nothing mentality around this does more damage. That would definitely. It harms. It definitely makes this decision harder for people. Right. I agree. There's a bit of a false

dichotomy. It's not just passionate or pragmatism. Again, like I said, though, finding that balance is like the hard part. Right. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe this is a good time too to bring up some Cal Newport and talk about Cal. Sure. Um, one of it, one, one of my favorite books that he wrote anyway is so good they can't ignore you. Yeah. And it really does address this question in a lot of different ways. Yeah. Now, Cal definitely comes out of, he's, you know, he's a computer programmer. He's a very systematic thinker, uh, computer programmer. Right. Um, writes books on productivity and all of that kind of stuff. Uh, but his day job is a computer programmer at Georgetown. Yeah. He went to MIT. He's a very smart guy, very accomplished. Probably followed his passion in some way or another, but he's very much a practical guy at the same time. Yes. He talks about, in that book, he talks about building career capital. And I think this is probably most applicable for a lot of people. Those two groups you were talking about, the kind of people who got into something, maybe you've got a decent job, it pays pretty well, you're good at it too.

And it's not like soul-sucking necessarily. But you're like, there's got to be something more. Yes. A lot of times what he argues to, especially like in the software development field or anybody who's in kind of one of those types of jobs, a white-collar job, they like their job enough. they get enough satisfaction at it, but they're always kind of like, ah, there's probably something over here.

Yeah. An example he gives somebody who's like maybe a, I don't know, they're a database engineer or something like that, but what they really want to do is like front-end web development or something like that. It's related, but they want to change. Yeah.

He argues, no, don't do that. You've built up all these years in your life of this, what he calls career capital. And he says, get so good at that, they can't ignore you. That's where the title comes from. Right. And then what you do is you leverage,

those skills that you have, have now, these high value, value-added skills that you have, and you leverage that into a lifestyle that is fulfilling for you. 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. What he argues for, and I understand this is probably a certain type of person, what he argues for is using that career capital you have, then you say, you know, you've worked at this job, you've worked at it, you went to the university, you worked really hard in university, got this job, you're working really hard at it, you keep learning, you get better at it, until you're so good that like, you're almost indispensable to the company. Now you can go to the

company and be like, hey, I want to work my own schedule, I want a flexible schedule, or I only want to work six months out of the year, and I'll give you those six months, but then the other six months out of year, I'm going to go, you know, hiking in New Zealand or whatever. Right. 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, you know, you get to leverage some time off or something like that. You're going to negotiate some leverage time off. If you ever try to work six months a year, I will drive to Colorado and fucking kill you. There goes my idea. Don't you get any ideas, Drew Barney. It was funny. I started

thinking lately, I was like, his idea, though, is like, you're talking about long term fulfillment right now. His idea is actually for long term fulfillment, maybe what you really need to do is think about, think more in short term, what do you want your days to look like? Hmm. Right. And if you can get so good at your job that you get a lot of leverage over your, your schedule, you can kind of craft your life this way as long, but you have to have that nice stable base, right, that I'm talking about, from which to negotiate from. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to ask for six months off. Okay. So all the, all the back-in developers who come back after their six-month sabbatical, and discovered Claude took their jobs he wrote that book in 2012 all right

he didn't see that one coming I okay I we're now we've bled into round four here

we're we've let into it we've we've kind of bled into your round four argument I have I have a rebuttal

to that and then okay I'm actually going to bring up another one of Cal's points in that book

yeah yeah oh yeah he could definitely go either way I'm sure no no no I think there's some very interesting nuance and distinctions that should be made here.

Because what you said is not wrong. I don't think, I think in that narrow context, right, you're back in developer, you're really good. You want to get in the front end development. Yeah, his advice is probably correct. Right, right. And I think that can be applied to a lot of people. So that's where I disagree. Like I think it's very, I think that advice is very context specific.

And I'll give you a couple reasons why. Because it's, first of all, That is a person who is developed career capital in one area and wants to pivot into a very adjacent area. So a very similar skill set. What do you tell a person who's become very good as a back-end developer and is like, I fucking hate computer programming. Yeah. I hate programming. I hate code.

I hate they're good at it. I hate software. Yeah. What do I do? Yeah. Right? Like that's not, you tell them get so good. They can't ignore you.

Like, no, you don't tell them that. It doesn't apply. And the other thing, the other caveat here is like, that is great advice for extremely talented people. But it is not everybody is extremely talented. Not everybody can be so good that they can't be ignored. That's true. You know, programming is an incredibly competitive field. 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. Sounds good. That's fair. It's like you have to be fucking world class to do that. And Cal's audience is full of like the computer programmer types and the, you know, graphic designers or whatever, people who are working those white color high paying jobs. Yeah. And I joked, I joked about Claude code. But like back when that book was written, there was a massive shortage of programmers.

Right. Yeah. Right. So it's like if you were a plus programmer, you probably could go to your boss and be like, you know what? Yeah. It was the height of white color work. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know what? I think I'm going to go to New Zealand for a few months. Why don't you, we'll pick this back up when I come back? Like, today, if you tried to do that today, like, good luck, dude. AI is happy to take over your work.

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Let's get into round four. Round four. And round four, what we're talking about here is what causes passion, actually. Okay. This is what I'm going to bring up anyway. Awesome. And we've been flirting around this. Jesus Christ causes my opinion.

Yes, the big J.C. My argument really here is that passion isn't found. You don't, and you've even already seen this. I agree with this. It's not found. It is developed. It's developed. Okay.

And back to my old argument, you developed that from a place of, you develop that best from a place of stability for most people. You got your random loose cannons like you. I get it. Most people are not like that though. Most of us have to develop a passion in some way. And I think all passions are actually developed. But here's an example.

Angela Duckworth, famous in psychology. She came up with the idea for grit, the concept of grit, right? Her dad had a very fixed mindset around what people are good at. Like you're either good or something or you're not. Yes. That's it. And so he was always telling her, hey, Angela, you're no genius, you know, so you're going to have to work really hard at something and this and that. Well, she did. She didn't go to grad school until she was in her 30s. Okay. And then she found out, oh my God, I'm incredibly passionate about psychology and not all like that, but all these around motivation and resilience and all of these things that go into what she eventually formulated as grit. Yep. Right. That took a very long time for her to develop. And I think that's just, that's how it goes for almost all of us. I could, I wasn't, I did not know what I was passionate about even when I got out of college.

I was just like, I know I'm interested in a lot of different things, which is part of it. Right. But that's only part of it. You have to get out and experiment a lot. And I know you agree with that for the most part. Right. In psychology, they talk about kind of the fixed versus developed passion. Yeah.

It's kind of founder versus developed, right? 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. They're out there somewhere. They just need to find it. They're more likely to expect kind of this effortless motivation and abandoned new interest wants to be, they lose interest in them.

Right. Whereas people with a more like, oh, passions are developed are much more likely to stick with it. Yep. And find that passion and grow their passion in those activities. Okay. Cal also argues that competence is actually what is the basis for passion. Yeah. Okay. So getting really good at something, you like it more if you're better at it. 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. Like there's a lot of studies in data around people who pursue excellence become intrinsically motivated around that, right? And you could argue that like a lot of what we experience is passion is an intrinsic motivation. It's just a desire to do a thing for the sake of doing the thing. 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 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.

with that. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it is. But they've also shown, like, there's a process to this as well. Okay. So, for instance, there's some research done. There's these four phases of passion development. Okay. One of them is a triggered situational interest. So you just come across something that interests you. And if you repeatedly run into that, you engage with it more, you become more interested with it. And you have that maintained situational interest too. Okay. So you are, you actively seek it out at that point. You might not be passionate, but you're

just curious still about it. Emerging individual interests is when you begin to engage on your own, uh, just independently, you ask questions, you enjoy the learning process for the sake of itself. And then that develops into a more well-developed passion over time. Okay. of 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. But it's developed. The point is that all of those, these models that they come with, it is developed. So I would say, yeah, go ahead, pay attention to your interest, what sparks you. That was the same thing with me. It was

like, I think I needed to build a shelf or something like that in my house. I don't remember what it was. I was like, oh, my God, I love this. Like I love these tools and like, oh, I got to go buy some tools. And I had the money to buy tools already at that point. And then it developed into like, oh, my God, I love this. Where it stopped for me, where I like I didn't take that to 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. Yeah.

I just like to make things. That's what I like to do. 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, want me to build something ugly. Yes. You know what I mean? Like that's not what I'm passionate about at all. I'm not passionate about like diving into YouTube dashboards around.

This is what I do for my day job. And I like it for that good enough. 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. It's not actually what it's around. So this is what I'm saying is be careful about where you're defining as your past. Yes. Right.

And just know, again, it's developed. It's something you develop. It is not something you find. It's not something that's out there. So you don't have one passion that just fits you perfectly. You've said this before, too. Like, how can you be passionate about whatever it is, playing the electric guitar or whatever it is?

Before the electric guitar was even invented. Nobody knew they were, you know, bound to be an electric guitarist or like that, right? Like, it's just not a thing to have one single, singular passion in your life. I 100% agree. I will concede two points or agree with you on two points. And then I'm going to throw in a big butt afterwards. 100% agree. Passion is developed for the most part.

Like it is, it's not something you're born with. It's not something you find. It's not something you just wake up one day and you're like, oh, this is what I do for the next one. It is something that is is incubated. It is explored. It is grown and it grows and evolves with you.

Your relationship with it changes over time. So 100% agree there. The other thing that I will concede slash agree with is that I, again, And 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. 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.

Yeah. Right? So it is a Baker example. Baker example is a perfect example. Like if you take somebody starting a bakery, my guess is less, less than a, you know, than 10 or 20% of their time is spent actually baking things. Oh, yeah. It is probably, 80, 90% of their time is probably acquiring customers, handling overhead,

dealing with banks, dealing with finances, hiring people, employees, training them. It's a completely different experience. Even like being an author, right? Like even before I started all the YouTube and podcast stuff, less than half of my time was spent writing. There's, I mean, there's publisher meetings, agent meetings. There's rights contracts to go over. There's lawyers to meet with.

There's public appearances. There's speaking gigs. There's like dealing with, you know, all the taxes that come from selling your book in 60 different territories. There's like so many things that you never think about that is being an author. Yeah. Right. So it is the experience of doing something professionally is often completely different than what is doing it as a hobby or a passion project.

And so just people need to be very, very aware of that difference because a lot of people get blindsided. 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, the Kirk 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. This is not what I thought I signed up for. So 100% on board there.

Okay. Here's my big butt. I agree with you. You have to explore. You have to find something that catches your interest, catches your eye. You need to invest into it. You need to get good at it. 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.

Yeah. People tend to find meaning in things that they are good at. And so by becoming so good they can't ignore you, you basically take control of being able to direct where you find passion in your life. That is all true. Yes. Except everybody has different aptitudes for different things. So, like, while that is still true, you still have certain talents and proclivities towards certain activities over others. Yes.

Right. 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. Okay. That's a good point. So it is just because I am just physically not bestowed with the necessary equipment to become an NBA player.

And I think this realism is important on both sides of the argument. Let's say you want to be a singer. Singing is so fucking brutal. Like it is the top 0.0001% of singers are able to make a living doing it. And I think much like an NBA player, right? Like you need to at some point take an extremely honest look at yourself and say, I'm good at singing. I might even be great at singing. I might even be the best singer I know.

But am I 0.0001% of singers? Probably not. Right? Like if there's any evidence that you're not, then like that should tell you something. Like you need to be realistic about that. 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.

Right. On the practical side, aptitude is an important variable. It doesn't get considered often enough. I would say one of the most common versions of this question that we're debating here that I get from is from Indians. Because in India, the culture is very much your parents decide your profession and you have to go do it. And usually it's doctor, engineer, lawyer. Yeah.

And I can't tell you how many emails I get from young Indian. Indian people being like, my parents are making me go to this engineering school. I hate engineering. I'm not very good at it. My grades are not very good. I really want to go do some creative thing. What should I do? And it is, so to come back to Cal's point of like, you've got this back-end developer who's

like, maybe I want to get in the front-end development. And Cal's point is, we'll just become the best fucking back-end developer the planet's ever scene and then you can use that capital to parlay it into this or that. The other thing, sure, if you're a super talented programmer and you like programming, great. 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. Just got by. Just got by. And now you've got this bullshit back-in development job that you hate. And you're like, well, what's the most practical thing I can do that like has some creativity to it, that has some sort of like, something

that I'm at least interested in front end development. Because then I can be a little bit creative. I can be a little bit artistic with what I work on. And so that person, I would say, yes, you should pivot to front end development. You should take the hit to your career and probably pivot to front end development. If you believe that is going to be emotionally sustainable enough in the long run, like it's worth giving you up that career capital you accrued over however many years and starting over just because A, it's going to be way more sustainable and then B, you're going to be happier doing it.

Okay. Okay. I think we might be converging then on instead of finding your passion, developing your passion. I like that. You and I can both agree on that. I like that. And I think there's a lot more avenues. Yes. It doesn't pigeonhole you as much. And then the aptitude comes into that. The competence comes into all of that as well. Very similar, like what you were saying earlier, when I was a little kid, you know, growing up in Nebraska, like, especially in the 90s, like football was everything. You know about, you grew up in Texas. Very similar. I wanted to be a football player. Yeah, me too. I would. And like, I would, my dad, I would have him, we would play catch all the time. When he wasn't home, I would go up by myself, throw the football up in the

air, run and catch it. And like, I was obsessed with it. I was just, I was dead set. I was going to be a football player. Even to the point to my, my dad explained to me when I was like, five or six what redshirting was. So in that collegiate program in the United States, you can redshirt, which means you sit out for a year and you get an extra year adding on to your eligibility for sports. Okay. And so my dad explained that to me. And I just looked him dead in the eyes and said, should I red shirt, dad?

You know, when I was like five. I was that serious about it. You know what I mean? I am not a big guy. I would die if I was in anything above high school football and the guy hit by one of those guys, I'd be dead. Yeah. Right?

Like, by aptitude for football was not there. but I was very, very passionate about it as a kid. Probably a smart thing I didn't try to go to the NFL. Right. Okay? Right. It just was. So there's an aptitude outside of it too.

I had to develop other passions in my life. And I think that's where we can maybe converge on this one. I like the word develop. Because, again, I grant that there are practical considerations on all these things. I think passion should be the long-term priority. 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.

And if you can find a way to make a career out of them, even better. Because I do think the data is that like you probably will be a more satisfied fulfilled person if you do that and you'll probably go further. So like if you can make that work great, but I agree with you that it is a complicated process and I think especially when dealing with some of these fields like professional football or professional music, 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 and something and then take the practical approach to doing what Jane Goodall did, right? Which is

like, okay, well at least take a step towards something that seems interesting or something that sounds exciting to you and then just see what emerges from there. I can get on board with that. All right. Yeah. We are landing the plane in the same spot.

In a vacuum, I think both of these approaches are important but incomplete. Follow your passion in a vacuum is important, but it's also incomplete. And it could definitely lead you down a bad path. You could mess up your life, waste a bunch of years, so on and so on. I think pursue financial stability, don't take too many risks. in a vacuum is also true, but also incomplete. Like if you only pursue that, you're probably going to leave a lot of life satisfaction on the table. Yeah.

And have a lot of regrets when you're older. Yeah. And even there, I'm all for like taking big swings. Like absolutely do that. That doesn't necessarily have to be around passion though either. Yeah. Right. Like I'm all for taking risk and taking big swings and like putting yourself out there and going for it.

Yeah. I just don't think passion is a great guiding principle for that even necessarily. It will fuel you along the way for sure. It depends. Yeah. It absolutely depends. It really depends. 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. Yes, right. Like there are something. And it's funny because I've had the conversation. So one of my good friends here in L.A., he works for one of the biggest video game companies in the world. And he's like one of the high-end marketing directors at it. And so he is, every time we hang out, we just talk video games for hours, hours and hours and hours.

And I have all these like thoughts and opinions and takes on video games because I play fucking all of them. And he, 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, you know, all the marketing campaigns and everything. 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

and he'll just look at me. He's like, he's like, man, you got to start a video game YouTube channel. He's like, you would crush. You would have such a good video game YouTube channel. And like, every time I look at him, I'm like, I was like, I will never do that to myself. I will never, like video games are my safe space. That's your pure.

That's where I go where it's just like nothing exists. Like, I don't want to ruin that by putting all these incentives and motives and shit on top of it. And it's just like my video games are for me. Right. Kind of like your woodworking is for you. It's too special.

Like you can't share it with the world. So I totally get where you're coming from with that. And I do think that is, I think that's the right option for a lot of people. Like there's a lot of passions in people's lives that that is actually the optimal selection. Because if you did try to make a profession out of it, you would taint it in some way. You would ruin it in some way. I have found that. Like I've done jobs for friends or friends of friends and stuff like that where I'll go in and like build in my cabinet install it all that kind of stuff.

Some of that. Some of it's fun. Some of it. It just wasn't. And then I've gone the other way to where I've just like I haven't had time to even participate in, you know, go out to my shop or anything like that. I have found that balance where it's like I need a little bit of this. I need enough of it in my life. Yeah. And I'm good.

Yeah. So I know I know that's, again, that's an individual personality based thing too. I get it. But for me, yeah, that works. we've established that there is a tension between these two things do you think it's necessarily

a one-to-one trade-off? I feel like it doesn't have to be. Yeah. I think it depends on the job and the person. Yes, I think there's a big part of that too. There are just, there are people who just need a lot of stability in their lives.

I get that. And passion doesn't factor into it as much. It's kind of, you know, with like relationships. Some people need a lot of sex, you know, some people don't. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a one-to-one. I don't know what the right mix is. And I don't know how you would

determine that necessarily. But again, it is hard finding that balance. Yeah. For most people, anyway. Yeah. Takes a lot of experimentation. It does. It's almost, it's like almost finding a route through a maze. Well, and like, you know, what if, what if your passion is, like, financial, like trading stocks or, you know, like, that's a, okay, then go into that. Amazing. Absolutely. Great. But what if it's, you know, what if it's, you know, crocheting. You know, there's that side. Hey, there's some people crushing on Etsy.

You watching those YouTube videos too, Marys? No, I'm not, but it's funny. So actually my brother, it's actually a really funny story. My brother and his wife were friends with a guy and his wife, 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, and it like took off. in such a big way that it, like, now she's making like, millions, tens of millions of dollars or whatever.

I take it back. Never mind then. All right. And then, of course, 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 them. Good for her. Yeah.

Some story. It was some facsimile of that story. I probably messed up a detail there. But, yeah, apparently you can make tens of millions of dollars, just crocheting and knitting and selling it online. So what do you think the right balances, I guess, or how do you determine the right balance? So again, I think the two variables here are the person in the field of where the passion is. So on the person, there's a spectrum, right?

Some people, I think some people just have to live their passion and really can't compromise on it. And if you're one of those people, like, I can't not do this, then go all that on. 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. 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. They don't really care. They're like, I'm fine. I don't really think about this. Most people are somewhere in the middle and there's somewhere along that spectrum.

So there's going to be a lot of people who really defer towards financial stability and they probably just want a job they don't hate. 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 doing something that they love. So that's the first, I guess, kind of axis of concern. The second axis is what is the thing that you're passionate about? Like some things can be very lucrative. some things have very clear career paths to them. If you're really into spreadsheets and organization, like my God, there's probably a million companies

that are happy to hire you. If you love software engineering, there's a million companies that are probably happy to hire you. So like that side of the spectrum, I think it's kind of a no-brainer. It's like, go do the thing you love because there's plenty of opportunities out there.

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, a power law market, like a creative field like acting or music or something, where 0.001% of the people accumulate 99.99% of the success. I think in those cases, then you have to take a really hard look. And I think there's probably two kind of hedges there rather than going all in. One is find the adjacent job or position like we talked about. You know, if you love music, music. So one of my really good friends from music school, he had a similar experience to me. He got about halfway through. He realized, like, I'm not going to make it. I'm not good enough. But he noticed that he had a really good ear, and he really picked up a lot on like Sonic subtly,

and he liked the kind of the engineering side, the sound engineering side. So now he actually does sound design at a video game studio. And he loves it. And he's, And he's great at it. And never thought he didn't end up there. And all the music training actually paid off perfectly because 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. So that's an example, right, of like a hedge. 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. So like he's happy as a fucking clam.

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, 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 might even hate. Right? You're going to have to go hire people. You're going to have to train people. You're going to have to go get a loan and deal with a bank and run out of space and do a brandy.

and marketing and promotion and online ads and all this stuff. 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. So it's like maybe you love the baking. That's what you're really passionate about. But in the process of promoting trying to get the baking out to the world, you discover that like you really like branding and design too. And so great, 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 and stuff that you don't want to deal with.

You see that happen a lot. I would characterize myself as that. Like, obviously, writing is, was the passion. As a side effect, I found that I really enjoy a lot of the system building operational side of like building out of content business and a media business and understanding. all the numbers and analytics and growth that goes into a business like this. Like, it's fun for me. Yeah. Yeah, that makes works for you too. It works very well for you. Yeah. There are aspects of the business that I hate and I go and hire people to do those stuff. So that's the other hedge. And it's realistically, I think, anywhere you end up, optimal is probably enjoying what you do 70 to 80% of

the time, right? Like, I think it's every job, no matter how much you love it or care about it, you're probably not loving it 20% of the time. And there's probably things attached to it that you don't love to do. And so I think just realism around that understanding, like, even if you land your dream job, working at your dream gig, there's going to be days where you're like dragging yourself out of bed. You're like, this sucks. That's just life. That's normal. Even when you do what you love.

Even when you do what you love. You will hate days. Yes. That quote is not true. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, you'll never work a day in your life. Yeah, right.

Bullshit. You will work very hard, actually. Yeah. Ultimately, I think, you know, considering those two dimensions, I think listeners should ask themselves where they are in those two dimensions, right? Like, what's your risk gap appetite? How uncompromising do you feel you are around your passion? And then secondarily, like, how extreme, how all in is the thing that you love doing?

Like how much can you hedge against it or how many like adjacent avenues are there To doing something so this is now this is my bias you you mentioned that you feel like most people Don't know what they're passionate about or have my mild passions and they're like you know you worry about them getting led astray into making bad decisions Based on emotion I'll tell you where my bias is and what what I worry about people doing I think probably the most common the most common story in the world is that people have a passion or they have something that they really wanted to do, they couldn't really do it or it didn't work out.

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. And in the process of doing that and getting good at it or finding kind of their niche that they get good at, they slowly grow to love that thing. Kind of like my friend who ended up doing sound design at the video game studio.

I think that's probably the most common story that happens. Yeah. And I think I have a very similar story to it. Woodworking isn't my only passion. Yes. When I got into this industry and got into working with you, I was excited. I didn't know what to really expect. But I did definitely develop, like, the better we got in it, the more I understood about it, more I learned about it.

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. Okay. All right. You can stay. I, okay, okay. My, my day 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. I find a lot of reward.

It's a rewarding job that I have. Yeah. You just gave me a raise up to $12 an hour. So like I'm making, you know, big bucks now. Time to go get the big tool, big boy tools. No, but like it does, like I said, it's been a stable enough environment for me. I know it's not always stable for you. But you provide this layer of stability for us.

And I get to do that. And then I do, there's a lot of freedom in my job that I get to kind of set my own days and what they look like. And there's a lot of creative freedom within that. Kind of just set the bounds for it, but we get to play around in that. 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. 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. Yeah. And so, like, I think that's part of why I like it, too. Why I've developed such a passion for it is because it gives me a nice balance there. So I don't know. I feel like I'm just incredibly fortunate in that where I've been able to kind of, like, like piece this together in a way that really works for me. So, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's when I think about all the people that I know that are, that seem very happy with, with how they spend their time and happy with their lives, they're all over the map. Yeah. this. Yeah. It's like lots of avenues to get.

Yeah. Like I said, I have a really good friend who has a job he doesn't hate. Yeah. And spends all of his free time doing the thing that he loves. And that works. He seems very happy with it. 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.

Yeah. And it just happened to work out that I made it at the thing that I really loved doing. So it's sometimes I wonder like, and I've had people ask me before, like, what would you do if your books never took off or became popular? And it's like, it's hard to know. Yeah. Honestly, I'd probably be writing a substack grinding away 40K or something. You know, I don't know. It's, I can't imagine doing anything else.

Like I just, the thought of doing another job makes my head explode. So. I'd be in the NFL. You'd be in the NFL. You'd be a redshirted, still redshirting for the university in Nebraska. All right. Any final takeaways, any lessons that you took from this episode? I mean, I do go back to that.

The point you brought up repeatedly about, like, hey, this is pretty individual thing. There's a lot of, like, that was really reinforced through all this research, because some people just have more of a pension. for risk. Yeah. Or they really are clear on what they want to do. Or they've already developed, they develop their passion from a very young age too. You know,

like my ex-girlfriend with a vet thing. The, but yeah, the avenues by which you can get to like a, a fulfilling life where you're working on things that are meaningful to you, those are numerous.

There are so many ways that you can get and do this. Yeah. Get into this, do this the way that you want to do it. And that, to me, it was just like,

okay, That's actually kind of, it's very reassuring. Yeah. It's like, I think we do get a little bit pigeonholed. It's all passion and go for it. You know, you just have to go for it, dude, and just lock it down and grind. Right. You don't have to do it that way.

Yeah. And so that was, that was refreshing. I think my big takeaway is that this is just a false dichotomy. Yeah. It's funny because the story behind this entire episode is actually kind of funny. So this was originally pitched to me, my former YouTube director, Shout out to Devin. He's out there listening. So Devin, as you know,

fucking lives and breathes YouTube. Like he was, he is the most obsessed person with YouTube I've ever met in my life. And he worked with us and, you know, ran our YouTube channel for a number of years. And so he originally pitched this as a YouTube video for us to do last year. Yeah. And he had all like intro and outline and like kind of bullet points of like what he thought would be really good. And I remember I sent it back to him and I was just like, I'm not buying it because it was very much like a, you know, take the risk, you know, it's just like just go for it. You'll be happy you regret minimization type stuff. Like you'll be happy you tried even if it doesn't work out. And I was like, yeah, I don't know, man. I think that I think we need a little more nuance here. And then he, ironically, he was very passionate about the concept. So he was like, he's like, no, I'm going to make it work. You know, give me another shot at it. And so he went and they like, revise. a bunch of stuff, dug up some research, sent it back to me again, like a month later.

And I was like, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think this should be a podcast. And sure enough, um, after, you know, after all the research and digging into it for like two and a half hours, um, yeah, I think it's a false dichotomy. And I think that's why I, because a YouTube video, it's, you know, it's like you get 15, 20 minutes and you usually need to kind of pick aside and argue it. I was like, no, this feels like, this is like a very nuanced thing with a lot of, a lot of variables, a lot of considerations and it is a very personal thing. So YouTube does not like nuance.

No, unfortunately. So yeah, I think that's my biggest takeaway is that it's, this is a false dichotomy. I like the phrase, develop your passion. Yeah, don't follow it. Yeah. Instead of following it, or choosing it or finding it. I think that is probably the most accurate way to... It highlights the process-oriented nature of the whole thing. Yes. It's not... Passion is an event.

It's not an event. It's a process. And then it also implies that you can develop it in a place that it wasn't before. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, so if anything in today's episode hit home for you, don't just let it fade. Because that's usually what happens, right? You hear something that clicks.

You think, I should do something about that. And then life happens. And three weeks later, you barely remember what you heard in the first place. That's why you should check out Purpose, because Purpose is built for exactly that situation. It's a personal development AI that learns you. It takes the stuff that you're learning and helps you actually apply it to your life, to your situation, everything you're dealing with right now. It remembers what you've told it. It tracks your patterns.

It gives you specific personalized direction and not just a pep talk. Check it out. Try it free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose.app. Which is also true. That's awesome. The world is your oyster.

Well, yeah. Well, hopefully the audience has developed an intense passion for us during this episode. And if you have, be sure to leave a review, follow us on whatever platform you're listening on. Anything else you want to say, Drew? I think that's it. We did the pod. I think you can go home now. You can fly home.

Start your six months off. That's right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.