“Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice - Ep. #316

Follow your passion is the worst piece of advice I've ever been given in my entire life. And I've started like 80 businesses. Entrepreneurship is my entire thing. It's my hobby, my life, my family, my profession, everything all rolled into one. And I still think that follow your passion is garbage advice. And I'm gonna tell you why. And by the end of this episode, I'm gonna hand you the exact tactical playbook for finding the thing you're actually obsessed with. Because I've seen episodes like this before, how to follow your passion, how to find what you love. And they're good. I'm inspired by them, but they're not good enough because they're not tactical or specific enough. And that's the kind of guy I am. I want to know what app to download, what tool to use, what prompt. Like, let's get real about this because anything less than that is just guru fluff, high-level motivation, like do what you love type stuff. And this is not that. This is the episode I wish I always had when I was 20 years old. But if you're 60 years old, this is still the episode for you because I'm assuming you still haven't found your passion yet or your obsession yet. So when I say tactical, I mean we're going to dig through your YouTube watch history, Google search history, Amazon orders, conversations that you've had where you tend to hijack the whole table and talk for 20 minutes straight and not even notice that you're doing it. And I'm also gonna show you how to use AI to do all this in like 20 minutes instead of wandering around in the wilderness for the next 20 years. So yes, the best stuff's at the end, but I'm gonna earn it first. Here's the problem with follow your passion. When someone tells you that, they're probably assuming one or two things, and both of them are probably wrong. Number one, they're assuming that you already know what your passion is. Most people don't. The vast majority of people don't, which is a crying shame, and it doesn't have to be that way. And number 2, they're assuming that you only have one. Nobody only has one hobby or one passion, one obsession. We all have multiple. Most of us don't even know what they are yet. So I know a lot of you guys know my backstory, so I'm gonna gloss over this really fast so we can get to the good stuff. But I just wanna set the tone and give you some context as to why I feel like I have a unique insight to offer to this age-old discussion. So I've done iPhone repairs. I sold iPhone LCD screens and parts. And was iPhone repair my passion? Absolutely not. I'm not an engineering brain. I'm not a tinkerer. That is not me. I didn't lie in bed at night dreaming about LCD screens. I've worked with RV parks, tree trimming, online snack business. None of those were or are my life's calling. None of them. I saw a gap, I moved, and I built the thing, and a lot of the time, once it was up and running, I'd rather hand it off to a great operator and go chase down the next puzzle, cuz I'm not a great operator. It took me way too long to learn this about myself, but for me, my puzzle is my passion, right? Going from zero to one, that is my passion. And one might look like $1 million or $10 million. It might look like $1. It still feels amazing to me. It still gives me that dopamine rush. And we say dopamine like it's a four-letter word, like it's a bad thing. Dopamine is amazing. But it should lead you to action, not just to information and research and procrastination. Dopamine has to lead us to execution, to action. In this case, to the first dollar hitting our Stripe account. That's the thing that I'm obsessed with. So of all the 80+ businesses I've started, which ends up being like, you know, 3 to 8 a year, the through line on all of those has never been the industry, either like the macro industry, like sales or the micro industry like home services. I don't care about any of those niches. I love commerce. I love being a merchant. That's why I love farmers markets, cuz it's like merchant central. That first customer is what I really love. And the industry that I happen to be in at any given moment is just like the costume that it shows up in any given week. And I wanna be straight with you because I've talked about this a few times before, never this tactically, but My own thinking on this topic has shifted over the years. There's two schools of thought on this whole passion versus profit thing. In my opinion, school number one says your passion does not have to be your job. They can live in two totally separate buckets. Do your job and then do your passion in your 5 to 9. Job, 9 to 5. Passion, 5 to 9. And I think for the vast majority of human history, that was true. And people did not have the luxury of having their passion and profit overlap. Make your money over here and go love your woodworking over there. I've said a dozen times on this podcast and others, follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion. And for my Utah folks, follow the profit means something else entirely. And you should do that too. Do the hard thing, the boring thing, the thing that pays, eat crap for a few years if you have to, and earn the right to go chase the fun stuff later. But today we live in a world where I think school of thought number 2 is much more feasible. And should be possible for anyone consuming this episode right now. School number 2 says, no, have your cake and eat it too. You can build a life where the thing that pays you is the thing you would happily do for free anyway, or the thing that you would even pay to do because we happen to be walking straight into this AI age of abundance where the cost of trying something, building something, selling, testing is dropping to basically zero. It used to take serious money and years to chase down some weird little obsession only to see maybe does it have legs or not. But now you can spin up a website or an app, write the copy, make the video, test the offer all in one afternoon. I mean, geez, just yesterday I'm on Twitter and I see this AI-generated video that looked very good, very real, of a guy building like a miniature house with like miniature concrete and rebar and 2x4s and shingles and everything. Elon commented on it. This guy had 500 Twitter followers. He's not an influencer. He's nobody, right? Elon commented on it. It got 7 million views, and I'm pretty sure this guy that posted it, Ethan, got the idea from my episode. 'Cause I posted about this in a reel a year ago. We talked about it on MFM about like a guy dollhouse. This should be a, an actual business and not just a hobby. And I think, I haven't talked to him yet, I think he was inspired by that and he launched a Kickstarter. He had $0 in funding, but he just made this AI-generated video, tweeted it out to the void. Remember, almost no followers. Elon comments, gets a bunch of views. He's raised $50,000 so far. He has a viable business. Like he launched a viable business with an AI-generated video and no followers. That's the world we live in. Anyone can do that. So that old trade-off of money in one bucket, passion in the other is breaking down in real time. More and more of us every day are getting to combine those two buckets into one. And that's the bet I'm making right now, both in my life and on this one episode. And it's the bet I want you to be making too. Hey, if this is helpful, please hit subscribe on whatever platform, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. I appreciate you. So here's something that kind of blew my mind the first time I heard it. The word passion. Where do you think that word comes from? It comes from the Latin word for suffering. Passion literally means suffering. It's not an accident. So when people tell you to follow your passion, what they should actually be telling you is go find the thing you're willing to suffer for, because that's the real signal. It's not the thing that feels amazing on a sunny Saturday when you're drinking your hand and nowhere to be. Anyone loves that. Of course we do. I'm talking about the thing where you will eat crap for 2 years straight and keep showing up anyway. And it doesn't feel like eating crap. This is the thing where the bad days still feel better than a good day doing something else. My dad used to always say, "Bad day of fishing is still better than a good day in the office." That's what I'm talking about. All this passion advice tells you to sit down, close your eyes, journal, meditate, reflect, look inward, find yourself. And that's a really good waste of a really good afternoon. You're not going to think or reflect your way to obsession. You've got to catch it in the act. And the thing is, your obsession is already leaving fingerprints all over your life. You just never dusted for them. You've never gone looking for them. You've got to become a detective of your own behavior. And that, that right there is what every single one of these tactics are. It's you dusting your own life for fingerprints. Okay? Just so you know, I'm not up here pretending that I have all this figured out. I've said this a million times. I probably say it too much. I'm an introvert. I have ADHD. I don't like leaving my office. I don't love talking to people in person. And for years, The idea of posting short-form video, putting my face on camera gave me anxiety. It's cringe, it's embarrassing. And don't worry if you think I'm about to tell you that you need to post content to follow or find your passion. That's not what I'm about to say. That could be a small piece in this, but it's a small piece. But one day it clicked. And honestly, I'm glad it clicked by one of my videos going viral, cuz if I posted 30 videos and none of 'em went viral, I probably would've stopped. Thankfully, like my 17th or so went viral and it was like, oh, Still cringe, still worried about what people think, but my love of this dopamine and upside is now outweighing my dislike of this cringe. Okay? There's a whole world on the other side of cringe, and whether you end up posting content or not, you're still gonna have to get over that. You're gonna have to get over the cringe thing because people either will talk or you're going to think that people are talking. And really it's the same thing. They're probably not talking, but if you think they are, then it doesn't matter. You gotta get over the cringe aspect, whether you're posting about it on the internet or not. Because people will know about you doing something differently, right? So you just got to push through the friction. If I can do it, you can do it. Okay, back to the playbook. Here's the tactics. I call this the obsession audit. I need to buy that domain name, actually. I mean, this could be a business. You can see my ADHD playing out in real time right here. Okay, obsessionaudit.com is available. I'm buying it right now, so you can't take it from me. I don't know what I'll do with it, but who knows? Anyway, the obsession audit. Number 1, receipts. Here's the deal. Your real interests are already sitting in your accounts. You just gotta go read them back to yourself. So open up your YouTube watch history right now, last 90 days. What do you go down rabbit holes on at 11:00 PM when nobody on earth is making you do this? That's a tell. Then go look at your Google search history. Then, and this one's gonna sting a little, your Amazon order history and your bank statement. And if you didn't know this, you can go to Amazon and you can export a spreadsheet of all of your Amazon orders. Upload that bad boy to ChatGPT and it's gonna tell you all kinds of stuff. And of course your bank statements. Why not? Where are you spending your money that you don't have to spend? Not the air filters, right? Or the bottles of water. Your discretionary income, because people are likely to fund their real obsession even when they're flat broke. Okay? This is the stuff that you're buying when nobody's watching and maybe you can't afford it. That stuff doesn't lie. So AI, AI can turn this from a boring, like, journaling exercise into a 10-minute superpower. Go to Google Takeout. In fact, I've got it pulled up right here in another tab. It's takeout.google.com. Okay, export your YouTube history. It's free. Or just screenshot a few pages of it, drop it into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, doesn't matter. And you give it a prompt that goes something like, hey, here's 90 days of my YouTube watch history. Ignore the random junk like, you know, how to fix your appliance. That's an outlier. Show me the 3 obsessions hiding in here that I'd probably never want to admit to myself out loud. That's the prompt. And then just watch what it spits back at you. It's going to see patterns about you that you are way too close to see yourself, or you don't want to see yourself. Right? We're very biased creatures. Then do the exact same thing, same prompt with your bank statement, Amazon export, hand it to AI and say, categorize my discretionary spending and tell me what I clearly care about based on where my money is actually going. And boom, that's gonna be a self-portrait that you didn't even know existed. Number 2, the hijack test. Okay? I know there's at least one topic where you grab the steering wheel of the conversation and you don't even realize you've been talking for 20 minutes straight. Your friends know exactly what this is. You probably don't 'cause you're too busy doing it. So text 5 people who know you the best right now and ask them one question. What do I not shut up about? Just that. I promise the answers are gonna cluster up. There's gonna be like 3 that say some version of the same thing, and that thing is pointing you at your obsession. And the AI version of this is kind of wild, by the way. If you've got like 6+ months of texts, notes, voice memos where you're rambling to yourself in the car, journal entries, whatever, feed a chunk of that into the AI. AI and ask it, what topics do I keep circling back to? It's like having a less of a biased friend with perfect memory of everything you've ever said and zero reason to be polite about the answer. Number 3, the childhood callback. Okay, think back to when you were 8 to 12 years old, right before the world got its hands on you and told you what was useful and what was a waste of time. What did you do for hours that nobody had to ask you to do? I remember as a kid watching like a whale watching video. And for whatever reason, I connected that to being a park ranger, like a game warden. Okay. And I was like, I want to be a game warden. And I loved going behind my house in Logan, Utah, and looking for animal tracks and catching frogs and trout fishing and setting traps. And I had this Nerf bow and arrow and I would shoot pheasants with it. Never hit one. But like, to this day, I love just going out in the woods and doing stuff. Setting traps and whatever. That is one of my obsessions that I could monetize. And it went dormant for decades, but it's there. There's an almost 0% chance that whatever it is you were obsessed with at that age completely went away and you have no interest in anymore. I'm not talking about like 3 to 7 years old when you love cars and dinosaurs. Like, I'm specifically talking about like 8 to 15-ish. Okay. Because around 14, 15, high school takes over, the opposite sex, sports, whatever. And that obsession stuff kind of takes a backseat, kind of like it's taken a backseat in your career so far, right? Which is a shame. What did you get in trouble for as a kid, right? That's usually your gift showing up way too early before you even knew what direction to aim it in. Talking too much in class— that could be sales, that could be content, that could be anything. I'm kind of a closeted class clown. If you put me in a class full of close friends, I'm going to be the biggest extrovert in the world. Were you the kid that took everything apart just to see how it worked? That's building you, right? Were you bossing other kids around on the playground? That's leadership. Your teacher just didn't have a nicer word for it yet. Number 4, the energy log. This one takes like 2 weeks, but it's stupidly powerful, so hang with me. For 2 weeks, every time you finish an activity— okay, it's a little tedious, but it's worth it, might be more effective than everything I mentioned so far— every time you finish an activity, rate it 1 to 10 on one single question: how do I feel right now after doing this? Or this question: how much energy did that task give or take away from me? Not while you're doing the task, but after, right when you finish. Because here's the truth: most things drain you, and that's normal. It's fine. We're here to work, right? You want to hunt for the rare thing that should be draining you but is leaving you with more gas in the tank than what you started with. More energy. A net energy positive, if you will. That's the green flag. And while you're at it, go ahead and track your time distortion? What's the activity where you look up and 3 hours just vanished? It felt like 20 minutes. That's flow, right? That's what it— you're in the flow. And that's right next door to obsession. So keep it all in your Notes app, and at the end of the 2 weeks, paste the entire thing into the same AI chat window where you're already talking to it about this stuff and say, find the pattern. Tell me what charges me up and what drains me. And AI's gonna spot it probably long before you do. Number 5, This one's a little uncomfortable, so brace yourself. There's no comfort in the growth zone. The envy map. What are you scrolling past on Instagram and feeling a hot little flash of jealousy? For me, it's like homesteading. I see people like raising chickens and quail and, and like organic compost in their backyard. And it's like, oh, I want to do that. I could do that, but I'm just not, right? That's a signal, but I'm being specific here. We're not talking about admiration. Okay. That's kind of useless for this exercise. I want that ugly sting. The one where you go, ugh, that should be me. Like, let's say you were in a high school band and you went to college and one of your bandmates stuck with the dream, joined another band, and now he's touring around the country in stadiums. Ugh, that should be me. I was a better guitarist than he was the whole time. Something like that. Obviously that's very niche, not likely to be the case for you, but you get what I'm saying. Write down 5 people who give you that exact feeling. Maybe they're old friends from high school, maybe they're current friends, maybe they don't know who you are. Doesn't matter. Maybe they're an influencer, doesn't matter. Their life, their work, their business, whatever it is you can find out about them. And then look for the pattern across all 5, because that jealousy is not random. It's not a character flaw. I'm not saying we should be jealous, but we can at least learn from that feeling. That sting is your obsession kind of like waving its arms in the air trying to get your attention. We feel envy toward people who are living the life some like quiet part of us already decided that we want. Guys, I wanna tell you about something I've been building behind the scenes. You've been watching my videos about AI tools and asking the same question. Okay, cool. How do I turn this into a business? Not just playing around with AI, but actually getting clients and getting paid. That's my community. It's called Playmakers, playmakersai.com. It's an AI agency program where we show you how to start an AI consulting business where you can charge local businesses $500 to $5,000 a month to set up and manage AI tools for them. It's not a course you watch and forget about. We do 3 to 7 live training calls every week taught by me and 23 other expert AI agency owners. You get plug and play templates, Claude code tutorials, AI voice agent frameworks, automation templates, and a 30-day roadmap so you don't fall off track. This is stuff you can just copy, paste, and deploy for clients on day one. And of course, how to find clients as well. We also have a 5-day first client challenge where we can walk you through landing your first paying client. In 5 days. You also get my frameworks for cold email, Facebook ads, SMS, cold calls, and then I hand you my Leads Galore spreadsheets with actual leads in your niche, in your area. We've already got over 200 people in there building real agencies. If you miss a live call, it's all recorded. So if you've ever thought about starting an AI consulting business or AI implementation business, go check out PlaymakersAI.com. Number 6, the 100 Questions Dump. Sit down and write out 100 questions that you genuinely want the answer to before you die. Yeah, 100's a lot. Doesn't need to be business or money focused, but the whole point is it needs to be a lot because the first 20 are gonna be surface level garbage, right? This is the stuff you think you're supposed to care about. Push through it to 60, 70, 80, 100, and the real answers are gonna be in like the deep cuts where your brain is like finally running out of the polite surface level answers and, and it'll start telling you the truth. And this, this is a perfect job for AI. Open a voice memo, ramble out 100 questions while you're driving around, dump the transcript into AI and say, cluster these into themes and tell me which theme shows up the most. That biggest cluster, that's the thing your brain can't stop chewing on even when you're not paying attention. And number 7, this is the teach it for free filter. What's the one thing you would happily make a whole video about or explain to a, a, a stranger next to you on an airplane? For zero bucks just because you physically cannot make yourself shut up about it. That's your obsession hiding in plain sight, and you do it for free. That's the whole point. And the stuff you would teach for free is often the same stuff that people will eventually pay good money for, especially if they can see your passion and zeal for it. That's how this whole podcast started, like 262 episodes ago. Number 8 is the big one because the other 7 are about like reading the clues that you already have sitting around. But the last one is gonna go out and generate brand new ideas. So you're gonna go wide here and fast. You can't think your way to your obsession. I said that in the beginning. You find it by trying 30 things badly, right? You kind of gotta fail in small ways a lot. Most people are trying 2 or 3 things their whole entire life, and I want you to try 2 or 3 things a month. Give yourself full permission to quit fast without any stakes. We don't want you to feel guilty about quitting. Quitting is like one step closer to success. You're not getting married to any of these ideas. You're just dating. We're dating around and the goal is like reps. Okay? And the cheat code inside the cheat code is something I say a zillion times on this podcast. Sell it before you have it. Run the ad before you build the product, right? This kid posts this video on Twitter before he really had anything. $50,000, an Elon retweet. Amazing. Post the offer before you own a single piece of equipment. It drives me insane. I just talked to a guy that wanted to start a forestry mulching business, and the first thing he did was go out and buy a mulcher that cost like $113,000, and he's ready to finance the whole thing before he's talked to one single customer. To him, it was easier and less scary to talk to a bank about borrowing the money than it was to talk to Joe Blow with 7 acres that has some kudzu that needs to be removed. It's backwards. Run the ad first, post on Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, see if your phone rings, and the market is gonna tell you the truth way faster than your feelings ever will. And while we're here, one bonus move that ties this all together. Post your stuff publicly, okay? Like, just do it. The experiments, the ugly versions, all of it. Yeah, it means that people are gonna see the ones that fail, but they're probably not gonna remember them. Who cares? I'm still doing this. I've launched things in the last 6 months that millions of people have seen that have failed. Or been abandoned. I don't give a crap. They don't either. They forgot for the most part. The downside is, yeah, someone's going to watch you fail, and that's not a real downside. So we got a finite, limited downside and an unlimited upside. Posting publicly keeps you accountable. And I am like, I'm on this heater of an obsession with accountability lately. I had to film a couple videos just last week, and I'd been procrastinating them for 10 days, and they were important videos. And my team was like, Chris, come on, come on, come on. And I was busy, but I had the time, right? I just kept doing other less important things. And finally I woke up last Friday and I said, if I don't film all 3 of these videos, which was like a 5-hour process to do this, this was on a Friday. If I don't film all 3 of these videos by the end of today, midnight Central Standard Time, I will give each of you guys $100. Everyone in this group chat, $100. You know what? I did them. And I probably, I definitely would not have done them that day had I not said that. I attach stakes to it, right? We need stakes. We need accountability. And business idea, someone needs to invent an app that like productizes that stakes, right? Where you like, you connect your credit card and it's like, hey, maybe you connect your inbox as well. And it's like, if I don't get to inbox zero every Tuesday by 3 PM, donate $100 to this charity or whatever, or send $100 to whatever. It works. Okay. And posting publicly is another way of accountability. It puts eyes on you. And eyes on you means finding customers and partners finding you instead of you having to chase 'em down. And remember, every time you hit publish, it's like a free lottery ticket, right? We're playing the lottery here, but it's free, so play it as many times as you can. And last thing, this is one I actually want you to remember if you forget every other word I just said. Everybody treats obsession like it's a buried treasure, like it's this one perfect thing sitting out there fully formed and you just have to go wander around on the map until you trip over it. But that is wrong. That's not how it works. This thinking keeps people stuck for years. The truth is that it took me way too long to learn. Obsession is something that gets built. You gotta start with a seed of passion, but you really get obsessed with the things you get good at. Think about anything that you love. You probably didn't love it on day one when you were terrible at it. You got a little bit good, that felt great. Then you did more, you got better, and somewhere in there, the interest turned into obsession. And the passion follow the progress, but it doesn't ever start the other way around. So all these tactics I just gave you, those are for picking a direction, but once you have a direction pointed, the move is simple. Pick the thing that gives you the smallest win the fastest, right? Dave Ramsey would call this baby steps. He wants people to pay off their smallest debt first, even if it has a lower interest rate, because momentum is very real. Remember, focus is overrated, momentum is underrated. We want to do little things, low-hanging fruit things that keep us momentum. You want to stack 2 or 3 wins, and then you want to let getting good do the heavy lifting. That motivation was never going to work for you anyway, right? It's a muscle, you work it out and it grows. And the final filter of all this, the real one, is stop asking yourself, what do I love? Start asking, What am I willing to suffer for? Okay, remember full circle here. Passion means suffering. Everybody wants the highlight reel of being obsessed, but nobody wants the boring grindy, like nobody's clapping, 3 in the morning middle part. But the real question is not like, what makes you happy? It's what bad days doing one thing beat a good day of doing anything else. Find that and you found your obsession, and that is the only one. That ever actually pays. So start by being a detective this week. Pull up your YouTube history, test the, you know, text your 5 friends, write the 100 questions, let ChatGPT find the pattern that you're too close to to see. Then go try something today. Remember, let dopamine lead to action, not information gathering. Do this stuff before you're ready because you're already way more ready than you think you are. And yes, like guys, business is hard. Okay? Finding this stuff is hard., but you've probably heard the old adage, choose your hard. Being overweight is hard. Eating healthy is hard, right? Choose your hard. Short-term hard or long-term hard? I choose short-term hard, but you are capable. You can do it. It's doable. If a kid like me who just didn't want to be broke anymore can stumble into 80 businesses and find the thing that I will happily do until I die, then you can absolutely do that for yourself. Oh, and fun fact, in the day or two that elapsed between when I recorded this and when you're listening to this, I went ahead and vibe-coded this really cool tool. Called Obsession Audit, and you can find it at obsessionaudit.com. I promise you, I was not intending to do that when I started recording this episode, but bias for action, I gotta do it. So it's free and it should help this process go a little smoother for you. But of course, you could still do it yourself, just a little more clunky. If you know someone that is lacking in obsession or happiness or fulfillment or motivation or in a crappy job, please send this to them. It could literally change their lives. You can have your cake and eat it too. I promise. I promise you it's going to take some work, some effort, some testing, some launching, a lot of failing. But I promise you it will be worth it. I'm laughing at myself because I almost just said, and I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. That was really weird. I've never almost said that as if I'm closing a church talk or a prayer. I'm clearly deeply ingrained with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and, and it shows. So thanks for listening, hanging out in the Koerner office. You guys are awesome.