Evan Carmichael found his passion by accident: a three-person speaking gig at a YMCA led him to realize he loved empowering entrepreneurs. He kept saying yes to free talks, grew audiences from 5 to 50, started a YouTube channel answering emails, and eventually landed book deals and international speaking gigs. Passion appears through exploration and relentless iteration, he says, and monetization follows.
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How did I find my passion? I'm going to answer that question in today's episode of Lunch and Earn. So I recently got asked a question from one of my loyal YouTube viewers, love you guys, Kaushal, who wrote in to say, "How did you find your passion and what were the difficulties that you faced in your journey here and how did you deal with it?" This is a great question and I've told this story a couple of times, but I feel like it's been a while, so I'll address it again in this context. And the difficulties along the way. In my first business, it was a biotech software company, and I joined as an owner with two other founders. And at that time, I wasn't, you know, my passion wasn't making that software. It wasn't the, the, the good that we were doing. I didn't have a software background. I didn't have a science background. I was super green. And it was a struggle for me to kind of learn the business and be able to market it and promote it. But my passion there was in helping these two entrepreneurs build their business. I discovered that I really love doing that. And when we sold the company, I went into almost a depression of what am I going to do next? You know, like, I don't know what I want to do. And I bounced around to a lot of different opportunities and followed my own advice, which is if you don't know what you want to do, explore and try things and see what makes you come alive. And how I discovered this, right, this helping entrepreneurs, this thing that I've been doing for I don't know, 12+ years now, is I got invited to speak at a YMCA to help their entrepreneur program. There's a bunch of young entrepreneurs going through the program. And I went up to that first event and I thought, I've got so much great information to share, all the lessons that I learned and all the mistakes that I made and how to help them really become successful entrepreneurs. And it was a free event and only 3 people showed up. And that was That was really heartbreaking for me because I felt like maybe this is my next thing. You know, like maybe helping entrepreneurs is my next big move. Maybe that's what I'm really, you know, that's my real passion. And only 3 people showed up and it was really disheartening and I felt like at that time, man, this is a total failure, right? Like I was promoting this event, the YMCA was promoting the event, and nobody shows up for a free thing. How am I ever gonna charge for it? How am I ever gonna make money? How am I ever gonna, turn this into a career. And I decided in that moment that I would keep going, right, that I would help those 3 people. And it just felt so amazing helping those people, seeing their eyes light up, having them leave the room feeling not just motivated and encouraged, but also having ideas that they could go and actually now build their business. And knowing that I had an impact, that meant something real to me, and I knew that I had to find a way to keep going. It was from that moment It made me come so alive that I had to find a way to keep doing this. And I didn't care if I, maybe I didn't care, but I didn't know if I'd ever make money. I didn't know if I would ever be successful in that, but I knew that I loved it so much. I just, I loved that high of helping entrepreneurs that I had to find a way to keep doing it. Even if that meant doing some other things while I tried to figure out my path, I would for sure keep this as one of the things that I did. So that was, I think, the biggest struggle for me was just knowing that I love something and knowing how excited I got by it, but not knowing how I'd ever turn it into a business, not knowing how I'd ever support myself doing this. And because I loved it, because it was genuine, I kept doing it. And I kept doing more presentations and more events, and all of them for free because I didn't have a business model behind it. I just fed off the energy, and it started to grow. And I had, you know, 5 people the next one, 10 people the next one, 15 and 20 and 30 and 50, and it just kept growing. And I launched my website, and then I got asked to speak at different events, and then I started to get paid to speak. And it wasn't a lot of money, a couple hundred dollars maybe, but like, "Wow, you want to pay me to come? Sure, happy to." And then I started increasing my speaking fee, and a lot of it is because, one, I was driving more awareness, I was building up a name for myself, and two, with more practice, I got better, right? My speeches now are way better than they were at at the start, and so I can justify charging a lot more money now than I could when I first started. And it gradually grew from there. And I think YouTube was one of the— when I started on YouTube and when I really went all in on YouTube, that's when it hit me that I'm finding something that I absolutely love doing. Because I would answer emails for people, and I would spend, I would spend like an hour writing somebody back an email. If you asked me this question, I would spend an hour sitting there writing an email to respond to you, and I was getting too many emails, and I'm much more of a visual person. I thought, why don't I turn this into a video? I started my channel, and you guys have been the fuel to keep me going, and I'm responding to videos and making you guys grow your businesses and giving you helpful advice and tips and wisdom and ideas. And that has now accelerated my business where I'm getting opportunities with brands and I'm getting international speaking deals, and I have a book deal. And so I face the same challenge that a lot of you guys are facing now, where at the beginning you have this love, you have this passion passion, this excitement for something that you're doing, and you don't know how you're going to make it work, and you feel everything that you try doesn't bring in enough dollars to support yourself. And the key is just to keep going. If you keep going, you will figure it out. And all the plans that I had, you know, you always start with a plan, you have a plan, you think this is the perfect plan, is how it's going to work. It never actually worked out like I planned it would work out, but it did eventually work out because I kept going, because I kept changing, because I kept adapting, because I kept improving, because I kept providing value. And people started to care more and more and more and more and more. And so I found, like, circling back to the question, I found my passion by accident, by a fluke, by just saying yes to opportunities, right? The YMCA event was one thing that I did that I said yes to. I said yes to a whole bunch of other stuff too, just because I was honestly desperate and just trying to find something that would make me come alive. And Salsa was one of those things too, and I fell in love with salsa, but I did not fall in love with a whole bunch of other stuff that I tried. And so if you're trying to find your passion, continue to explore, find something that makes you come alive, and when you find it, latch on to it, keep doing it, and you'll eventually find the way to make money. I promise you. Believe. So that's my story. I'd love to know what your story is. How did you find your passion? Leave it in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. Thank you so much for watching, continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.
