How to find your thing

Dude, when you use the word stack, I get all fired up. Dude, why don't we just describe our podcast that way? Us, founders acquired it to the most potent stack. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I can be what I want to. All right, so Sam, I was in Austin last week and I was at a restaurant. So we were sitting down at the table, guy comes up and he's a fan of the podcast. He says, hi, and he was like, Oh, yeah, I love the episodes.

You know, Sam, blah, blah. And I asked him, I go, what's one thing you want us to talk about? We're getting almost 1000 episodes in any little inspiration. And so I said, what's one thing you want us to talk about?

He goes, well, I don't know what other people want. But here's what I want. He's 24 years old. He's like, I know I'm smart.

I know I'm hardworking. I just don't know kind of which lane to go in. I'm ready to swim, but I don't know what's the lane to go in. And what he said was he's like, you know, basically the generic advice is like, Oh, just follow your passion.

And he basically described this problem, which is like, I've been in school. My teachers, my parents, like I was told what to do. You got to take these classes. You got to get these tests.

You got to get these marks. And that's a superstructure. All of a sudden, graduates, now he's just on his own. So went from super structured, completely unstructured.

And he's like, I know that I should be doing something. And my friends are all doing this. I don't think I want to do that banking consulting type of jobs. And his question was basically, they say, follow your passion, but how?

How do you actually do that? Like, what would you guys actually do if you could go back? So that's why I want to talk about why I think that follow your passion is terrible advice and what you should do instead. Great.

I think I will mostly it sounds like based off your one line response right there, I might agree with you on everything. First, I want to hear what advice you gave him, but you told me that you wanted to, you also looked at the history of following your passion. Is that true? Well, I have a historical kind of reference.

So I was reading this thing by Joseph Campbell. He famously came up with a hero's journey. Yeah. Yeah.

The circle that explains how Star Wars works and Harry Potter and all the great stories, they sort of start with the same structure. So it's got Joseph Campbell. He gave a lot of interviews about his philosophy. And he had this better.

This phrase that I think is a little bit better. Sounds a little hokey, but when you explain it, I think it clicks. And he goes, he started off by saying, don't follow your passion. Follow your bliss.

And later he changed it to follow your blisters. So he's explaining and he explains for himself. He's like, Oh, you know, for me, the way I arrived at this kind of hero's journey thing was because when I was a kid or a teenager, I was obsessed with studying like indigenous tribes and Native American stories and myths. And I got really into all these different myths.

First as a consumer, then I started to wonder like, how are all these myths? Like, why are these so? Why do I love these so much? What's the structure of these things?

And that's how we kind of discovered the story shape that became the hero's journey. But when he's talking about bliss, he basically made a couple of points. And so let me first break down the problem with passion and then why I think the bliss and blisters things better. All right.

So here's my case for why passion is maybe the wrong idea. First, raise your hand if you know what your passion is. They're like most people, 90 plus percent of people do not know their passion. I am so I'm going to cite Mark Manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called, What Should You Follow Your Passion or Not?

And I listened to it two weeks ago. I'm 36 years old. And I think about it all the time. Yeah, I'm with you.

I'm always trying to figure it out. I'm going to perpetually reinventing myself and starting from scratch and questioning what's going on and reinventing myself for better and for worse. That's in the place of some amazing things, some amazing changes in my life. But it's also a period of great uncertainty and sticking around in the fog of uncertainty sucks.

It feels shitty when you're doing it. And, you know, sometimes I wish I was just one of those people who didn't question anything and just sort of just pick the thing and just did it for 50 years. But it's not who I am. And so if you're somebody who's been in this fog of uncertainty, this will sound familiar.

So what ends up happening is you follow your familiar. So you do what you know. You do what you've already done. You do what your parents do.

You do what your friends do. And so what a lot of us do is we mistake what is familiar for what actually lights us up. And so even if you had this idea of like, you want to do something, you don't really even know where to look and you feel like and while you are searching, it often can feel like you're lost. And so even though you're supposed to be searching, you feel like you're lost during it, which feels like you're doing something wrong.

And so what are you doing? So I guess it's bliss and blisters concept. Basically bliss is not meant to be just like pure joy. It's not meant to be just like euphoria.

What do you mean by bliss is basically what are you enthusiastic about doing? So using enthusiasm. As your guide. So this is criteria.

So he said, naturally, naturally drawn to it. It's of interest. You feel alive when you're doing it. It's often irrational and you will lose track of time when you find yourself doing it.

And you'll do it in your off hours. So you'll do it even you'll do it during the hours when you're normally seeking kind of like pleasure, relaxation, you know, just sort of an indulgence in yourself. But the stuff you find yourself doing there that others would see as work is an important signal. And then so he started talking about this and people took it the wrong way in his opinion.

He's like, I said this thing about foliar bliss. And then everybody just looked for something that just made them happy, pleasurable all the time instantaneously. He goes, Oh man, I made a mistake. It's not that at all.

He said you kind of offhandedly. It's attributed to him that he said, I wish I had said, follow your blisters instead. And what he means by blisters is basically that there is going to obviously be hardship. In fact, like follow your bliss.

Most of the time leads you on an unfamiliar path. You're leaving a place that's safe. You're going to face the dragons, cross the bridges, pay the tolls, pay the price. And it was worth it deeply satisfying along the way.

And blisters, this idea of blisters is like on my hand right now, I have these blisters because I've been training for this and I've been doing pull ups all the time. So my hands, both sides have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a receipt. It's an evidence of a price paid, a price paid over and over and over again that you really couldn't force yourself to do just a willpower, but you had to have been actually like pulled to doing it.

And so if you find evidence where you suffer pain willingly, that's probably a very good signal. You are so drawn to doing it that you're even willing to endure the hardships that come along the way. That is ultimately what you're looking for. And so that's the short idea.

And this has been echoed by the way many times over. So Paul Graham wrote this long, long essay. I don't know if you've ever read his called how to do great work years ago. It's like a it takes you like two days to read this goddamn blog post, but it's great.

And he has one phrase that I remember, which is let enthusiasm be not just a motor, but the rudder of your boat. So basically enthusiasm is obviously going to provide you some fuel, some like your motor is going to get you to go, but let it also be the thing that guide you, like a rudder that guides your direction. His take was that it leads you to the frontier of any field because the more, like for example, when you got really into fitness, you started maybe at 50 percentile knowledge on health and fitness. Is that probably correct?

Yeah. And then the interest often irrational, because dude, why do you get you're married? You're already healthy. Like, why do you, what do you, what do you want?

These abs so damn bad, right? But something drove you correct. Yeah. And frankly, I don't even know what it was.

Not about it is the kind of trick. And then how far did it take you? You're injecting stuff in your butt. You're doing the NFL combine as a civilian.

You were like getting to, you know, measuring every calorie and body fat. Like you went to the frontier of how to do this thing, like best practices, plus some experimental shit. Am I right? Yeah.

And so what he talks about is like Paul Graham, he says, let the enthusiasm be the engine and the rudder. It'll guide you where you need to go. It'll take you to the frontier. And after frontier, you will notice some gaps.

So when you were at the frontier, Sam, did you not notice a gap and the gap that you told me about has turned into one of our most profitable investments. There's this like male epidemic of low testosterone. People are going to want to take exogenous testosterone and it's extremely, you know, it changes the way you feel. It's extremely sticky when you do it.

I don't know if I want to build that business, but man, I know that would be a gangbusters business. I mean, both invested in home health, which is out, you know, over nine figures, run, right? It's doing great. It's a wonderful business.

And so it's only when you're at the frontier. Do you notice gaps in there's not really a trusted brand for doing this, right? Or we don't really know how to do this, but if somebody ever figured it out, that would be really valuable. You told me about ozempic back before it was even cold.

I was like, you're like, I'm taking semi-glutide and, you know, we didn't act on that inside, but it took you when you go to the frontier, you notice the gaps in the gaps and where all the sort of the opportunities are for a person who wants to do great work. First of all, great. Spiel, you got fired up there. Second of all, it sucks that me taking drugs.

I'm kind of paying the price of your point making here. Or it could be friends with someone who's going to do all that shit. All right. So this episode is all about excellence.

A while back, I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life. And the team at HubSpot turned it into a 30 day operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that took me 10 years to figure out and shows how exactly I use them day to day. These are systems that genuinely changed my life.

So if you want to build a good life, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. I'm going to tell you something that sounds academic and woo, but I'm going to make it super tactical. But the idea of blister versus bliss is actually really interesting because do you know what the etymology of the word passion is?

No. So the word passion comes from the word suffering. It always seems weird that it was the passion of the crisis, the story of Jesus being nailed to the cross, which you're like, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why it's for sufferings. And so the idea of bliss versus blister is interesting because blister is a significantly better word because passion following your passion means following your, your, your suffering, meaning something that you love so much, you're willing to suffer a whole bunch in order to put to it, you know, to follow through it.

You basically call to do it. And what's interesting is that up until recently following your passion didn't mean what it means today. Now a lot of people think it means follow your bliss, which that's actually a great word to use, which is something that you're like, enthused about all the time. Do it.

Yeah. Don't love your job. Job you love. You know what I mean?

So up until like you've heard of the Gilded Age. So in the Gilded Age, that was where this idea of leisure time first got popular in America. And it was a sign of class, meaning if you were rich, then you would spend your days in a state of leisure, a man of leisure, have you heard that phrase? That was a phrase that was invented in the late 1800s in America.

And this idea of like, no one has leisure. That's a, that's a, that's the idea of passion and leisure. That is idea that is only afforded to the rich. And up until that point, your trade or your skill set was given to you by your father or mother, it was my father was this thing.

Therefore, I will become this thing. And do you want to know something interesting? I think people were probably happier than, but there is like a middle ground. And so up until like 1930, there was no vacation or there was no work weeks or work weekends.

Did you know that? But it went like the 1930s. Do you know who popularized the weekend? Isn't it like Henry Ford with the factory system?

Yeah. So Henry Ford was, his company was so big at the time, they employed so many people. He was like, how do we get the most out of our workers? And he actually determined through a bunch of research and like some, like scientific data.

He was like, if we actually give people weekends off and we create a standard work day, which I actually think the standard work day for him was 12 hours, not eight. But if we, and then we institute like a minimum wage and this type of thing, we're actually going to get more loyalty and we're going to get more productivity, this and that. And so the idea of work weeks and vacation and all that stuff, that didn't even exist until 1930, then the Great Depression happened and the World War II happened. And those ideas sort of went away.

We worked really hard, like makes things happen, but then post World War II. So between the years of 1950 and 1907, that was peak leisure. This is when like the idea of like baseball and bicycles and vacations, that's when like this idea really took off. It's very interesting, but like there literally that was like the golden age of leisure, because all these American soldiers came back from the war, the economy was booming.

And they got this thing called the GI Bill, have you heard the GI Bill? No, veterans, ex soldiers, if you're still young, they would pay for your college. And so all these young guys were like, I was in Germany fighting for my life now. I'm in college and like the economy is booming.

I can get a job where I can have a house in Dayton, Ohio, where I can afford two cars. And this idea of like, I could buy an oven and a car and a stove and all this stuff. That was like this golden era. And up until recently, this idea of passion wasn't really a thing, but now we actually work harder, I believe the data will show that we actually work significantly harder today than ever before.

And our leisure time and focus on leisure and focus on passion, it's sort of been like this weird dichotomy where we work really, really hard all the time. And we somehow think that following your passion is what you have to do. And following your passion is what you have to do for work. And because of that, and because the economy is booming, there's this idea that if you think about your happiness and your purpose on Earth, it actually makes you more unhappy.

There's this amazing book called Bad Therapy. And this author used this idea that the people who think why and ask themselves all the time, why am I not happy? Why am I not following my life's work? Why am I not following my passion?

This should feel better. This doesn't feel better. Those people are actually oftentimes significantly more discontent with their life. There was a cow Newport who wrote Deep Work.

He had this thing where he said, passion is a byproduct of mastery. And if you extend that, well, then where does mastery come from? I would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm. You know, yesterday I had a piano lesson in the morning and then in the evening before bed, I'm tired, I'm walking to bed and I pass the room that has a piano.

I'm like, let me get in here and play the sea shanty. Like I'm a pirate on the pirates, I got a boat or something like that. And I'm playing this song and I'm basically half eyes open. But it's, but I got a little bit better, right?

I've got one step closer to mastery. And the only way, not only way you can get yourself to do enough load the 10,000 hours type of idea to achieve mastery is through enduring enthusiasm. And so if you, if you think that maybe that's the chain is enduring enthusiasm, to endure enthusiasm, which leads to mastery and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to a passion and this idea of blisters where it's like, look for the evidence of suffering because you're so you enjoy what you're getting out of it. Now, can I give you my riff on this?

Cause I was like, okay, I like the idea, but how do I actually do this? How do I use this? So I had this observation that like I used to pick projects based on industry. Oh, I'm going to do health care.

Cause I'm more passionate about health care or I'm going to do, you know, I started just closing clothing business. Cause oh, that sounds fun. Let's do fashion. Let's do apparel.

That's cool. Well, that sounds more fun than that. You're a big clothing guy, huh? I picked things I thought sounded fun.

I think industries or products that I thought were fun. And what I learned along the way was that the time you spend on the actual product or industry, the industry almost like fades to an oblivion. The time you spend on a product is very minimal. Like how much time would you say, whether it's hand to hand or the hustle, how much time per day would you say you spent on actually working on the product?

Well, none. And because all the time is spent on people stuff, right? Like you start a company because you love to tinker and then after six or 12 months, if you're really successful, the majority of time is spent on managing or leading or organizing people. And even when you're organizing them, you might be leading them or managing them or organizing them partly around product, but a huge amount of it is around growth.

You spend most of your time selling the thing, not making and marvelling about how, how great the thing is. And so what I realized was like, dude, you spent all your, like when you, when you decide to start a company, you're going to try to like inherently, you're saying, I'm going to make this thing successful to make it successful. It's got to grow. And to make it grow, you're going to spend most of your time on that really hard problem of making it grow.

Part of making it grow is the product, but that's only a small part, minority percentage, not more than 50%. I would say more or closer to 15% than 50. Most of your time is going to be spent on building the team, managing the team, and working on core growth and sales. And so I simplified it and I was like, Oh, I don't need to pick an industry I love or a product I love.

I need to pick a sales motion that I love because guess what? Like if you have a product, doesn't matter what the niche is, if it's grown via enterprise sales, most of your time is going to be spent doing enterprise sales, hiring enterprise sales and managing an enterprise sales team. If it's built on Facebook ads, if it's ecom, I have an ecom brand. Most of the time it's spent on running ads to landing pages and sending emails.

Because if I want the thing to grow, that's the thing I got to get better at. Yeah, it's like, do you want to work with spreadsheets or do you want to work in like with guys that wear bright brown shoes and sports jackets and call themselves like the regional VP of the Southeast region? Exactly. Do you want to take people to dinner and the promise to circle back or do you want to sit behind your laptop, you know, orchestrating or do you want to do this?

So there's a few of these, right? Like if you're in SEO game, then you're going to play the SEO, that's what you're spending most of your time doing is improving your SEO. If that's the main growth channel. So I realized, Oh, I should actually just figure out what type of sales or growth mechanism I like.

And that's the constraint. What do you like, by the way? So for me, it's content. I was like, I like making content and so I should pick things.

I should pick games that content is the main way to make it grow. My second favorite is ads. I like ads, which is also content, but it's like the more pay to play scalable version of content. The thing I like the least is viral growth and sales.

Those are my lead to least favorite. Dude, I distinctly remember time. So the hustle was a media company. So we had a couple of seven figure deals, a bunch of six figure deals and not require a little bit of whining and dining.

There was one distinct day that I had to go to New York City and I wore these stupid, bright brown shoes, which is like a joke that like all the sales people would wear for some reason. The outfit was like blue jeans with a sports jacket and these ugly broad shoes. I distinctly remember a trip where I took the shoes off post meeting. I threw them in the trash can and I got it the cab without shoes on and I said, I'm never doing that again.

These shoes are done. The dude version of taking off your bra after a long day. Dude, I was just like sucking so much D in this meeting. I'm like, the truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people.

It's like, I'm going to lie. My least favorite is the willing of influencers. We did a streaming, the company we sold to Twitch was a streaming app. And so it was made for people who live stream on YouTube and Twitch.

And the number of absolute shitty meetings where I'm, I'm metaphorically on my knees with this, you know, some 19 year old streamer who's not looking up from his phone and his manager, who is, you know, his girlfriend is sitting next to me. They don't ask a single question. They're making more money than they know what to do with making millions of millions of dollars sitting in Toledo in their bedroom and you're trying to pitch them on like, you know, your product. And I just remember thinking like, I actually met with one of my biggest competitors that night for dinner and we were both just commiserating.

I'm like, he just literally told me, he was like, I'm so tired of sucking. He's like, I'm just not going to suck anymore. And I just my first meeting with this guy. It's like two.

You have C fighters when they get done fighting in their backstage and they're like, we both lost. Exactly. That's how it fell. And so that's my least favorite is the wooing of divas where you need these influencers to back you for your product to succeed.

That's absolutely worst. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written and everyone is aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create the content. That's someone is you and it's due tomorrow. Breeze assistant can help.

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All right. So my phrase for this is you want to find a loop that you love. All right. What's a loop?

So the loop is basically like I can kind of break down any job into a pretty repeatable loop. So I'll give you an example, the healer loop. This is a doctor or therapist. It's someone comes to you in pain.

You diagnose the root issue of the pain, you prescribe some solution and you hopefully send them back out with less pain. That's your loop. If you're a doctor or therapist, you're going to do that tens of thousands of times. And so I remember when I was in college, I took the MCATs.

I thought I was going to go be a doctor. Specifically, I knew what I wanted. I knew my passion was to be in sports medicine, to be an orthopedic surgeon. And I went and I actually before I went to med school, I spent two weeks shadowing a guy who did the exact dream job I wanted.

He was an orthopedic surgeon for an NFL team, plus, you know, had his own practice. Wow. It doesn't get any better than this. And I go in and I realized the loop that he was doing, which was basically somebody comes to you in chronic pain.

You say some version of like, well, that's just it is what it is. You don't have any cartilage left in that shoulder or that knee or that's damaged or it's ruptured. And we're going to try our best to do surgery or to give you an injection. A steroid, but like it's never going to be the same as it was before.

And you'll never change your behavior. And like, you know, I'll do pain management for you or I'll do performance management for you. And like I'll send you back on your way better than you were when you came in here, but much worse than you want to be. And that was what he did every single day.

And he'd been doing that for 40 years. I realized that is not a loop. I love it is extremely low creativity. You see people suffering all day and more power to him.

He loved doing it. I didn't like I felt tired at the end of every day of like, oh my God, just emotionally tired of dealing with suffering all day. And I was like, do I have to do this? Cause I've been saying this since I was 14.

Cause I don't know, it sounded good. My parents are something I'm not sure where this came from. But like this idea of a loop, I think is really important. So for example, the founder loop is you see the world as it is, some status quo of an industry of a situation.

You imagine it better. Why? What if we did this instead? You build a product, you sell the product and then you build a team that will build a product and sell the product.

That's the loop you're going to do as a founder, every as a founder on the whole. And on the on the daily basis, it's going to be mostly initially it's a building loop, then it's a selling loop and then it's a building the team loop. And that's what you're going to do for the rest of time. So like, do you like that?

And so there's many of these. A farmer has a loop, right? It goes with the seasons, you plant the seeds, water them, then it grows and then you reap what you sow. Right?

And like that's the loop you're going to do. And you're going to do that every year for 25 years. So I think the key to life, if I was telling that that kid who walked up to us at the restaurant is assume right now, you don't know what it is, but know what you're looking for. You're looking for the blisters that you enjoy and they'll come from doing this loop thousands of times.

But you don't have to know what you'd like to do. Thousands of times to see. Are you interested in doing it once twice? Do you have an enthusiasm towards doing this?

And then as you do it, if that's yourself, like, is this something I feel by self doing, you know, like more and more and more. I would I don't feel tired doing this. I feel like I get energy doing this. Yeah, there's there's some pain.

There's some suffering. There's some difficulty. I'm not saying it's without that, but find the loop that you love. And so for me, I stumbled onto it when I was basically 30 years old, which was this podcast.

It's like, oh, I'm not the founder. The loop is OK. But the one I really love is I'm doing life and I get to be curious about something. Then I go dig in, then I take the top 1% of what I found and I enthusiastically share it with like minded people.

And I like that they like it and I go and do it again the next day. And whether I'm writing books or I'm doing the podcast or the YouTube channel, it doesn't matter which way I do it. That's the that's the loop I love. But now we're doing this podcast what six years something like that.

And I'm fresh, fresh as a daisy, you know, as I keep going. And not everybody other people could do this exact same loop and they would be totally burnt out and they would hate it. Let's get really practical on advice for that guy. But let me ask you something first.

Have you read this book? I read this. I think five years ago, I told you about it when I read it. It's called the top five regrets of the dying.

I didn't know this is a book. I've heard the story. Some researcher went and talked to people at hospice, right? Is that the story?

I think I think it's worth the read, but it's one of these books that if I can tell you the five points and that's definitely a lot of it. It's worth the read. But basically I forget how many people she worked with, but as a woman who worked in a hospice for decades and I think it was potentially 10,000 people, but for sure, thousands of people who she is not a researcher. She actually just worked there.

She was a nurse. Yeah. So she was a nurse. I think she was a nurse.

This was her occupation and she saw thousands of people die and she wrote this book called the top five regrets for dying of the dying where she put together a list of the five things that were most common amongst the people she worked with. And I don't believe this book is scientific. It's purely observational. But her number, I can tell you all five of them.

But the number one regret by a huge margin was I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. That was the number one regret by a huge margin when she like tallied this up. And basically this idea is that they like would spend too long and they didn't realize until the end of their life that they were living a life that other people that they thought other people should want them to live, not versus what they really wanted to live. Now listen to the rest because the third one is actually related to the first one.

The second one was I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Now this was the majority of men who said I missed this game. I wasn't around for X, Y, and Z and they had massive regret around that. The third thing was I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

So it was people who suppress themselves and they wish they had the courage to say X, Y, and Z to someone they loved or a friend. And it also was when they were conflicted with someone and they had arguments someone and they're like, I wish I had the courage to say I don't agree with you. Can we please hash this out? But it's related to number one, which is living the life that you want to live versus what you think you should.

The fourth one was I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Specifically, this is for old friends. Diapatians tried to track down in the final weeks, a lot of buddies who they had, but they couldn't find them and they had huge regrets. And the last one was I wish I had let myself be happier.

And this idea is that happiness is a choice that people didn't realize that they could make. And they stayed in comfortable patterns and they pretended to others and themselves that they were content and they feared change right up until change was forced upon them. And so this book is really good and I highly I should actually go and read it just telling the summary kind of excites me because I did feel awesome reading this in a very weird way. But there's this man I told you about this 96 year old man in my building who I go and talk with all the time and Gary Vaynerchuk has said this all the time that he likes to go to talk to old people.

But I think reading this book is very similar to the joy I get. I'm basically to the listener. I'm friends with the 96 year old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories and I leave feeling better. Part of the reason why you enjoy reading this is because you think you have wisdom but also I can kind of learn from your mistakes which is a little bit of a morbid way to look at it but still useful way to look at it.

And so I think that this book is a really good book for anyone to read while when they're asking themselves if they should follow their passion because the answer is almost always like yes but I would argue that the answer is you should follow your passion but your passion doesn't need to be your job. I've seen so many people that have made that mistake but they thought following their passion was following that as a career and I think that actually can be a massive, massive mistake. And so for anyone listening to this I don't think this includes us this includes what you see on Instagram. I don't think you should necessarily go start a business.

I don't think you should quit your job and do X, Y, and Z. If you do want to do that I think try it but you should probably save up six to 12 months of expenses and life is a lot better when you have financial security because there is money may not make you happy but a lack of money certainly will make you unhappy. And I've seen so many people that have followed their passion and it was a because probably your passion oftentimes means creative pursuits artists things like that. You don't really make a good living in any of those things and I think there's nothing wrong with having your passion be your hobby.

I disagree with one part of what you said which was like you don't have to make your passion to work. I get what you mean which is like your hobby but I would say probably the default mode would you accept that most people are not lit up by what they do for work. Yeah most people are not. Most people don't get excited about Mondays they don't wake up sort of tap dancing to work.

According to Bill Garley's book 70% of people do not like how they spend their days. Right. And I think in that book he makes a point which is like you know 24 hours in a day you sleep eight that leaves 16 you work eight so half you're waking hours essentially half of your conscious life. You're going to once you become a working age you're going to spend you're going to spend at your job and so it doesn't make sense to find the one that like you like to do.

Right like that you actually enjoy because it's half of your life experience is going to be spent that when you're once you're working age once you're sort of that 20 to 65 range. So I was a way too many people except it is what it is on something that's to me I'm like way too important to not accept that. Now obviously like you're right that like not everybody sort of figures it out or makes it or whatever but it's I don't know to me it still seems like the question you should go on. The fight with fighting for is like to fight for that to fight until you get that to fight.

What I'm saying is that it's a lot oftentimes that answers not entrepreneurship and it is having your job. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

Totally. I don't think it's on the entrepreneurship at all. Right. I even said for me it wasn't entrepreneurship and I was an entrepreneur.

That's what I thought my job was for a long time. I think it's fine that loop that you live if that loop is as a salesman or a marketer or a connector or whatever it may be. There's many different loops but figuring out one that actually gives you a lot of energy makes you feel alive. I think it's worth doing.

I'm going to leave you with one quote that was said on this podcast Isaac French came on and he was here to talk about his age. He was here to talk about his Airbnb business where he built this like a little seven cabin Airbnb business and sold it for seven, eight, nine bucks. I said some cool business like that but he said this phrase. I don't remember much about the Airbnb thing.

He said this one phrase or a quote which was light yourself on fire and people will come from many miles away to watch you burn. I just thought like there's something poetic about the way he said it and I do think there's a test of like could that be used to describe what I'm doing. Right. Like it's not a literal thing but it's like it's almost like that's what level 10 looks like.

You might not be a 10 but let's let's agree that somebody who's really lit up by that what they're doing. That's kind of how we would feel is that they've just decided they've lit themselves on fire with passion and they are now people will come for many miles away to watch them burn. I would say that kind of describes individual format what that's supposed to look like. I think that's a great quote Isaac's the man and I want to preference this by or not preferences but I want to say that this is really hard.

For example, you know one of the best ways to kill passion. Sometimes I like to apartment shop. I don't intend on buying an apartment anytime soon but today I or on Sunday I looked at an 18 million dollar apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse and was fancy and shit and I wanted to go look at it and there was many other people there. I went from I'm happy to I need more.

I need more. I need more. I need more. I need more.

I need more. I need more. I need more. I'm going to elevator to your whole.

Oh my gosh. Is that a loving home now? Have you ever done that? Have you ever done real life?

Is it a little bit like I always call my parents like oh I'm looking at an apartment and they're like you're looking at that apartment. I'm like the word looking I need a different word. I am I'm flipping the catalog and that's happened like that happens to be there but I'm actually going to buy this apartment and that's like the easiest way to like start like you know comparisons with the people joy. That is a way to kill the passion and so I think it's really challenging to fight internal rewards versus external rewards and what we have just said sounds really great and my eyes is really great but I also want to acknowledge this incredibly challenging to pull off.

My analogy is this I took my kids to the airport and you know you have to take those like airport trams like the little like the I don't know why we're at an airport but we're taking a train inside the airport from like one part to another and my kids have never done this before so they get on the super excited over on like a train and I'm like hey grab the bar and they're like why because the train hasn't moved yet. They're like what are you I'm fine and I know hold on to this it's about to it's about to go and they're like no I just want to balance this is going to be fun and I was like alright train starts. 30 pound dollar goes flying into someone's right away gets rocked by the world and I would say like a lot of advice. That falls into this kind of easier said than done bucket is really like it's the internal soul equivalent of holding on to the pole because trust me this world's about to rock you and if you're not holding on to this you stand no chance you will go flying into that man suitcase right now and so like.

The idea of like yeah you do want to figure out what likes you up what makes you feel alive not what sounds good others you do want to figure out an internal reward scorecard so that you're not going to the 18 million dollar penthouse feeling like you need more when you walk out of there and so it's like you need all this generic. Cliche goddamn advice because it's the equivalent of the poll to hold on to if you don't have it you're gonna go for your just gonna get whiplash by the world you're just gonna constantly be whiplash and holding it's you know you're still gonna feel it when the train jerks you around but like. Now that's like that's to me like the metaphor of like how this sort of like grounded advice plays into the world you know today like which is going to whip you around. I call it braces money I have friend that had this amazing job and he was like I used to just sale like I would like it was like a $30,000 million I would like to say about 30 grand and then go like sale and then he's like I had a kid and I realized I wanted to buy them braces because that was my passion more so than sailing and so I got this really great job so I can have braces money because I realized I'm passionate about that as well not just sailing.

This podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury they make the world's best banking product I think you know this already I use Mercury for all my businesses I think I like maybe seven or eight businesses we use Mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just want a personal bank account so I have my personal account there I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase I'm just all in on Mercury why I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems I have so I'm very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and I get savings yield it's just has all the stuff that I need in one place so if you're looking for the best making product on market it's definitely Mercury I will fist by anybody who disagrees with me on that go to Mercury dot com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech not an FDIC insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and call them and a members FDIC. I want to leave one other point which is when you if you accept that the trick to figuring this out is following your enthusiasm especially things you're enthusiastic about that others are not especially things that you're willing to suffer for the blisters.

Then there's two kind of takeaways the first is name the blisters so it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome so yeah I'm gonna go I'm gonna start working out so really want to be in shape. I want to be I want to have six pack okay cool I'm gonna be jacked name the blisters the blisters is I'm gonna be waking up at this time I'm gonna be going to Jim on days I don't even feel like it I'm gonna have to push myself on there I'm not gonna be looking at my phone I'm gonna be pushing myself tell failure on a bunch of different sets I'm gonna have to watch what I eat I'm gonna have to write so you have to like it's the blisters that decide whether you're gonna like it or not much more so than the rewards and so figure out when you're when you're looking at what loop I like like just the blisters are actually pretty obvious you can actually know what they are and you decide if you're good with those or not so that's the first thing be upfront about those the second is there's a great art of noticing. You have to learn to notice in yourself where you have some weird irrational disproportionate enthusiasm or where you're willing to go further than most people or the mastery that you're enjoying picking up and what that mastery actually is because it's not always doesn't always have a really clean label that other people have told you about and also that sometimes other people notice it for you. There's just a two examples of all who somebody I think we both kind of admire he tells a story about when he was a kid he thought being a scientist was what he was gonna be he thought scientists were the highest calling there were the truth seekers they were the ones who invented things like that's what he wanted to do and his mom was like I don't know I think you're gonna be a businessman he's a businessman never said anything about business.

He's what every time we walk in that pizza shop tell me how they're doing this and this wrong why they should be doing this instead what this company should do instead and she's like I think that's just how your mind actually works and he's like she spotted it when I couldn't and I don't know if you saw Adam Newman from we work went on Rick Reuben's podcast a bunch of people watching. Yeah but you Austin reef who I think told you are you saw this thing yeah Austin tips to say that's like when the great he's like Adam gets a lot of hate but he is really worth listening to here. Yeah also was one who was like talking about it he's like did he said master storyteller he's like I can't believe you're not more obsessed with that kind of reverse nag okay I'm interested so I watched it he tells a story about we work he actually was working on the way. He was working on a kids clothing brand before we work and it wasn't working he was failing at it and he's asking I think his girlfriend at the time.

Well what do you think I should do and she's like real estate and he's like I've never done really where did that come from random I've never done anything real estate. She goes I think you should do real estate because whenever we're walking on the street she goes a man's eyes can go in many places walking down the street in New York. You can look at the woman who's just past you you can look at the dogs you can look at the many things the food you can look at all times your eyes go up. You're always looking at the buildings and what's in these buildings and how they can how they work and you know why this building could be for that what it is for.

That what it is for she goes I think you should be in real estate and like okay this honestly the story sounds a little bit like reverse. I've heard no I've heard I think her name is Rebecca his wife is Rebecca Newman I've heard five to ten and the new men are storytellers so the kabobbi fake I've heard five stories about Rebecca being the one you know whatever they say like behind every successful man is a woman like pushing them I've heard like five stories of her being like the Adam Whisper and like pointing him in the direction I would be great I would like to have her on. Yeah everyone needs a Rebecca in their lives. That's awesome and what did you learn from the part.

You know what life is never listen to this podcast. You wanna talk shit. It's not about it right now. It's not about safe space.

This is the only place I can say anything I know she'll never find. Yeah I talk trash about it right now. What else do you want to talk about anything else. No I do but I don't think I think we're good here.

We have to have this one has to have a scene slate. This is pretty cool. What's the kid's name who you talk to the young guys who you talk to. Douglas Douglas this one was for you.

Can I tell you about my trip to Austin real quick before you just we can cut the sound over. Dude one of the this is gonna sound like you know you guys who make fun of me for being cringe. Austin is MFM Mecca. Did you get eyeballed like a ton?

Yeah a little bit for sure. I wasn't there for long as long as I'm there for like a day and a half but so many of our peers are there. It's like our you know like every 30 something year old who's into some version of like startups media or a commercial whatever is there for some reason. And it's easy to get around it's pretty cool right.

I went to so I went and I did the Chris's show which is kind of like going to the penthouse in your building or whatever. It's like oh yeah this is great podcast. Then you go to the eighth biggest podcast in the world and he went on Rogan. He's like I went on the number one podcast in the world right.

So it's like envy all the way up. But just Rogan when he did he mentioned it like when Rogan's are you like entering in this like epic center or is it like low key relaxed type of stuff. I didn't ask him a ton about it. I think it is kind of what you see and that Rogan is kind of what you see as well.

Like I think it's pretty aligned. I don't think it's like a big like facade that's there either in the set or anything else. But but I also visited Cody Sanchez's office and we hung out for a little bit and it was so interesting. I think it's kind of related to what we were just talking about.

Like you know you want to you want to experiment for yourself but a faster way is to just take a quick Costco sample of what other people are doing. Her office is cool right. Well she just moved into brand new office. I mean yeah it's cool but it was also like it was on one hand very impressive and cool for her.

You can walk in there's an energy. There's 65 people sitting there. I'm like what's going on what's happening here. And so there you know you want to wear the sales team or the content team is just like rose of dudes with headphones on just trimming shorts of her videos clips of her videos for like an operation.

It's an operation. It's not full operation right. It's the brand. And at the same time as impressive as it was it was also like a very clear signal to my gut right.

I actually am practicing this idea of like how do you talk to your gut and bypass the head all together. And one way is you just go immerse yourself in an environment your gut will tell you like yeah yeah yeah more of this or no no more less of this. And so this works with people when you like trust your gut with people of like I just like this guy or like something off about this person. I don't trust them for some reason.

And there's the same thing for like figuring out what you like and what you don't like what you want more of in your life which one less of when I walked in. I was like wow this is really impressive. Also. I definitely don't want a buzzing office and 70 people to deal with and 70 people's like I don't want that scale.

I don't want head count like head count is something I'm actually like against. I'm looking for low aggravation and I'm looking for like kind of high high flow state low management state of you know how I want to spend my days. But that's her flow state by the way she loves that I'm very much Cody forever she loves that. Every different one right.

Like you know what yours is I know I can only speak what I know and so you go to each one and same thing like you know Chris is I picked up some like another example would be look for things. So what do you sampling you're looking for things that right in your gut you say more more or less less the second one was where is somebody who I respect doing something I've just written off in the past. I just thought it's not for me or not good or not worth it or not whatever right like Chris does a live tour for his podcast we've done a couple of live shows and I think we both are at least like it's like it's okay. It's like it's okay.

It's okay. Don't be more of that. It felt good. It felt amazing but it was a lot of pressure and live podcasts don't in my opinion have not translated oftentimes right when I see when I've done them and when I see them.

Right. He's clearly doing it. I was like what do you know about like why are you doing this what do you know about this that I seem to not know what did you catch that I seem to have missed. He's also a young single guy who like it's like literally would be like a rock star lifestyle if you if you chose it.

I'm looking to validate it is that like because that's the reason I don't right is I don't want to travel so much with little kids or whatever but I'm you know you do do things I did travel to awesome right you do do things if there's enough motivation to do them. So I'm kind of looking for like you know that that guy you know that guy you know the sit down on the campus and like tell me to change my mind type of thing like I'm actually trying to change my mind. I actually want to find falsify some assumption that I have like I talked to this dude who is an ecom his name is Zach and he just actually came out he just announced what his company is it's like you tell me the phone he's like yeah it's like you know $100 million run rate supplement brand I was like what I didn't know you're doing that I thought you had an agency the sock is talking about is this a fin. No it's something like men go to Mars or something like that I don't know what it is something something Mars is in the name Zach stuck his name so he's like yeah do you know built this brand to in two years we're at 100 million in run rate it's a I think it's like an alternative testosterone boosting brand so you like you take like fucking like tongue on the and stuff like I think that's the idea you see it.

Yeah yeah, ma'am men go to Mars and it's a the most potent and natural testosterone stack on earth. Dude when you sort stack I get all fired up. Why don't we just describe our podcast that way us. It's a stack.

Founders acquired it's the most potent stack of the dust for boosting for founders. It's a mixture of your body your mind and your wallet better with this stack does this work should I take this. I mean I put my body. I think I'm going to throw this for gummies.

You can't eat a bag of gummies. But he was telling me is I tell me like how great ecom is I was like wrong time to run away from ecom and I was like what do you know about ecom that like what do you know that I don't he's like well I just think with AI like having businesses have real world products is like way more defensible all the digital shit is just like a race to the bottom for digital only you know that seems indefensible but like still having like a supply chain and a physical product that's on shelves that gets into people's hands like that's something AI is not going to be able to just do plus we get the benefit of AI that we're going to like we're going to go from maybe 15% margins to 25% margins if AI gives us productivity so I think I think it comes a great place to be and I was like. I'm pretty convincing I really have no count points. You know I fold I think this thing that I've been telling myself for seven years might no longer be true and I should I should revisit that assumption.

Yeah you're also not selling supplements that seems like the game of the game that seems like absolutely the game. I think you called it a long time ago dog supplements are really the best ones because. Who the hell is that on the back of the label. No.

It's just a middle figure says we're not required. I think I'm going to put the stack in my body. What do you do to make yourself feel like your testosterone is going to forget the numbers. What do you do in life to make yourself feel that.

Yell and traffic lift weights and lose fat. I mean yeah that's what you do in the red meat right. I feel you have some niche ones too. I don't know what they are but I just want my spotty senses digling.

A lot of people think that if you eat wild animals like versus fat cows that it's a powerful stuff and you get a hike up. But it's just what you think it is is lifting weights and losing fat and that kind of doesn't show. Are you still sparring you still fight at all. I got really into boxing and I loved it.

I got hit in the head a couple times that I had a headache for like seven days and I was like I think I should chill. But it was awesome sparring session. Was that the sparring session? Dude it was it was it was it fun.

Oh dude it's fun. The footage I'm sure will be just absolutely comical. It was fun. It's fun and like when we sparred it was just like you just you don't you didn't get hurt at all right.

It was just it was just a no. Honestly honestly that was the closest like I don't know if we've hugged but that was a hug. It was like a man hug like I felt so taken care of. I was like Sam is really taking care of me right now.

He's giving me just enough where I get to feel good in this and he's doing none of the stuff that's going to make me feel terrible by just whipping my ass here. This is really really nice. I really feel very taken care of. Thank you.

It's fun to have someone like in your face and you're like oh this is what feels like to get rattled a little bit. I think that definitely could help your testosterone go up for sure. But no I mean I the good stuff comes in syringes if we're being honest but in a bottle that I could buy the internet that's called a stack that might also be good. I'm going to give that a go.

I'll tell you after we had a spark session I came home and I was like I'm going to do this and I went on Craigslist and I found a trainer. Did he say he showed up in Timbalins? Yeah he showed up in Timbalins and jeans and like a huge set of keys like a janitor ring of keys and he was basically like a handyman and he had a hand. But he had a hand.

But he trained with the Diaz brothers and stopped it. He trained at their gym and so he would do let he would leg kick me with fucking Timbalins. It was insane. Just to show me wasn't like hurting me but oh my god it was it was the most brutal workouts.

It only lasted seven days. I'm just glad I didn't quit. He disappeared. He just like he's like his phone line disconnect.

He's gone. I don't want to happen to this guy. But it was the hardest seven days of training and I'm glad I at least experienced it so that I know what the real thing is. I'm like that's what it looks like when you're not in a safe environment when you're training.

It's fun to get there and then whenever you I just box because the kicks are scary. When our friend Ramon would kick he would kick like I would wear all the pads and it hurts so bad still. I do not understand the kicks. The kicks are in the same to me but I think boxing is definitely good.

I think it's really fun. Okay. Is that it? Is that it?

So who's the guy saying Douglas? Douglas. And Allison? Because that's like what everyone does.

You walk around shirtless and very awesome. Everybody in Austin has a moustache. Hybrid athletes maybe. That's what I do.

It's like everyone was like buff. Yeah. Hybrid athletes. That's when you're buff and you run.

That's the move in Austin. I'm trying to figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of business where you have the success but you don't have the grind culture suffering mindset. Like the Goggins were mostly like, it's just about pain. That's what it is.

You need to not see a family and not do this and that. I'm like, I'm doing this. I'm doing this other way. It's just going to work pretty well for me.

I don't know what to call this because so I'm like. You can be jacked and run. and run. That makes sense to me.

Yeah, everyone in Austin's that way. All right, that's it. That's the pod. Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor.

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