Making Your Passion Your Business | Tom Bilyeu

Now, Tom, let's talk about the pathway to turning your passion into a business. Right. I think one of the big hang ups that many people have is many of us have multiple passions. We might be interested in travel, in food, in wine, in programming. How do we know what passion to pick? How do we know what passion is going to be the one that's going to be the big company?

Yeah. So I think the honest answer is you're not. You're not going to know. And for me, it's really about picking the one that seems like the most likely horse. There's no reason not to run some metrics on it and say, hey, is there a big community here? Is there a large unserved need? You know, if this company were successful and it reached 80% of the potential market, what would that look like? And if the answer is a million dollars, you probably should look for something bigger because the chances of you becoming the 80% player are virtually zero. So now you know, you're competing for a small pond. But the truth is, at the end of the day, it's all going to be a guess. So I think people are way better off acknowledging that it's better to be running 1,000 miles an hour in the wrong direction than one mile an hour in the right direction and never be afraid to change course. So if you're hauling ass and you crash headlong into something and realize, whoa, this business is not working, I did not like this the way that I thought I was going to Be honest with yourself and change course. And you know, sometimes quitting is the smartest thing that you can do. And people just have to understand that quitting is not the same as giving up. I may quit on a path, I'm not giving up on my goal. Right. So I hold no allegiance to a path. I don't care how I get there. It's like X Prize. It's one of the things I find so fascinating about the X Prize is they say we just want to identify the problem, what the solution is. Like, we're totally open. Don't care where the solution comes from, don't care in what form. If it works, it works. And that's how I see it. What's your mission? Right. Your mission is some grand overarching thing. Don't be romantic about how you get there. Be pragmatic. So there's gonna be a whole bunch of twists and turns along the way and just be willing to change course at any time, but do everything at breakneck speed.

That, Tom, is a beautiful response to that question. I think you've answered that question better than just about anybody else I know. Do you have a process that you can advise people, People to help them identify their mission? Yes.

So there is an amazing man named Cal Newport who wrote a book called so Good They Can't Ignore youe. I highly encourage people to read that. And he talks about overlapping areas of interest. And when you combine. So overlapping areas of interest, meaning find something where multiple interests that you have intersect and then find that sweet spot where it can be monetized. And then from there, it's really about gaining mastery. And when you're gaining mastery in an area of overlapping interest, that is the alchemic potion for passion. And I don't think that passion is some lightning bolt thing that you're given as a kid. It really is discovered. It's developed even as you pursue that interest, as you gain mastery, it will turn into a passion. So don't sit at home and wait to realize, oh, that's what I'm really passionate about. It's not. It's going to start as an interest. It may even start fairly pedestrian. And it's only as you go down that rabbit hole and really begin to explore it and get really good at it that that will turn into a passion. So don't be afraid of that and don't be afraid to discard a passion. You got into it, you learned a lot about it, you became passionate about it, and then you lost interest.

So what?

Doesn't matter. Change direction, start running a thousand miles an hour again. Everything else will work itself out.