Aaron Doughty shares three keys to turning passion into work: notice what naturally holds your attention, step outside your comfort zone to find hidden opportunities, and use a pleasure-pain framework to stay motivated. He cites Roger Bannister's four-minute mile as proof that belief shapes what's possible.
Aaron Doughty here, and today what I want to speak to you about are the 3 keys to doing what you love for a living. So over the past 4 years or so, I've done a lot of study in the area of personal development. I've studied a lot of people who've obtained a certain level of success, and the one consistent thing that I've noticed is that they all do what they love to do for a living. And knowing that, I've decided that we should all do what we love for a living. We should all find ways to monetize what we love doing so that on a daily basis when we go to work or we go to do whatever it is, we love what we do. I believe that if society, if everyone in society were to do what they love to do for a living, we would have a totally different society. It would look completely different. For the better. And over the studies of me looking at all of this information, I've noticed that there are 3 main keys to doing what you love in life. And the first key is that you simply gotta ask the question. You gotta find out what your passion is. And the way you do this could be through realizing the kind of books that you read, the kind of information that you're drawn to, the activities that you love doing. These are all sure signs that They're something that you love doing. If it's something that when you do, the time goes by very quickly and everybody that does this, that visualizes this and that intends for themselves to find out what their passion is, will eventually see a reflection of that. They'll maybe have different thoughts. They'll think of what it is that they would love to do for a living. I know a lot of people know what they love to do, but some people may not. And the way that you find that out is you simply got to ask the question. The beautiful thing about society is that because technology, technology has advanced so fast, there are potentials of careers now that never existed 20 years ago. There are people that can just be creative and film it and post it online and find ways of monetizing it through creative expression. They get to get up every day and do what they love for a living because they found an angle, a way for them to monetize it. So that's key number 1. The second key is is you gotta step outside of your comfort zone. Any person who's obtained a level of success, a high level of success, has had to at some level step outside of their comfort zone. They had to do something that they could never saw themselves doing in order to make something that was invisible become visible, in the sense that you make an opportunity that may have been there before become visible because you're stepping outside of your own comfort zone. You're getting outside your own personal bubble. If every day you do the same things day in and day out, you're not creating any new circumstances, you're not creating any new experiences to learn from. So the idea is that as you expand outside of that bubble, as you do more things that you normally wouldn't do, you learn from them. And even if you have what you would call a negative experience, you can still see positive in it because you realize that you learned something from it. Now that's the second key. The third key is that you gotta be hungry. You gotta have a passion for whatever you're doing, which goes back to step 1 of knowing what that is. But if you have passion for it, that energy will drive you. It feels good. It feels good to do what you're excited about. It's why you're excited about it, because it's what you're meant to be doing. And I found that there's a simple tool that we can use in order to define ourselves in a way of choosing what makes us feel that excitement and what— where motivation is driven. And the idea is this: it's the idea of pleasure and pain. The idea is that we will always move in the direction of what we believe brings us pleasure and we will always move away from what we believe brings us pain. And this is evident in every area of life. If somebody, for example, was trying to quit smoking cigarettes, uh, what they would do is instead of knowing that when they put the cigarette up to their mouth they feel pleasure, they would maybe think of something that would make them feel pain. So they would think of maybe somebody that's passed away. because of lung cancer or because, uh, health started deteriorating when they were smoking cigarettes because they were smoking cigarettes. And if they were to associate pleasure with the idea of quitting, then maybe they would imagine themselves doing, uh, some type of activity that would have been hard if they were smoking, or they would imagine themselves having more energy. Uh, it'll be easier for them to make that connection because they switched the modalities. They've switched the way that they define themselves. And I believe that anybody can use this tool in any area of their life by changing how they believe, how they think about whatever they're doing. I've done this in my own life. For example, the, the actions that I take every day, uh, the reason I feel it's pleasurable for me to do things, to take action in the direction of my desires, is because I define it that way. And I define myself as procrastinating. If I procrastinate, I feel literally, I will feel pain. I will sit around and I will feel some type of underlying, like, you need to be doing something type feeling, but that's because I realized that the power is within me. I chose to feel that if I do that activity, do that action. So the idea is that we can choose how we feel about the things that we do, and we can switch that if we choose to. And the idea is that we all have unlimited potential inside of us. We can literally do, have, or be anything that we want in life, and all we have to do to get there is take off the governor, take off the, the limitations that we set on ourselves from the time we were young. A lot of us had a certain— when we're born, we all have something that we are here for, something that we're meant to do. But a lot of times growing up, we develop a certain level of belief systems, and what these belief systems do is they put caps on our potentiality, what we could be doing, and they set up a framework for how things should be done in that new context. Those beliefs that say, oh, you have to do this, this, this before you get this. You have to go to school for 4 years. You have to graduate. You have to work for 25 years and then retire and then live the rest of your life doing nothing. You can do what you're passionate about your whole life if you find out what that is. And a lot of times the people end up living longer, the people that do what they love to do forever. And it's something we can all do. In 1954, before 1954, it was considered impossible to run a 4-minute mile. But then Robert Bannister came along and he ran a mile in under 4 minutes. He broke the record. He extended what people thought was possible. And after that, within a year, dozens of other people went along to do the same thing. And the reason I'm telling you this is because the only thing that switched in those people's mind was The possibility was the belief that it was possible, and then they had a burning desire to do it. And I encourage you to switch inside your own life to determine what do you want to believe about yourself? What story have you been telling yourself that is bullshit that you could just put away in order for you to come up with something that you prefer? The reality is, is that if you make a change on the inside, You then will make the change on the outside. The inner reflects the outer. Anyways guys, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed, and until next time, have a great day. Bye-bye.
