Follow your *fascination* ... then align it with the market

Follow your fascination, then align it with the market. This is a blog post I just published, and in this video I'm going to read it to you and also add a few more comments. All right, here we go. Follow your fascination, then align it with the market. This is for solopreneurs— in other words, solopreneurs— who want their work to feel like play. Who sense that grind harder isn't sustainable and who want to build from genuine curiosity instead. A solopreneur business lives at the intersection of what lights you up and what people already value enough to pay for. This post focuses on the first half— what lights you up— because without that, you might burn out before the business ever gets traction. Here's the core idea: find the thing that makes you naturally fascinated, the thing that you keep returning to with devotion, with aliveness, with recurring curiosity, and then align that with what people already value. However, I do need to clarify something that often gets misunderstood. Follow your fascination is not a permission slip to ignore whether anyone wants what you're building. Fascination without market awareness is a hobby. Of course, there's nothing wrong with a beautiful hobby, but as a solopreneur, if you want a business that sustains you and reaches the people who need your work, then your own fascination alone isn't enough. The reverse is also true. Market awareness without fascination becomes a grind that can eventually break you. You end up serving something you don't care about, an inauthentic business. The traditional model says, find what the market wants, then force yourself to to provide it. That can work, but it often leads to burnout for solopreneurs. Let's get to financial sustainability, yes, but from a different starting point. Find what you're naturally fascinated by, then filter for the parts that meet a real market need. Or I like to say market want, because oftentimes when you say oh, the market needs this, the market needs that, it can often actually mean, I think people should want this. I think people should want that. But we really want to look at what the market wants, what they're actually paying for already. So, but that's in a separate blog post I published in the past. Okay. Start with what lights you up and then ask, where does this aliveness intersect with something people already want, already seek help for, already invest in. If you read my previous blog post, "Your Income Comes from Their Spending," also linked below, you know that I take the market side seriously. Your income comes from what people already know to invest in, but this post, this video, is about the first part. So let's first work on finding the fire. So here's what I mean by fascination. Actually, for some people, the word obsession might feel more resonant. It carries the right intensity. But for others, especially those who are recovering from burnout or who are a bit tender in this season, obsession might feel too compulsive, the very energy that we're trying to heal from. So when I say fascination, I mean aliveness, devotion, sacred curiosity, a recurring pull towards something, the thing that always seems to energize you, the topic that you keep returning to again and again without anyone asking you about it. The thing you would explore even if no one paid you, even if no one saw it. It keeps showing— that fascination keeps showing up insistently, sometimes quietly, but it does keep showing up. Fascination outlasts discipline. Paul Graham wrote about the bus ticket theory of genius. Some people obsessively collect old bus tickets. Not for any practical reason. They just find them genuinely interesting. Graham noticed that the same quality, an almost irrational fascination with things that seem pointless to others— can you relate?— is what often drives real breakthroughs. Collectors of obscure knowledge, tinkerers following threads that few or none around them are interested in. They end up discovering paths that others miss entirely. Graham's core insight is this: genuine interest makes you work harder than discipline ever could, and it even selects for better problems to solve. Discipline says, keep going. Fascination says, I can't help but go to this place that almost no one seems interested in at first anyway. Stanley and Lehman, two other authors, or an author of a book, a co-author, co-authors, arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. In the book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, they show through research in AI and evolutionary systems that ambitious and clear, so-called clear objectives, can actually prevent you from reaching them. The stepping stones to any great achievement often look nothing like the final destination. You often can't draw a straight line from here to greatness. Isn't that interesting? What works instead? They recommended following your interestingness. I love that word. They, they, uh, they coined it or they popularized it. Follow your interestingness, pursuing the next curious novel step, not necessarily because it maps onto a 5-year business plan, but because it will open doors that you couldn't have predicted. They call it the treasure hunter problem. You can't navigate to a treasure that no one has ever seen, but you can follow interesting stepping stones, and many of those Lead somewhere remarkable. Now, this is something that I didn't expect to discover before I read the book. Basically, a lot of the greatest inventions, the innovations, the things that changed our lives, the things that we actually use as products, they weren't part of a business plan that says, oh, we do this and then this and this and then we'll have this great product. It's often because inventors are like pursuing something that really fascinates them, right? And then they go, hmm, I didn't expect for that. Let me go into that thread. And that's kind of like how your passion works. A lot of times you are pursuing something again that a lot of other people find weird or at least are uninterested. And you sometimes are almost yelling at the world saying, why aren't you more interested in this thing that I think is so fascinating? But I think hopefully this video and this blog post gives you that permission to keep pursuing it, knowing that the very fact that you are uniquely interested in it means that it's your unique strength. And that if you keep pursuing it, no matter if other people think it's weird or uninteresting, you need to keep pursuing it, looking for what's fascinating to you. And then of course we can align it with the market. Okay. Research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation supports this. Intrinsic motivation leads to greater persistence, creativity, deeper learning, and lower burnout, especially in creative, relational, and knowledge work, which is most of what we're doing here as solopreneurs. Intrinsic motivation is being motivated by your own passion versus extrinsic motivation being, oh, I gotta do this to pay the bills, or I gotta do this because someone asked me to. Okay, so pursue your intrinsic motivation first. So that's exactly the work that solopreneurs do. You are not running a factory, even when it comes to content. Don't be a content factory, right? Don't be a content machine. Create content based on your fascination, right? So you are doing nuanced, presence-based work that needs you genuinely engaged, not just clocked in. Here's what fascination as compass looks like in practice. Here are some examples. A breathwork facilitator who reads trauma physiology at night, not because a course told her to, but because she can't stop doing it. She follows the researchers on social media. She brings new questions to every session. No one assigned this. It found her. Another example. A spiritual mentor drawn to the rituals and thresholds of life transitions, birth, death, career endings, identity shifts. He collects anthropological accounts of rites of passage. He notices liminal spaces in his client's stories before they do. Not a niche that he chose strategically, but it's a thread that he's followed his whole life. Another one, a coach who keeps returning to attachment theory long after the certification ended. Her shelves are full of books on the subject. She sees attachment dynamics everywhere— in clients' lives, her own relationships, the patterns of teams that she works with. The certification gave her a framework, sure, but the fascination predates it. These aren't distractions. They serve as important clues. If any of this resonates with you, by the way, I welcome your comment below. What do you— what What are you fascinated by? What are some threads and topics that you, and issues and problems and experiences and tools and things in the world, goals that you have, problems in the world that you pursue more passionately than most of the other people around you? You just find yourself loving reading about it, studying it. Watching videos about it, working on things that are related to it. So, 3 reasons to start with fascination. 1: Pull instead of push. If your spirit is tired, tired of pushing, tired of competition, tired of performing, the answer probably isn't more discipline. You've already tried that. What you need is a different kind of energy. Fascination provides pull rather than push. When you're working on something that genuinely captivates you, you don't have to manufacture motivation. The work draws you toward it. The pull is renewable in a way that willpower isn't. For a solopreneur with no team to carry them through the low motivation days, renewable energy is not a luxury. It's about survival, survival of your business. Depth that can't be forced. The most original contributions rarely come from trying to outperform a competitor. They come from someone so absorbed in the question that they explore angles that others might find impractical or strange. When you're grinding, you run out of energy for new angles, but when you're fascinated, the looking itself gives you energy. Does that resonate with you for any particular topic? For example, the, the breathwork facilitator who reads trauma physiology for fun. Will eventually understand her client's nervous systems in ways that someone who is just following a protocol never will. That depth becomes the edge, not because she planned an edge, but because she couldn't stop exploring. And this is the insight from that book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, in action. The stepping stones didn't look strategic at the time. They looked like wandering, but they led somewhere that no planned curriculum could have taken her. Finally, authentic differentiation. We live in a world increasingly saturated with templated strategies and optimized everything. In that world, your unique human fascination— something that AI can't manufacture, by the way— is your strongest differentiator. No algorithm can replicate your exact combination of interests, lived experience, and true devotion. No competitor can fake the specificity that comes from genuine, sustained curiosity. And this is the point that I want to just take a moment to dive into a bit. Sustained curiosity. A problem that some of us have who are a bit ADHD, and this blog post and video, I think resonates a lot with people who, yeah, I want to be pursuing my heart. Essentially. The problem with some of us is that we touch upon so many interests that we don't have the sustained— we don't pursue the sustained curiosity for one interest. And I think this is where you need to look at all the things that you spend energy on and go, okay, yes, I have— I'm fascinated by these 5 things, but can I— which one am I more likely to have the energy to keep pursuing? For, you know, not just weeks but for years. Okay, and, and you might have the clues because you might already have been pursuing or been interested in something for years. That's an important clue to keep on diving into it in a way that can become a profession. Okay, all right, so there's the two modes: grinding versus playing. Most solopreneurs have lived in both. They're not permanent identities, they're just states that you move through. But naming them helps because the difference changes everything about whether your business survives long enough to compound toward success. So in the grinding mode, what sustains you is willpower. What it produces is short-term wins, sure, but then burnout. Loving discipline's role, you know, is that grinding mode bears the full weight, right? Whereas playing mode, what sustains you is curiosity and aliveness. What it produces is sustained deep work if you allow it. If you allow it. And then, um, there's an imagery of a trellis. A trellis is a kind of like those wooden things, or it doesn't have to be wooden, but those things that are like grids, you know, sometimes built with wood that supports a plant that's already growing. Okay, so your, your playing mode, your fascination is your trellis. So here's a saying that I keep coming back to: find the thing that looks like work to others but feels like play to you. That's from Naval Ravikant. Yes. An important nuance though: play doesn't mean easy always. Following your fascination still involves some unglamorous work, administration, some difficult conversations sometimes, or moments when the spark goes quiet. Yet you show up anyway. The difference is that a current of deep interest carries you through those stretches instead of willpower alone. So, you know, an interesting example for me that shows up all the time is creating content. I create content because the topic at first fascinates me. But when I actually sit down to write, it's not glamorous. I personally have never enjoyed writing. I still don't to this day. You know, but I say, well, the topic interests me. And I know that writing will serve a lot of people. So I'm going to just go ahead and commit to the devotion of service, service to the topic that fascinates me and service to the people that this topic and this writing can benefit. And so I sit down for, you know, at least I give myself an hour, but I sit down and it's like first 15 minutes and half an hour sometimes is not glamorous. I'm just like brainstorming ideas and trying to figure out what's not, is less of a good idea, more of a good brainstorm first. And then of course, curate. And then I might use AI to help me refine some ideas, and I'm, you know, I'm gonna polish what the AI wrote so it's much more my voice. And so it's a lot of the unglamorous— middle part is unglamorous. At first it's exciting, middle part's unglamorous, and then finally the publishing of it is exciting too. And I'm grateful, I'm proud to have something that might serve somebody else. Same thing with making videos, right? This video started where I I never make— feel like making videos. You might think, George, you have thousands of videos. I do. I have more than 2,000 videos uploaded on my YouTube channel right now. I've made thousands of videos, not including— that's not even including the course videos that I record for my courses. So, but I never make like making— I never feel like making video. In the beginning, again, I connect with a topic and that excites me. And then I also connect in my minds and hearts eye, my mind's and heart's eye, I connect with my ideal student, my ideal client, my ideal viewer. And I feel for their pain. Sometimes they have a pain that I'm trying to alleviate. They may have a goal that I'm trying to help them achieve. They have an experience that they love to have in their life. And then they have a yearning. And I connect with that silently. Before I record, because that gets me going in the first minute or two or five minutes sometimes before I then, once I'm into those first one, two, or sometimes five minutes, then I'm into it, right? Like I have to start with that caring for the topic and for my people. And then the unglamorous part of starting the video recording, I don't feel like it. I'm shy. I'm, I feel like making, I'm afraid to make mistakes, right? Whatever, all the reasons that, that get— keep me from not making videos. I do it anyway because of that care. First couple minutes, not glamorous, and then after that I find my— I find the flow because of the willingness to sit through the unglamorous middle part, right? The starting part and sometimes middle part. So, um, all right, and this is what I call loving discipline. Because it's not just discipline, grinding your teeth and go, I hate this, I'm going to do it anyway. No, it's discipline born of love, born of love for the topic, for the issue, and born of love for the people that this thing will serve, whatever I'm putting out there. Okay. It protects your curiosity. A writing, a weekly writing practice is loving discipline. Protecting your mornings or afternoons or evenings for deep work. Is loving discipline. Saying no to projects that scatter your attention is loving discipline. These are acts of devotion to your own aliveness. The trouble starts when discipline replaces curiosity instead of serving it. When you're grinding, discipline bears the full weight. But when you're playing, discipline is the trellis. It supports what's already growing toward the light. Loving discipline in service of fascination. That's where sustainable, extraordinary work comes from. You're not opting— and when we say we're playing, right? We're not opting out of excellence. You are choosing the version that feels like flow instead of friction. The one that lets you bring full presence to the people you serve. By the way, I don't know if you can hear my birds outside my window. Okay. You are not retiring from work, just from toil. And I love that distinction. So here are 4 steps to find, protect, and align your fascination. Step 1: Hunt for your recurring pull signal. Your recurring pull signal. Start by noticing what already pulls you, no matter if it monetizes or if anyone asks you about it. Ask yourself, What topic would I happily read books and watch documentaries about or explore for months, even if no one ever saw it? This cuts through a lot of noise. It bypasses what you think you should be interested in, what your certification trained you in, what seems marketable. It points straight at the thing you can't leave alone. Then journal the edges and the threads that keep showing up, especially the ones that feel a little strange, niche or hard to explain. The fascinations that make you think, is this too weird? Those are often the strongest signals. The strangeness is a clue that, uh, the, the strangeness is a clue you're following something authentic rather than borrowed. Okay. Step 2, protect the aliveness and gently test it. Start micro projects around your fascination. These aren't big, polished, or strategic. They may be a single essay, maybe a recorded reflection, a short experiment with 3 people. The point is to engage actively, not just think about it. Then start to ship tiny experiments publicly, notes, short videos, threads, whatever your natural medium is, not to sell, but to invite feedback and serendipity. And I call this Stage 1 content. If you're not familiar with Stage 1, it's basically where you put a lot of things out there to experiment without expecting any feedback at all. And this is the hard part about Stage 1. It's like you can't expect feedback because if you're always expecting feedback immediately, then it's actually extrinsic motivation. Think about this. You're not doing this because it really pulls at you. You will say, George, well, I'd love to do it just in my own private life. Well, that's called a hobby. And that's great. But do you want to eventually turn it into a true livelihood, a business that sustains you financially? Well, then it needs to be experimented with publicly. So this is the, this is the trick. You need to say, I'm experimenting with this publicly, but I'm not expecting any feedback. Now you do have a choice. There are different places you can post it. So look at the places that you could post something and pick the place that tends to get you more likes than other places. You have several social media profiles. Which one, when you post something to, tends to get more likes than the other places you post to. So for example, I post on my Facebook, it tends to get more likes than if I post on my LinkedIn, but it might be different for you. Okay, so when you are trying out these micro projects and putting things out there, do it where you tend to get the most— when it comes to content, where you tend to get the most likes. Now you could also, of course, connect privately with several people around this interest and say, hey, would, would, would there be 3 people interested in exploring this topic? I'm gonna form a mastermind. I'm gonna form a book club. I'm gonna form a group coaching program that's currently free. I'm gonna charge for it in the future, but currently free. So it's easier for people to say yes, right? So these are some examples. When you share something you genuinely care about, you create conditions for resonance. Some people eventually who find it will be fascinated too. Some will ask you questions eventually that you haven't considered. Some will connect you to communities that you didn't even know existed. That's great. If you find communities that are also fascinated by this, participate there, right? As responses eventually come in, notice what do people ask for? What overlaps with things that they're spending on? Coaching, books, retreats, courses. These are early hints of market alignment. Again, what overlaps with things they're spending on, such as coaching, therapy, books, retreats, and courses? Because these are hints of market alignment. Something I've seen again and again: you don't always have to hunt for the overlap between your fascination and the market. Often, when you make your fascination visible publicly for a long enough period of time, okay, the overlap finds you. The overlap with the market finds you. Step 3: build gentle structures so that fascination doesn't scatter. Fascination without structure often dissipates. You follow one thread for a week, you get excited about another, abandon the first and start a third. 3 months later, a dozen half-explored interests and nothing to show for any of them. Okay, this is where loving discipline, the trellis— think about the trellis— earns its place. Pick no more than 2 deep dives per quarter, plus a curiosity queue for lighter exploration. Think about like the 80/20 rule. Okay, so two, two things that you're choosing per quarter that are the 80% that you just keep on diving deeper and deeper into and sharing things publicly about. At the same time, a 20% curiosity, uh, pile where you can— 20% of your energy can go into exploring a bunch of different things. Okay, the deep dives get your real time, maybe, maybe 2 hours each morning or each evening or whatever rhythm works for you. And the curiosity pile captures the other sparks so they don't distract you now, but aren't lost for later. An optional public commitment, a newsletter, webinar series, or tiny mastermind, free if needed, can help add to the pull that helps you keep going, keep diving deeper into your, your primary one or two deep things right now. When someone's expecting your next piece or you've told a small group that you'll explore a topic together, for a month, you have a gentle reason to show up on the days when fascination isn't as strong. Okay, so structure in service of curiosity, not a cage around curiosity. Okay, step 4: give yourself permission not to monetize every sacred interest. Not every fascination needs to become a business. Some should stay personal, devotional, private, and that's not a waste. If you try to monetize every sacred thread in your life, you risk draining some things that are part of your wholeness, your aliveness. Here's a useful filter. Do I want a relationship with this topic that includes clients, expectations, and financial exchange? Or do I want it to remain private? Which is perfectly fine, right? Some fascinations are meant to be your business. Some are meant to be a private sanctuary. Knowing the difference is part of the discernment that this path asks of you. So what about income? Some of you might be saying, this sounds beautiful, but I need to pay rent. So I definitely honor that. If you need income soon, pure curiosity following may not be a luxury you have at this time. You might need to start with the market, begin with what people already want, already buy, and let your curiosity grow into it over time. You know, because here's a reframe: even in a market-first approach Curiosity adds flavor. You can become genuinely fascinated by understanding your people, their pain, their language, their world. Empathy practiced deeply becomes its own form of fascination. Let me start that again. Empathy practiced deeply becomes its own form of fascination. You start listening to their struggles And before you know it, you're captivated, not by an abstract topic out there, but by the living reality of the people you want to serve. So for more about the income prioritized path, read my other blog post, Your Income Comes From Their Spending. Okay, so now it's your turn. Let's go back to the fascination idea. Let's pause strategizing for now. Instead, write down a few topics where— or activities where you lose track of time. Those are the threads that you may have been following for years because you've been exploring your interestingness. Don't have to ask yet, is this marketable, or does this make sense as a business? Just allow yourself to write them down for now. Then look at the list and notice which ones give you, or which one gives you, the most energy just looking at it. Which one makes you think, I have so much I want to explore here? The alignment with the market, that comes later, and it's a skill that you can learn. But the fascination itself, that can't be manufactured. It can only be noticed and then guarded or captured. Giving it structure to allow it to grow. So I look forward to hearing what you discover. Thank you so much for joining me for this.