In this motivational interview, host Evan Carmichael and GoPro founder Nick Woodman discuss the importance of following personal interests and passions as a pathway to fulfillment and success. Woodman emphasizes that inner passions reveal one's true self and lead to happiness, while Carmichael illustrates the concept with his own experience starting a salsa dance business despite numerous obstacles. Both stress that uncertainty should not deter action; instead, low‑risk experiments and intuitive exploration can uncover opportunities, as demonstrated by Woodman's creation of GoPro against industry giants. The conversation concludes with a call to viewers to identify and try an unexplored interest, encouraging immediate, low‑pressure engagement rather than waiting for a guaranteed big breakthrough.
Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is Pursue Your Interests in Life. Over to you, Nick Woodman.
I wake up every morning, this bread still keeps me going.
We all have interests and passions for a reason. It's your inner voice telling you what you should be doing with your life. If you're not pursuing your interests in life, you're not realizing who you really are. And as a result, you're not going to be as happy as you can be.
I think a lot of people don't necessarily pursue their interests because they don't know how it's going to work out, and that uncertainty prevents them from taking any action. Where honestly, a lot of the greatest business ideas and a lot of the best personal growth that you'll ever get in your life is by following your intuition, by following your passion, by doing the things that interest you, even if you have no idea how it's going to work out, and not putting the pressure on yourself that it has to work out, especially in the short term. When Nick was looking at starting GoPro, he could have said, this is a stupid idea for me to do. Look at, look at these big companies. You have Nikon and Canon and Sony and all these big companies are already making great cameras. Who am I to come up and make my own camera and compete against these huge players? That could have been his mindset. That's a lot of— that's the mindset for a lot of people. But he kept pursuing his interest to then be able to build a big company that made him a a billionaire because he followed his interests and his passion, what he was doing. I look at myself, I look at this business, Toronto Dance Salsa. When I first started in the salsa world, I just dropped in on a class, right? I dropped in to learn salsa, it was an interest of mine, I was curious about it. I didn't set this goal that I had to have a salsa dance school, I had no idea. On paper, it looked like a stupid idea, right? I'm too tall, right? You don't see a lot of huge, tall dancers. I didn't speak the language. I don't understand Spanish and I still don't. I didn't understand the counting of the music. I didn't grow up learning the moves and it's gonna be way harder for me as an adult to learn compared to somebody who grew up with that, right? Like all of these things that were against me, but the thing that I had in my favor was that I loved it. That it made me come alive. And I would always bet on the ignorant man or woman who loved what they were doing as opposed to the person with all the experience who was just mailing it in, who was okay with mediocre, who was okay with settling. And so even if you don't have the knowledge or the resources or the connections, you can figure all of that out if you have the passion. And so I think too many people give up on their interests too quickly because they don't know how it's going to work out and they want to live that safer life. Just find a smaller way to get started. And you owe it to yourself to at least try, to explore, and not put so much pressure on yourself to find the next big thing because you never know where it's gonna come from. If I went into salsa dancing in that first lesson and said, "I will have to make this my business that I'm gonna launch off with or I'm not gonna even do it," and I put all that pressure on that first class, I probably would have quit dancing. Just like if you go on a first date with somebody, it's like, "We either need to get married or this isn't gonna work out." Like, you need time to explore and pursue and see what's gonna work or not. And so, I encourage you to try a bunch of stuff. You get excited about something, go out and try it immediately. See how it makes you feel, see if it makes you come alive. Find a low-risk way to start immediately and continue to explore to see if it's the next big thing for you, and if it's not, you drop it. But it's way safer, in my view, to do that than to never explore anything and just take the so-called safe path that everybody else has built for you instead of you building a life for yourself. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what interest do you have in your life that you are not currently exploring yet? What is it? What do you have on your list of I wish I could blank? What is that blank that you haven't started yet? Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
