Passion Is Suffering, Not Happiness | Ep 935

If you're suffering right now in pursuit of the thing that you find meaningful, there is nothing wrong with you. You are not on the wrong path. And this is how it works. And the people who try to tell you otherwise either don't know better or actively are trying to destroy you. People want to follow their passion but don't even know what it actually means. The root of the word passio is Latin for suffering. So it's not about doing what you love. It's about finding something that you love enough that it's worth suffering for.

And so pick something worth suffering for.

The first usage of the word passion came from Passion of Christ, which was literally Jesus Christ's crucifixion story. And so it's interesting that this has been bastardized into following your passion means doing what you love. I had a young man stop me, say that he quit his job, went all in on entrepreneurship, but then he didn't like what his life looked like. He asked me what he should do, and the reality was that he quit because He thought that he was doing something wrong because he wasn't loving every second of it. And so here's the big problem. Your passion only exists in the vague, not in the specific. So even if you start a business around what you believe to be your passion, 95% of what you do every day, if you're successful, will not be your passion. You'll just have very brief moments where you'll do that specific thing, if at all. And so what's short-lived is This kind of like passion window is very short-lived, or it's only possible as an employee where you actually stick to doing the same thing every single day within a larger machine, or a solopreneur that chooses not to scale. Not a business owner unless you choose to love business ownership as the thing you're passionate about, which means that you're willing to suffer for it, right? If you keep doing the thing that you suffer for for a long period of time, eventually you can get to true ownership where something operates on its own and then you have all your time back, right? So I run every month, I meet with 10 entrepreneurs.

It's the most expensive service that we sell.

It's obviously unscalable, but I meet with bigger businesses.

So usually the average business size around 10-ish million and we meet in a group of 10 and it's something that I absolutely love doing.

I look forward to the days whenever they're coming up, but I would absolutely hate it if I had to do it every day. And so how can that be true? How can I love something? But if I did a lot of it, I would hate it. There's a certain pizza place that I love going to once or twice a year and it's Amazing. If I was forced to eat it every single meal, I wouldn't like it as much. And so we have this misconception about following your passion. And in both scenarios, if you do the same thing all the time that you love, you'll stop loving it because you'll get so much of it. The fact that it's rare is what makes you love it. And if it stays rare, then it means that the vast majority of your time you're not really doing it. And so it's just a complete myth. And I understand why people tell younger people or other newer entrepreneurs like, oh, follow your passion. It's just because it's politically correct and it's easy to say, but it's not the truth.

Right?

And so you're not going to have the perfect amount of sunshine for the perfect amount of time. And so let me reframe how I think through this is that you want moments, you want good days, not a never-ending work state of this jolly thing that you love, because eventually you'd adapt and you would get bored just like everything else. And so here's the underline. You are using the excuse of a lack of passion to disguise your inability to handle difficulty, to handle hardship, to handle enduring, to handle being able to repeatedly do things that you don't enjoy, to have something that you do find meaningful have happen, to make it real. And so this is what actually happens in the real world, right? So unless you get very good at your passion, you will have to do things that you like less to pay your bills, period. That's real, right? And then number 2, as soon as you are good at your passion, your demand will outstrip your supply of time. And 95% of what you do will not be the thing you love, but stuff that you do to support the thing you love, which you may indeed not love. And so the 5% of your passion that's left over will only be there if your passion doesn't change, which it also will, which means the vast majority of your life you will not be doing things that you are passionate about. And in the tiny instance you do, it's likely short-lived. And so let me frame why I think this is so important.

If I were to say, let's imagine life is a video game for a second.

If you were playing a video game and day one I said, enter this cheat code, you have max life, max strength, max money, max good looks. And then you go through the whole game and it's incredibly easy. How boring would that be? Imagine you couldn't even undo the code. What would you do? You just never play the game. You wouldn't even, it wouldn't even be fun. And so we on some level know that we have to suffer. It's not about winning the lottery, right? It's not about the outcome. We can't say, oh, I'm really ambitious, I won the lottery. That's the ambition and the passion go hand in hand in that you were stating to the world and more importantly to yourself that you were willing to suffer for this thing because you have deemed it important enough to suffer for, which is why the striving, the suffering is quintessentially human and not something to be avoided. I wanna make this really real for you.

Growing a business is really painful and sucks.

Being in a plateaued business is really painful and sucks. Being in a decaying business is really painful and it sucks. Entrepreneurship is hard. Being an employee is hard. Being broke is hard. Being rich is hard. Married people want to be single. Single people want to be married. I'm not saying all the time, but I'm saying there is suffering in every path of life. The core issue, especially with entrepreneurs, especially newcoming entrepreneurs, is that they look at their existing state and think, I am suffering, and therefore there is something wrong with this. I need to change this because if I change this, I will no longer suffer. But change will also cause suffering. It's the fact that you claim there's a problem with suffering that's creating even more suffering and sacrificing the thing that you said you would suffer for because you're not going to achieve it because you never walk down the path. And so one of my favorite sayings around this, it's of myself, it's my own saying, so it's a bit self-aggrandizing, but success and failure are on the same path. Failure is just an earlier exit. To that younger entrepreneur I was talking to. No matter what path you choose, it will be hard. And so pick one that pays better, if that's what you think is worth it. Suffering is a fixed cost. The suffering on all paths is a fixed cost. And so the secret to getting what you want is doing lots of things that you don't want. And so no matter what you do, it will suck. And so pick the things that pay better. The goal is to reframe reality so that bad things are good, not to try and only experience good things. I'm gonna say that again. The goal is to reframe your living experience so that bad things are good, not to try and only experience good things. It would be like looking outside and saying, every day that it rains, I will be upset, rather than there are benefits to rain and there are benefits to sunshine. You have to change your frame, not your conditions, your perceptions, not reality. Let me give you a hypothetical. What if I told you had two options and both rides cost $10? One ride is one that you want and the other one is one that you hate. Which one would you pick? They both cost $10.

The thing you hate and the thing you love.

You'd pick the thing that you love. Now let me give you another option. The thing that you love unbelievably, like huge love. It's so unbelievable that you're not even sure you want to try to ride the ride because you're not even sure if it's going to finish the way you want, but it still costs $10. Which one would you do now?

The thing you hate, the thing you like, or the thing you really love?

All three. Are $10. Which one would you do? You probably picked the one that you really love, right? So then what if I told you that you're going to suffer the same amount in all three paths that you pick in life? The thing that you hate, the thing that you think is a moderate or reasonable goal, or the thing that you really want to swing for the fences for? All three have the same amount of suffering. Think about it. You will suffer the same. You'll suffer regret more here. You'll suffer difficulty more here. You'll suffer the same. It's a fixed cost. And so this is why aiming big is so real for me, is that what's the alternative? Aiming small and also still suffering? Fears that we have on the downside are not true. They're just suffering. And so I say all this to say, delaying your pursuit, your big swing, because you're waiting to find your passion, is a fool's errand. Find something that people value. Do that thing even though it sucks. Realize there is no greener grass on the other side. It all sucks on both sides. One of my favorite CEOs that I've ever had, Suzanne, used to say, it's greener on the other side of the fence because it's fertilized with shit.

And so there's shit on both sides of the fence.

You just haven't gotten over and stepped in it yet. But I will say this. It does all suck, but it sucks less when you're good. And the best way to get good is to get started.

One of my favorite Chinese proverbs is everything must be hard before it can be easy.

Do not try to be passionate about what you do, but try to be passionate about why and how you do it. The reason for that is because your why and your how will persist. They are internal. The thing you like doing You like carving little miniature ships, you like playing video games, you like painting, whatever it is, it's external and you have little control over that. Those are treats, those are moments, they can't be requirements.

And so this is from a personal level, me having gone through a little bit of this myself, like questioning the reason for working when you no longer need any money, right? I do not need to work.

What I had to realize for myself was I am not the goal. I am the goal in terms of who I want to become. This cannot be the goal because you will satisfy your own needs relatively quickly, especially if you get good at anything.

Everyone's bar is different, but you will satisfy it. Doesn't matter who you are.

And so that why has to be bigger than you, or you'll only be able to overcome obstacles that are smaller than you. And this is why I believe it has to be eternal.

Viktor Frankl famously said, if a man has a big enough why, he can overcome almost any how. And Rogan had this quote that I love about this, which is, a man will crawl through broken glass with a smile.

You need a goal worth suffering for. The goal is your passion, not the path. If you love the goal enough, the path stops mattering, right? So imagine your future family and your future wife. People who go to war fight for different reasons. Freedom, duty, protecting their loved ones, not letting their friends down. None of this is their love, but they love them enough that they'll do anything, including die for them. And my definition of love from an operationalizing perspective is that you measure it by what you're willing to give up in order to maintain it.

The man who loves the journey will walk further than the man who loves the destination.

But the man who walks to protect his family will walk until the other man dies. They've done research on this where they have someone get shocked and then eventually they tap out, right?

At a pain threshold.

When they told the same people that their loved ones were in the other room and every shock they took, their loved ones wouldn't have to, their threshold tripled. Think about how crazy this is. And the reason I think this is so relevant is that If you want to do big things, it will cost you great pain. And so your— the why is your passion, not the path. And so this is why people talk about finding your passion, because it'll get you through the inevitable hard times that come. But whenever you hear someone say that, first off, I don't think they have bad intent.

I think they just don't think about it as much.

But when you hear that, just remember. It will get you through the inevitable hard times that come is the definition of passion.

It is the requisite for it being your passion.

If passion— the literal translation in Latin is suffering and endurance, to endure suffering. The Passion of Christ, this crucifixion story, the first usage of suffering in this context. Don't you think that the thing that you're going for, maybe it's to set yourself up financially, to set your family up financially, to move into a better neighborhood, to set your kids up to have something that you didn't have. Don't you think that's worth suffering for? Whatever that is for you. And so I want to make duty cool again. I want to make it cool for a man to go in a field and work a rice paddy and know that they did a job because of who they did it for. For me, my passion, what I'm willing to suffer for, is helping men provide. It's something that I feel deeply about. And that's, to be fair, it's not like I don't want women to provide.

I want them to provide too. But I'm saying, what is the closest to my core? Obviously, business tactics work no matter who's using them, right? But I see the core components of me and men specifically as provide, protect, procreate.

And I can't help do all of them, to be clear, right? So that's on you.

But what I believe I can help with is at least one of those three. And there are many days where I do not enjoy some of the downstream effects of what I do, but I do enjoy what happens as a result.

I spend so much time on my books and this content because I think on my deathbed it will matter more than any wealth. And the ironic part about my role is that in order to influence more people, I need to continue to gain access to increase credibility. Our outcomes are inextricably linked. I have to succeed. I have to learn the next step so that I can teach it.

And that carries me through the pain of uncertainty and the failures of my many misjudgments.

You can become passionate about your work because you become passionate about what your work gets you. I think for some reason, people talk about it's the journey, not the destination. But like, in some ways, it's about the destination so you can tolerate the journey. I don't think Frodo, on his quest to destroy the ring, was like, I'm not sure if I'm passionate about this. He absolutely was passionate about it. He was willing to die for it. He was willing to give up his home for it, his friends for it, his family for it. And so I think we all on some level strive to have that. Something I've been saying to Leila a lot is that something I believe to my bones is that a man must have a quest to drive towards something. The problem is that we believe when we see monsters and dragons on the trail, society is telling us this is not the right path for you because it's not all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. No, that path, not only does it not exist, even if it did, it would be short-lived and you'd adapt because you're human. Hedonistic adaptation is a real thing. There are elements of my work, of my path that I love. I love writing, but basically anything besides that, I don't like 10 outta 10 enjoy. I love writing. I enjoy lifting. Lifting, I would say, is super high on my like enjoyment list. I enjoy eating and hanging out after I work out with people I like. Those are basically my emotional highs. But if I did it all the time, which I know because I tried to do it, I owned a gym. I started a gym because I thought, oh, if I eat food with people I like and work out all the time, then my life's gonna be happy. And let me tell you, the most miserable year of my life was the first year I started the gym. The most miserable of the last 15, the hardest year of my life. And so the thing is that you habituate to the good, but you still suffer through the bad. You get used to it. And so definitionally, You need something that you cannot achieve in order to continue to strive, to continue to fight, especially when you don't want to. And so I'm not going to speak for women and men, but especially for men, I believe that we need to give ourselves permission to earn, permission to strive, permission to suffer and grow as a result of that suffering. Because the stretch between that, that we feel between who we are, who you are, and who is required, the person you have to become to handle your current struggle, is the pain of growth. And we can't wish for the benefits of growth without accepting the cost or the price of growth, which is the suffering. And so you could even say that growth is your passion.

But if growth is your passion, that means you're willing to do many miserable things in order for it to happen, which means you're willing to suffer to achieve it.

If you are suffering right now in pursuit of the thing that you find meaningful, there is nothing wrong with you. You are not on the wrong path, and this is how it works. And the people who try to tell you otherwise either don't know better or actively are trying to destroy you. And I do this work because I really do find it the most meaningful.

I put up with plenty of shit because I like—

it's hard for people to comprehend this. I took out $42 million in distributions before my 46th a million-dollar exit at 31. Put that in a bank account and put 5% a year on it. I don't live that fancy. It was an active choice to take this on and do this because when I took the year off, I was very miserable. I had no quest. And I remember being in Mexico.

Layla and I went there for a month or two. I can't remember.

And I remember every day I would look out this beautiful ocean, this massive mansion that we had rented while we were there. And I had to think to myself, like, what do I find meaningful? What moves me? And when I say moves me, I mean calls me to take action. What is a cause that I'm willing to suffer for? And for me, it's helping younger me out because I know how much pain I was in. But a portion of that pain was because I had other people in my ear telling me there was something wrong with me. For the pain I experienced, that there was something wrong with the path. And so they would sow these seeds of doubt and uncertainty into me, and then that made the path so much more painful because the whole time I was wondering, like, am I— like, I'm go— I for sure know I'm going through the suffering, but I don't know if I'm doing it for the right reason. And so I think that if you provide for your family, like, you've won. And most people, if we're really being real, think back to the last major life change that you had. Once it stabilized, you're probably close to about as happy as you are now. And I'll, and I'll make a right, like I'll make a prediction after your next major life change, you'll have a short period of improved subjective wellbeing and then you'll return to baseline. And so if we assume these things to be true and the, our subjective wellbeing, how we rate ourselves, how we feel day to day is about the same, pretty much no matter what. Then that steady state becomes our existence. And so that's the $10, that's the fixed cost of living. But we can change the reward. We can change what we do it for or for whom we do it for.

Nothing wrong with you if you are pursuing something for the purpose of something that you find meaningful, independent of how hard it is.

So when I was—

to make this real for some of you guys who are going through it right now— when I was sleeping on my gym floor I say that in one sentence. I was sleeping on my gym floor. But what the sentence fails to compress is that that's a turf floor that I used to get rashes on because it was like covered in sweat and I didn't clean it that often. I would sleep in the gym clothes that I would finish the night before and I'd wake up still wearing them because I didn't have a shower at the gym. And when I was sleeping there, I was barely sleeping because it was underneath a parking garage and had these metal dividers and it was a concrete box. And so these cars would drive over it at all hours of the night, usually like kids around my age because I was 22. Driving there who were college kids or just out of college partying on the roof. And so I could hear these cars and it would wake me up. I would do the billing until sometimes 11 o'clock at night, and then I would have this adrenaline and this sweat sleep that I'd go through because there was no AC in the gym because it was in California. And my first session would be 5, people would get there at 4:30, so I'd open the gym at 4:15. I would sleep for around 4 to 5 hours every night, but I did that consistently for about 6 months. It got to the point where I could fall asleep leaning against walls. And I remember thinking to myself during that period of my life, like, anyone who ever has sleeping issues just simply isn't working hard enough. I don't think that's true. I for sure think that if you were sleep deprived enough, like, you will not have sleeping issues. But I bring this up to say that, like, I was— I remember showering at the LA Fitness, didn't have flip-flops, and I still have athlete's foot in one of my feet because of what I caught at that place. That I still deal with. I literally had all my stuff in my car because I drove to California in my car and all my stuff was there.

When I say one line of, I slept on the floor, I get it.

I understand that because while I was going through it, I had no promise that it was going to work. And I had also given up something that was significant. I had a white-collar job and every person that I knew, when I decided to quit and start my own gym business, actually had higher status than me. So because they all had white-collar jobs and I quit to start what most people would consider a blue-collar business, I lost all social status that I had within the girls that I knew and guys that I knew because I was no longer on the investment banking management consulting path. And like, I went to this prestigious college so that I could open up that world and then instead left everything so that I could become a personal trainer, which requires zero credibility at all. And so if you are going through your version of hard time now, maybe it is more sleepless nights, maybe it is physical exhaustion, maybe it's more the social stuff of feeling like your peers are getting ahead of you and wondering what's wrong with you. And like, you're for sure sacrificing this time, money, and taking on this risk, but you're not sure if it's going to work. The only thing that I can say is that every single person who was successful shares that path with you. The only thing that I can tell you that got me through that period of time was that I committed to not stopping. I never, I didn't know when I would succeed or if I would succeed, but I did know that I wouldn't stop and that if I didn't stop, that I couldn't be called a failure. And so that was the big thing. I realized that if I had to stop, then I would have to explain stopping. That still meant that other people's opinions mattered to me. But if I just keep going, I can always be like, I'm still doing it.

And as long as I had enough to cover food, which doesn't really cost that much, I was going to be okay.

I would encourage you to think out in more specificity what really is the worst case scenario. As someone who slept in the car, on the floor, you know what?

Just like everything else, it becomes steady state.

I remember when I was broker and had amazing memories, and I remember being richer and having amazing memories. I remember having terrible memories of having more money, and I remember having terrible memories then having less money.

For sure, money will give you options, but it will not really dramatically change your subjective well-being because that is very internal.

A lot of us already know this, but we still want to make sure and go get the money anyways. But I see a man's work as something that's incredibly core to who we are. I don't know if it's the same for women. I can only speak to my own experience, but I see my work and what I choose to do with my hands and my mind and my— like, every day. Like, my grandfather, who was the person that I was closest with in my family, he came here. He was an immigrant, one of 9, born in Macedonia. He was the smartest of them, so they sent him to boarding school because he was smarter than his siblings. Did well, then ran from the Nazis for multiple years during the Holocaust, and then from there came to the US after being in Europe after the World War to start his practice here. And then he had to retake all of the exams because none of the European standardizations mattered in the US. He had to retake everything again in the US in language he didn't understand. And he and I would sit there and talk and he says, you have two hands and one mind. That's it. I always thought about that. We have two hands and one mind. No matter what path you choose, poverty is tough, right? And so is growth. And so is risk. Everything sucks, right? I tweeted this thing the other day because I was texting someone. It says, everything is hard and no one cares. The only person who attends your pity party is you. Able to make these videos despite some of the personal cost that it comes, that comes with it. For sure, there's personal benefit, but there are costs and benefits. Because when I have those moments where you're like, shoot, what if I go off this ramp and I'm about to die? Or you have some health scare because you see a lump somewhere and you're like, oh my God, is it cancer? And it's not, or whatever.

Those moments you like, you do this quick check on your life and you're like, do I need to change everything about what I'm doing?

For me, when I have those moments, I look back and say, this is what I would have done. I feel like the work that I do helps people and it's something that I find interesting.

So I do it.

And much of my day does not include that. And much of my life leading up to this did not include that. I thought that pursuing my passion of being in fitness and because I liked working out, but me working out with friends is such a small slice of my life. I'm back at the beginning again right now with a gym that I can work out with the people that I like and I do not have a gym business.

I say this to say that the suffering will not stop.

We work because on some level we think the suffering will end, and it just won't. And so I think if you accept the suffering as the toll that you pay on all these paths, then at least you get to pick where you go. And I think that is something worth fighting for.