How to find your thing

dude when you use the word stack i get all fired up dude that why don't we just describe our podcast that way us founders acquired it's the most potent stack doctor founders yeah i feel like got rude word i know why i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a road less travel so sam i was in austin last week and i was at a restaurant so we're sitting down at the table guy comes up and he's a fan of the podcast and he says hi and he was like oh yeah i loved episodes to you sam blah blah and i asked him i go what's one thing you want us to talk about we're getting a almost a thousand episodes in he made a little inspiration and so i said what's one thing you want us to talk about he goes well don't know what other people want but here's what i want hey told me he's he's twenty four years old he's like i know i'm smart i know i'm how hardworking i just don't know kinda which lane to go in i'm ready to swim but i don't know which 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 you basically described this problem which is like i've been in school my teachers my parents like i was told what to do you gotta take these classes you gotta get take these tests you gotta get these marks and that's it's like super structured all of a sudden graduates now he's just on his own went from super structured to completely unstructured and he's like i know that i should be doing something my friends are all doing this i don't think i wanna 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 what i wanted to talk about why i think that follow your passion is terrible advice at what you should do instead great i think i i will mostly it sounds like i based off your one line response right there i might agree with you and everything first of wanna 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 kinda of reference so i was reading this thing by joseph campbell he famously came up with the hero's journey yeah yeah yeah circle that explains how star wars works and harry potter and all the great stories they sort of start with the same structure so 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 it sounds a little h but when you explain it i think it clicks and he goes he started off by saying he 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 hero's journey thing was because when i was kid or you know a teenager i was obsessed with studying like indigenous tribes in 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 what's the structure of these things and that's how we kind of discovered the story shape that became the hero's journey when he's talking about bliss he basically made a couple of points and so let me first break down the the problem with passion and then why i think the bliss and blisters thing is better alright so here's my case for why passion is maybe the wrong idea first raise your hand if you know what your passion is alright like most people ninety plus percent of people do not know their passion i so i'm gonna cite mark manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called what should you file your passion or not and i listened to it two weeks ago i'm thirty six years old some people might regard me as successful i still don't know what my passion is and i and i think about it all the time yeah i'm i'm with you you're i'm always trying to figure it out i'm perpetually reinventing myself and and starting from scratch and questioning what's going on and reinventing myself for better and for worse that's been the place of some amazing things of 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 these people who didn't question anything and just sort of just picked a thing it just did it for fifty 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 you're 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 what is familiar for what actually lights us up and so even if i i 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 you 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 do are you do instead so he has this bliss and blisters content basically bliss is not meant to be just like pure joy it's not meant to be just like euphoria what he means by bliss is basically what are you enthusiastic about doing so using enthusiasm as your guide so this is his criteria so we said naturally naturally don't 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 indulge in yourself with the stuff you find yourself doing there that others would see as work is an important signal and then so he he started talking about this and people took it the wrong way in his opinion he's like i said this thing about all your bliss and then everybody just looked for something that just made them happy pleasurable all the time instantaneously he goes oh man made a mistake it's not that at all he he said he kind of off handedly it's attributed to him that he said i wish i had said follow your blisters instead and what 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 a on an unfamiliar path you're leaving a place that safe you're gonna face the dragons cross the bridges pay the tolls pay the price and it was worth that deeply satisfying along the way and blisters this idea of blisters is like on my hand right now i've i have these blisters because i've been training for this mu and i've been doing pull ups all the time so my hands bought both sizes have all these blisters and if you think about the idea of blisters it's a it's 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 the 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're 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 know you ever read is 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 in it he has this one phrase that i remember which is let enthusiasm be not just the motor but the rudder of your boat so basically enthusiasm is obviously gonna provide you some fuel some like some your motor it's gonna get you to go but let it also be the thing that guides 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 fifty percentile knowledge on health and fitness is that probably correct yeah and then the interest often irrational because dude why do you you're married you're already healthy like why do you what do you what do you why do you want these abs so damn bad right but something drove you correct yeah and and frankly i don't even know what it was you didn't question it you don't have to know what it is you just have to not doubt it is the kinda 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 you went to the frontier of how to do this thing like best known best practices plus some experimental shit am i right yeah and so what he talks about is like paul basically says let the 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 at the frontier you will notice some gaps so when you are at the frontier sam did you not notice a gap and the gap that you told me about has turned to one of our most profitable investments there's this like male epidemic of low testosterone people are gonna wanna take exogenous testosterone and it's extremely you know it changes what you feel it's extremely sticky when you do it i don't know if i wanna build that business but man i know that would be a gang buster business and we both invested in home health which is now you know over nine figures run rates it's doing great so 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 oz back before oz was even called him oz you're like i'm taking semi and you know we didn't act on that insight but it took when you go to the frontier you noticed the gaps and the gaps are where all the sort of the opportunities are for for a person who wants to do great work first of all great feel you got me fired up there second of all it sucks that me taking drugs i i'm kinda paying the price of your point making here yeah or it could be friends with someone who who's gonna do all that shit alright 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 thirty day operating system that you can check out right now it breaks down the systems that have took me ten 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 wanna 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 gonna tell you something that sounds academic and voodoo woo but i'm gonna make it super tactical but the idea of blister versus bliss is actually really interesting because do you know what the et ideology of the word passion is no so the word passion comes from the word suffering it always seemed weird that it was the passion the passion of the crisis the story of jesus being they hold to the cross which you're like why why he you love that yeah it it stands for suffering and it's 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 follow through it you basically called 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 let's that's actually a great word to use which is something that you're like enthused all the time i'm doing it do yeah don't love your job job you love know what i mean so up until like you've heard of the gil at age so in the gil 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 ever heard that phrase that was a phrase that was invented in the late eighteen hundreds in america and this idea of like no one has leisure that's a that's a that's this 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 wanna know something interesting i think people were probably happier than but there is like a middle ground and so up until like in nineteen thirty there was no vacation or there was no work weeks or work weekends did you know that until went like in nineteen thirties 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 and we create a standard workday which i actually think the standard workday for him was twelve hours not eight but if we and then we institute like a minimum wage and this type of thing we're actually gonna get more loyalty and we're gonna get more productivity this and that and so the idea of of work weeks and vacation and all that stuff that didn't even exist until nineteen thirty then the the great depression happened and then world war two happen and those ideas sort of went away we worked really hard like makes things happen but then post world war two so between the the years of nineteen fifty and nineteen seven 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 they're literally that was like the golden age of 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 of the gi bill no veterans ex soldiers when 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 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 can have a i could buy an oven and and a car and a stove and all this stuff that 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 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 it's and this author uses 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 while 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 kat cal newport who wrote deep he had this thing where he said pass 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 i had a lesson in the morning and then in the evening before bed i'm tired i'm walking to bed and i passed the room that as the piano i'm like let me get in here and play the c s like i'm a pirate on the pirate like at i'm a boat or something like that and i'm playing this song and i'm i've i basically half half eyes is open but it's but i got a little bit better right i've got one step closer to mastery and the only the only way you can get yourself to do enough load the ten thousand 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 enthusiasm to enduring enthusiasm which leads to mastery and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to you know passion and in this idea of blisters where it's like look for the evidence of suffering because you're so you you enjoy what you're getting out of it now can i give you my r on this because 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 it's like oh i'm gonna do health care because i'm more passionate about health care yeah or i'm gonna do you know i started this closing clothing business because oh that sounds fun let's do fashion let's do apparel that's cool well that sounds more fun than that you're big clothing guy i picked things that i thought sounded fun i picked industries or products that i thought were fun and what i learned along the way was that the time you spend on a on the actual product or industry the industry almost like fades student an oblivion the time you spend on a product is very minimal like how much time would you say in whether it's hampton 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 you start a company think because you love to tinker and then after six or twelve 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 marvel about how how great the thing is and so what i realized was like dude you spend all your like when you when you decided to start a company you're gonna try to like inherently you're saying i'm gonna make this thing successful to make it successful it's gotta grow and to make it grow you're gonna 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 fifty percent i would say more closer to fifteen percent than fifty most of your time is gonna be spent on building the team managing the team and working on core growth and sales and so i i simplified it and i was like oh i don't need to pick a 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 gonna be spent doing enterprise sales hiring enterprise sales and managing an enterprise sales team if it's built on facebook ads if you're if it's e com i have an e com brand most of the time is spent on running ads to landing pages and sending emails because if i want the thing to grow that's the thing i gotta get better at yeah it's like do you wanna work with spreadsheets or do you wanna 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 wanna take people to dinner and then promise to circle back or do you wanna sit behind your laptop you know orchestrating or do you want into this so there's a few of these right like if you're an seo game and then you're gonna play the seo that's what we're gonna spend 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 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 place scalable version of content the thing i like the least is viral growth and sales those are my lead two least favorite dude i distinctly remember a time so the hustle was a meaty company so we had a couple seven figure deals a bunch of six figure deals and that required a little bit of winding 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 the sports jacket and these ugly broad shoes i distinctly remember a trip where i took the shoes off post meetings i threw them in the trash hand and i got it to cab without shoes on it and i said i'm ever do that again these shoes are done it's a dude first of taken off your bra after a long day dude because i was just like out of here suck in so much d in this meeting i'm like like this the truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people it's like my least favorite is the willing of influencers we did a streaming the the company we sold the twitch it was a streaming app and so it was made for people who live 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 nineteen year old streamer who's not 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 dollar 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 comm on like he he just literally told me he was like i'm so tired of sucking hey he's like i'm just not gonna suck anymore and then i just my first meeting with this guy it's like two it's like two you have c fighters when they get done fighting in their backstage and they're like we both lost yeah yeah exactly that's how it fell and so that's my least favorite it is the woo of diva where you need these influencers to back you to for your product to succeed that's the absolute worst you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written and everyone is aligned and you realize someone still has a sit down and actually create the content that someone is you and it's due tomorrow breeze assistant can help it works right inside of hubspot drafting campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all grounded in your actual customer data so don't just create content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the summer platform for growing businesses alright so my my phrase for this is you wanna find a loop that you love alright what's a loop so the loop is basically like i can kinda break down any job into a pretty repeatable loop similar 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 a therapist you're gonna do that tens of thousands of times and so i remember when i was in college i took the mca i thought i was gonna 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 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 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 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 yeah you it's damage or it's rupture and we're gonna try our best to do surgery or to give you an injection a steroid but like it's never gonna be the same as it was you'll never change your behavior the like you 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 wanna be and that was what he did every single day and he even been doing that for forty 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 i felt tired at the end of every day of like oh my god this emotionally tired of dealing with suffering all day and i was like do i have to do this just because i've been saying this since i was fourteen because i don't know it sounded good to my parents or something i i'm not sure we even where this came from but like this idea of a loop i think is really important so for for example the founder loop is you see the world as it is some status quo of of of an industry of a 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 the team that will build the product and sell the product that's the loop you're gonna do as a founder every as a founder on the whole and on the on the daily basis it's gonna be mostly initially it's a building loop then it's a selling loop and then it's a building the team loop that's what you're gonna do for the rest of time so like do you like that and so there's there's many of these a farmer has a loop right it goes with the seasons you you know you you plant the seeds and water them then you you know then it grows and then you reap what you sow right and like that's the loop you're gonna do and you're gonna do that every year for twenty five years so i think the 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 that will come from doing this loop thousands of times now you don't have to know front you would like to do a thousand 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 fast ask yourself like is this something i i feel myself doing you know like more and more and more i would i would i don't feel tired doing this i feel so 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 you know i stumbled onto to it when i was basically thirty years old which was this podcast it's like oh the i'm not the founder loop is okay 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 one percent of what i found and i enthusiastically share it with like minded people and i like that they like it and then i go and do it again the next day and whether i'm writing books or i'm doing the podcast or it's my youtube channel it doesn't matter where which way i do it that's the that's the loop i love and i've been now been doing this podcast what six years something like that and i'm fresh fresh is a daisy you know it's like i keep going and not every but 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 in hospice right is that the i think it's worth the read but it's one of these books and if i'm gonna 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 is a woman who worked in a hospice for decades and i think it was potentially ten thousand people but for sure thousands of people who oh she's not a researcher she actually just worked there she was a nurse yeah so she was a yeah she was a nurse i think she she asked 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'll 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 to this this up and then 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 would 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 majority men who said i missed this game i wasn't around for x y 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 suppressed themselves and they wish that 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 argument 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 wanna live versus what you think you should the fourth one was i wish i'd had stayed in touch with my friends specifically this is for old friends dying patients try to track down in their final weeks a lot of buddies who they had but they couldn't find them and they had huge regret 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 to 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 reread it because telling the summary it kind of excites me because i did feel it felt awesome reading this in a very weird way but there's this man i told you about this ninety six year old man in my building who i go and talk with all the time and gary van vaynerchuk has said this all the time that helix 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 ninety six year old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories and i leave feeling better a 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 it's still useful sole 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 have seen so many people that have made that mistake where 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 this listening to this i don't think and 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 wanna do that i think try it but you should probably save up six to twelve 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 filed their passion and it was a and this follow 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 one part of what you said which was like you don't have to make your passion work i get what you mean which is like it can be your hobby but i 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 right most people don't don't get excited about mondays they don't wake sort of tap dancing and work according to bill girl gu books seventy percent of people do not like how they spend their days right and i think in that book you makes a point which is like you know twenty four hours in a day you sleep eight that leaves sixteen you work eight so half your waking hours essentially half of your conscious life you're gonna you know once you once you become a working age you're gonna spend you're gonna spend at your job and so like doesn't it 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 gonna be spent that when you're once you're a working age once you're sort of in that twenty to sixty five range so i say way too many people except it is what it is on something that's too 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 you know the quest you should go on but you the fight worth fighting for is like to to fight for that to fight till you get that to fight what i'm saying is that it's a lot oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship and it is having your a a job that you like yeah yeah totally that's that's sort of what i that's what i mean yeah totally i don't think it's on i don't think it's entrepreneurship at all right i don't i haven't even said for me it wasn't but i wasn't entrepreneur that's what i thought my job was for a long time i think it's fine in that loop that you live if that loop is as a salesman or a marketer or a connector or you know whatever it may be there's there's many different loops but but figuring out one that actually gives you a lot of energy and makes you feel alive i think is is is worth doing i gonna leave you with one quote i was set on this podcast isaac french came on and he was here to talk about his airbnb like business where he he built this like a little seven cabin and airbnb business and sold it for seven eight million bucks i says some some cool business like that but he said this phrase i don't remember much about the airbnb but 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 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 a like it's a it's almost like that's what level ten looks like so you might not be a ten but let's let's agree that that somebody who's really lit up by the what they're doing and that's kinda of how we would feel is that they're 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 kinda describes in a visual format what what that's supposed to look like i think that's a great quote isaac the man and i wanna preference this by or not preferences but i wanna 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 right but today i or on sunday i looked at an eighteen million dollar apartment because it was in my building and it was the pet house and it was fancy and shit and i wanted to go look at it and there was many other people there and i went from i'm happy too i need more i'm not a ninety more i need more i need to do more podcast podcasts screw down the elevator to your shit hole oh my gosh is that her love loving home mouse shit have have you ever done that have you ever done real life zillow where you just like go and like i always like i tell my parents are 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 through a catalog and that's happened like that happens to be there i'm not actually gonna buy this apartment and that's like the easiest way to like start like you know comparisons the thief of 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 i and what we have just said sounds really great and what isaac said is really great but i also want to acknowledge it's just incredibly challenging to pull off my analogy is this i took my kids to the airport and you know how you have to take those like airport tram like the little like 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 they're super excited we're on like a train and and i'm like hey grab the bar and they're like why because the train hasn't moved yet they're like what do you mean i'm fine i'm like no hold on this it's about to it's about to go and they're like no no i i'm just wanna balance this is gonna be fun and i was like alright train starts thirty pound daughter goes flying into someone's third right away gets rocked by the world and i would say like a lot of advice that falls into this kinda easier said than done bucket is really like it's the internal soul equivalent of holding on the pole because trust me this world's about to rock you and if you're not holding onto this you stand no chance you will go flying into that man's suitcase right now and so like the idea of like yeah you you do wanna figure out you know what lights you up what makes you feel alive not what sounds good to others you do wanna figure out an internal reward and a scorecard so that you're not going to the eighteen million dollar penthouse and 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 pole to hold onto to if you don't have it you're gonna go you're just gonna get whiplash by the world you're just gonna constantly be be whiplash and holding it's you know you're still gonna feel it when the the train jerks you're around but like now mad like that's that's to me like the metaphor of of like how this sort of like grounded advice plays into the work you know to daily life which is gonna whip you around i call it braces money i had a friend that had this amazing job and he was like i used said just sail like i would like he was like i was like a thirty thousand dollar millionaire i would like save about thirty 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 could have bra money because i realize i'm passionate about that as well not just sailing thanks podcast is brought you buy my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking 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 that i have so like 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 just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees 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 an a members fdic i wanna leave only 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 or not especially things that you're willing to suffer for the blisters then there's two two kind of takeaways the first is named the blisters so it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome like oh yeah i'm gonna go i'm gonna start working out because i really wanna be in shape i really wanna be fit i wanna be i wanna have you know six pack okay cool i wanna be jacked named the blisters the blisters is gonna be waking up at this time gonna be going to gym on days i don't even feel like it i'm gonna have to push myself and i'm 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 you know watch what i eat i'm gonna have right so you have 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 that's the first thing be upfront about those the second is there's a great art of noticing so you have to learn to notice in yourself where you have some weird irrational disproportionate enthusiasm and or where you're willing to go further than most people or the mastery that you're 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 i've told you about and also that sometimes other people will notice it for you there's just yeah i'll give you two examples naval 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 scientist 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 oh i don't know i think you're gonna be a businessman he's like business i never said anything about business manager she's like you never said but joe was doing it he's what so she yeah like 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 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 when on rick rubin podcast a bunch of people watching yeah but you austin reef who i think told you or you saw this thing yeah austin kept keep saying it's like one of the greatest he's like adam gets a lot of hate but he is really worthless sitting to here yeah austin was the one who was like kept talking about it he's like dude he's said master storyteller he's like i can't believe you're not more obsessed with them and i was what we kind of reverse ne okay i'm interested i watched it he tells a story about we work where he's he actually was working on a kid's clothing brand before we work and it wasn't working he's failing at it and his 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 real what where did that come from random i've never done anything in real estate she goes i think you should do real estate because whatever 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 who's who just passed you you can look at the dogs you can look at you can look at many things the food you can look at it all the times they your eyes go up you're always looking at the buildings and what's in these buildings and how they could how they work and you know why this what this building could be 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 date i have heard no i have heard i think names rebecca because the wife is rebecca newman i have heard five to ten and the newman are storyteller teller so could all be fake i have heard five stories about rebecca honestly being the one you know whatever they say like behind every successful man is like a woman like pushing him i have heard like five stories of her being like the adam whisper and like pointing him in the direction i we adam 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 podcast my wife has never listened to this podcast isn't another hilarious you wanna talk shit he's up the battle about it right now in my safe space this the only place i can i could say anything i know she'll never find yeah talk trash about it right now what else are you got do you want you wanna talk about anything else no i do but i don't think it i i think we're good here so we have we have to have this one has to have a clean slate this is pretty cool what's the kid's name who you talked to the the young guys who you talked to douglas also so douglas this one was for you can i tell you about my trip to austin real quick before you just we can cut this out but one of the this is gonna sound like you know you guys can make fun of me for being cringe austin is m m mecca did you get eyeball like a ton yeah a little bit little bit for sure yeah i wasn't there for long i wasn't there for like a day and a half but so many of our peers are there it's like ours it's crazy you know like i i feel like every thirty something year old who's into some version of like startups media or yeah commerce or 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 i did chris's show which is kinda like going to the penthouse and your building or whatever it's like oh yeah this great podcast and it's like then you go to the eighth biggest podcast in the world and he went on rogue and he's like i went on the the the number one podcast in the world right so it's like envy all the way up but just ro when he did he did mention it like when rogue 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 i think it is kinda what you what you see and that rogan is kinda what you see as well like i think it's pretty aligned i don't think there's was like a big like facade that's there either in the set or anything else but but i also visited cody sanchez office and we hung out for a little bit it's and it was so interesting i i think that this kind of related to what we were just talking about about like you know you wanna you wanna 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 well she just moved into a brand new office i mean yeah that's cool but i was also like it was on one hand very impressive and cool for her you could walk in there's an energy there's all there's sixty five people sitting there i'm like what what's going on what's was happening here and so they're you know you walk oh we're the sales team we're the content team there's just like rows of dudes with headphones on just trimming shorts of herb of her videos clips of her videos for like it's an operation it's an not full operation right she is the brand and at the same time as impressive as it was it was also like a very clear signal to my gut right like i i actually am practicing this idea of like how do you talk to your gut and bypass the head altogether and one way is you just go immerse yourself in an environment your gut will tell you like 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 you want less of when i walked in i was wow this is really impressive also notice to self i definitely don't want a buzzing office and seventy people to deal with and seventy peoples 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 wanna spend my days but that's her flow state by the way she loves that i'm i'm very cody forever she loves that everybody has a different one right you have know what what yours is i know i i can only speak what up 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 are you sampling you're looking for things that write in your gut you say more or less size the second one was where is somebody who i respect doing something i've just written off in the past i just thought 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 or at least like it's like a it was like it's okay it was like it's okay i don't more of that felt good it felt amazing but it was a lot of pressure and live podcast podcasts don't in my opinion have not translated time to i when i see it when i've done them and when i see them right but you know here's a smart talented guy who i respect and he's clearly doing it i was what do you know about like why are you doing this well what do you know about this that i seem to not not no what did you catch that i seem to have missed he's also a a a a young single guy who like it's like literally would be like a rockstar star lifestyle if you want if it if he too chose it to to validate it is is that like because that's the reason i don't right is i don't wanna like travel so much with little kids or whatever but i'm you know you do do things i did travel to right you do do things if there's enough motivation to do them so i'm kinda looking for like you know that that guy this sit down on the campus and like tell me it changed my mind type of thing like i'm actually trying to change my mind i actually want to find find fa some assumption that i have like i talked to this dude who is in e comm his name zach and he just actually came out he just announced what his company is it's like you told me the phone and he's was like yeah i this like you know a hundred million dollar run rate supplement brand i was like what and i never i even know you're doing that i thought you had an agency and a sucks you talking him out is this fin no it's 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 duck is his name so he's like had dude i built this brand two in two years we're at a hundred million and in run rate it's a i think it's like an alternative to testosterone boosting brand so you're like you take like fucking like tan ali and astra canada and stuff like that i think that's the idea do you see it yeah mar men go to mars and it's a the most potent and natural testosterone stack on earth dude when you use the word stack i get all fired up why don't we just describe our podcast that way us this is stack founders acquired it's the most potent stack stop truck boosting for founders it's a make your mod your body your mind and your wallet better with this stack does this work should i take these i mean should i put my body bro for gum mean yeah but he was telling me he's he's telling me like how great e commerce i like i'm trying to run away from e comm and i was like but what do you know about e com like what do know that i he's like well i just think with ai like having businesses that have real world products is like way more def defensive all the digital shit is just like a race to the bottom if you're digital only you know that seems ind indispensable 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 gonna be able to just do plus we get the benefits of ai that we're gonna like we're gonna go from maybe fifteen percent margins to twenty five percent margins if ai gives us this productivity so i think i i think he comes a great place to be and i was like think you might be right i'm pretty convincing i i i really have no counter points you know i fold and 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 do use the game that seems like absolutely the game like i think you called a long time i go dog supplements are really the best ones because who how the hell now on the back of the label because who no it's just a middle figure it says we're not required studies show nothing there wasn't we couldn't tell does this should i i i think i wanna put this stack in my body i'm i think i'm into it what what do you do to make yourself feel like your testosterone going up forget the numbers what do you do in life to make yourself feel that yell and traffic no lift weights and lose fat i mean yeah that's what you do and eat red meat right like if you're eaten like i feel like you have some niche ones too that you do i don't what they are i what my spidey sense is digging a lot of people think that if you eat wild animals like versus fat cows that it's some powerful stuff and you get and you get all hyped up but it's just what you think it is is just lifting weights and losing fat and that kind of still spa you still fight at all i i i got really into boxing and i loved it i got hit 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 spa was was our spa session dude it it it was it at least that footage was it fun i'll do it super fun but the footage i'm sure it will be just absolutely comic it was fun it's fun and like when we spa it was just like you just do you don't you weren't you didn't get her at all right it was just it just just honestly honestly honestly that was the closest like i don't know if we've hugged but that was the hug it was like a man hug like i felt so taken care of i was like sam is really taken 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 gonna a baby feel terrible by just wiping my ass here this is really really nice i really feel very taken care of thank you fun to have someone like in your face and you're like this is what it feels like to get rattled a little bit i think that definitely could help your testosterone go up for sure but no i don't i mean i the good stuff comes in syringe if we're being honest but in a a bottle that i could buy the internet that's called a stack that might also be good so we'll have to give that a go did i ever tell you i think after we had us far especially as i came home and i was like i'm gonna do this and i went on craigslist and i found a trainer didn't he say he showed up in timber yeah he showed up in timber and jeans and like a huge set of keys like a jan ring of keys and he was basically like a handyman and somebody but out of hands but he trained with he trained with the diaz brothers in stockton he trained at their at their gym and so he would do let he would leg kick me with fucking timber on the world pain just to show me he wasn't hurting me but oh my god it was it was the most brutal workouts it only lasted seven days i'm i'm just glad i didn't quit he disappeared he ghost like he just like his phone line disconnected he's just gone i don't know what happened 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 well 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 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 did not understand the kicks the kicks are the same to me but i think boxing is definitely good i think it's really fun okay yeah i think that that's is that it is that is that was so who's the guy's name douglas douglas shout out douglas was he shirtless in austin because that's like what everyone does did you walk around shirtless and bare verify nobody everybody has a must everybody in austin has a mustache hybrid athletes baby that's what they do it's it's like because everyone was like dogs yeah hybrid athletes that's when you're buff and you run that's the move in austin i'm trying figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of business where you have the success but you don't have the like grind culture suffering mindset right like the go for like it's just about pain and that's what it is and you need to not see your family and not do not do that it's like i don't i'm doing this i doing this other way and working pretty well for me i don't know what to call this but it's so like like you could be jacked and run so like i oh that that makes sense to me yeah everyone in austin's that way alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude to where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor it is a podcast that we want you to check out it's called d pod it's hosted by ramon barr and blame bolus and this is a podcast about all things direct to consumer d it's e commerce stores it's how you optimize your brand and they're talking with founders marketers and the platform creators about all kinds of things that you need to know for d you know website conversion pay ads facebook ads consumer trends email marketing if you wanna know the stories behind your favorite brands this podcast is for you so check it out listen to d pod wherever you get your podcast