Ryan Daniel Moran argues you don't have a hidden passion waiting to be found. Follow the money first to pay bills and remove stress, then build passion projects on the side. He cites Derek Sivers as an example of someone who kept music separate from his income-generating work.
Lavenda Tupo asks, how do you disconnect what you are passionate about from what you have to get done to escape the rat race?
Now, this is an interesting question, and there are multiple schools of thought on this. There are people who say, follow your bliss, follow your passion, and the money will follow. There are some people who say, follow the money and the passion will come. Both work. Both are perfectly viable. What works for you? What drives you? I think the important kind of X factor here is you've got to be passionate about something, right? You could be passionate about quitting your crappy job, but something has to be driving you. Let's talk about it like that. It's not, what are you passionate about? Because then that brings in the question about, how do I find what I'm meant to do in this world? How do I find what I'm passionate about? And none of that exists, right? It's just whatever you decide, whatever you create, that's what your life becomes. There is no outside of yourself passion that you have to find. There is no you that you have to discover. There is no life path that has been preset for you. It's just what you decide and what you create along the way. So what's driving you is a much better question. And that can be your reason why. That can be your passion. My suggestion for somebody who is still in the rat race, follow the money. Do what you need to do to make the money. Let the passion be running away from what it is that you're trying to avoid. And once you have cut that off, you've cut the source of your stress and frustration, then you could say, okay, great. What am I going to do with my life and my business? Now, the important question, I think, is, what do you do once you have freed yourself from the thing that you resent? If you hate your job and you've gotta pay bills and you're trying to start a business to try and get away from the job, what's your life gonna look like when that's gone? Most people never answer that question. So what happens is they cut off the job, and then they take their resentment, they bring it into their business, and then they just resent the business. So what is your life gonna look like once that's gone? Is it gonna be in this business? Is it gonna be in a different business? And you'll wind that one down? Does it mean that you just automate that one so you can live a nice, cushy lifestyle? There's no right or wrong here. But answering the question of what fills that gap, what fills that space will allow you to make a healthy pivot from being able to justify, I'm gonna do this thing that is, I might not even enjoy right now, but I'm gonna put all of my attention into it so that I can get rid of the crappy job that will allow you to do that. Now, some people will argue that this is just easier if you do what you love and what you're passionate about. And if that's what drives you, if you got something, if you got a topic that you're interested in and you want to build a blog and a side hustle about that specifically, you have my blessing to do so. That has driven a lot of my business decisions, but only once I was successful. I had to have the. The stress monkey off my back before I felt free to be able to pursue what it was that I was passionate about. That's me. Other people don't have that. But if you've got something that's holding you back, I say it's a logical and easy thing for you to do, to follow the money so that you can quit the thing you hate. And then we can answer the question, what am I passionate about? Or what am I doing with my life? Derek Sivers had a great blog post on this, and he basically argued that the happiest people that he knows have a job that they're committed to, meaning it's a career or a skill set that isn't their passion, it's not their gift to the world, but it's something they're at least invested in enough to where they can constantly be growing in that skillset. And then they have an art form or the thing that they're passionate about that they're not reliant on for income. And what that allows them to do is to balance both worlds, is to be committed to their work and committed to their art. And they've got the thing they do for money and the thing that they do for fun or as a gift to the world. I think the same is true in business. I have cash flow businesses. I have businesses that pay for my life. And then I have my gifts to the world. I make the least amount of money from Freedom Fast Lane. Of all my projects, I. I make the least. Like me taking home Freedom Fast Lane. I talk about this stuff. Cause I can't not like, if you took away all of this, I'll be on the street corner talking about capitalism and free markets. All right? I can't not talk about it. But for those of you who've been following me for several years, you know that I haven't been doing this show and the podcast with full commitment until I had the cash flow piece. But built up from my physical products brands, which I love. I've become passionate about them. Cause they're my babies. And now that they're more automated, I can focus more time on the thing that I think is gonna really change people's lives and give me fulfillment. So I do the same thing. I balance the things I do for money and the things I do for passion. They're just businesses rather than a job and a.
Sam.
