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's the most potent stack of testosterone boosting for founders. Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
On the road, let's travel. All right, 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 love the episodes you and Sam, blah, blah, blah. And I asked him, I go, what's one thing you want us to talk about? We're getting almost 1,000 episodes in. You need a little inspiration. And so I said, what's one thing you want us to talk about? And he goes, well, I don't know what other people want, but here's what I want. He told me 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 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 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, take these tests, you got to get these marks. And that's, it's like super structured. All of a sudden graduates. Now he's just on his own. So 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 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 what I wanted 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 of all, 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 the hero's journey.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This circle that explains how Star Wars works and Harry Potter and all the great stories, they sort of start with the same structure. So this guy 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, you know, 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 he kind of discovered this 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 problem with passion and then why I think the bliss and blisters thing is 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. All right, like most people, 90+% of people do not know their passion.
I, so I'm going to cite Mark Manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called Should You Follow Your Passion or Not? And I listened to it 2 weeks ago. I'm 36 years old. Some people might regard me as successful. I still don't know what my passion is. And I think about it all the time.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm always trying to figure it out. I'm perpetually reinventing myself 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 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 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, um, what do you do instead? All right, so he has this bliss and blisters concept. Basically, bliss is not meant to be just like pure joy. It's not meant to be just like, uh, 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 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. 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 follow your bliss, and then everybody just looked for something that just made them happy, pleasurable all the time, instantaneously. And he goes, oh man, I've made a mistake. It's not that at all. He said, he 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 Murph and I've been doing pull-ups all the time. So my hands on both sides just 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 through 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 ever read it. It's called How to Do Great Work.
Years ago.
It's like, it takes you like 2 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 going to provide you some fuel, some like, some, uh, your motor. It's going to 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 50th percentile knowledge on health and fitness. Is that probably correct? Yeah. And then the interest, often irrational, because, dude, why do you need— 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 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 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 known best practices plus some experimental shit. Am I right? Yeah. And so what he talks about is like Paul Graham 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 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. And we both invested in Hone Health, which is now, you know, over 9 figures run rate. 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, hmm, 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 Ozempic was even called Ozempic. You were like, I'm taking semaglutide. And, you know, we didn't act on that insight, but it took— when you go to the frontier, you notice the gaps and the gaps are where all the sort of the opportunities are for any person who wants to do great work.
First of all, great spiel. You got me fired up there. Second of all, it sucks that me taking drugs, I'm kind of paying the price of your point making here.
Yeah. I only could be friends with someone who's going to 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 30-day operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that have 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-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 seemed weird that it was the passion of the— Passion of the Christ is the story of Jesus being nailed to the cross, which you're like, why?
Why? Why?
Why is it called that? Yeah, it stands for suffering. 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, follow through it. You're 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, 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 this idea of passion and leisure. That is an 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 then, 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?
Until when?
Like the 1930s. Do you know who popularized the weekend?
Yeah. So Henry Ford was— his company was so big at the time and 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 12 hours. Not 8, but if we are, 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, of work weeks and vacation and all that stuff that didn't even exist until 1930, then the Great Depression happened and then World War II happened and those ideas sort of went away. We worked really hard to like make things happen, but then post-World War II, so between the, the years of 1950 and 1970, 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 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, 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 and I can get a job where I can have a house in Dayton, Ohio, where I can afford 2 cars. And this idea of like, I could have a— I could buy an oven 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 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 it's— 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, 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, uh, Cal Newport who wrote Deep Work. He had this thing where he said, uh, 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 piano lesson in the morning and then in the evening before bed, I'm tired, I'm walking to bed and I, I'm like, ah, let me get in here and play the sea shanty like I'm a pirate on the pirate, like on a boat or something like that. And I'm playing this song and I'm basically half eyes open, but I got a little bit better, right? I've got one step closer to mastery. And the 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 think that maybe that's the chain is enduring enthusiasm, to enduring enthusiasm, which leads to mastery. And mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to, you know, passion. And this idea of blisters where it's like, look for the evidence of suffering because you're— you enjoy what you're getting out of it. Now, can I give you my riff 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 going to do healthcare because I'm passionate about healthcare, or I'm going to do, you know, I started this clothing, clothing business because, oh, that sounds fun. Let's do fashion. Let's do apparel. That's cool. That sounds more fun than that.
You're a big clothing guy, huh?
I picked things 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 to 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 start a company because you love to tinker. And then after 6 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 marveling about how, how great the thing is. And so what I realized was like, dude, you spend 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 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 you— 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 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 then promise to circle back, or do you want to sit behind your laptop, you know, orchestrating, or do you want— so there's a few of these, right? Like if you're an SEO game, then you're going to play the SEO game. That's what you spend most of your time doing is improving your SEO. 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-play scalable version of content. The thing I like the least is viral growth and sales. Those are my two least favorite.
Dude, I distinctly remember a time— so The Hustle was a media company, so we had a couple 7-figure deals, a bunch of 6-figure deals, and that required a little bit of wining 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 salespeople would wear for some reason. The outfit was like blue jeans with a sports jacket and these ugly brown shoes. I distinctly remember a trip where I took the shoes off post-meeting. I threw them in the trash can and I got in the cab without shoes on and I said, I'm never doing that again. These shoes are done.
It's like the dude version of taking off your bra after a long day.
Dude, because I was just like, I'm outta here. Sucking so much D in this meeting. I'm like, I'm like this. The truth doesn't matter when you talk to these people. It's okay to lie.
My least favorite is the wooing of influencers. We did a streaming— the company we sold to Twitch, it was a streaming app. And so it was made for people who livestream 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 and 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 on 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—
it's like two UFC fighters when they get done fighting and they're backstage and they're like, we both lost.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's how it felt. 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 the absolute worst.
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All right, so my, 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 a 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 2 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 realize 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 it'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.
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. 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 just because I've been saying this since I was 14? Because I don't know, it sounded good to my parents or something. I'm not sure even 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 the team that will build the 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. That's what you're going to 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 plant the seeds, you water them, then you, you know, then it grows and then you reap what you sowed, 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 that will come from doing this loop thousands of times. And you don't have to know upfront you would like to do it thousands of times. Just see, are you interested in doing it once, twice? Do you have an enthusiasm towards doing this? And then as you do it, you have to 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 it when I was basically 30 years old, which was this podcast. It's like, oh, 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 1% 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 which way I do it. That's the, that's the loop I love. And I've been now been doing this podcast, what, 6 years, something like that. And I'm fresh, fresh as a daisy, you know, it's like I could 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, um, I think 5 years ago. I told you about it when I read it. It's called The Top 5 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 story? I think, I think it's worth the read, but it's one of these books that if I'm gonna— I can tell you the 5 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 it was 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—
oh, so she's not a researcher, she actually just worked there.
She was a nurse. Yeah, so she was a— yeah, she was a nurse. Uh, I think she— yeah, she was a nurse. This was her occupation. And she saw thousands of people die, and she wrote this book called The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, where she put together a list of the 5 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 5 of them, but the number 1 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 1 regret by a huge margin when she, like, tallied 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 the majority men who said, um, 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 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 arguments with 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 1, which is living the life that you want to live versus what you think you should. The 4th one was, I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Specifically, this is for old friends. Dying patients tried 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 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 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 a 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 it's still a 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 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 to 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 want to do that, I think try it, but you should probably save up 6 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— and because following 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 your work. I get what you mean, which is like it can be 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.
Right. Most people don't, don't get excited about Mondays. They don't wake up sort of tap dancing into work.
According to Bill Gurley'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 8, that leaves 16. You work 8. So half your waking hours, essentially half of your conscious life, you're going to, you know, once you, once you become of working age, you're going to spend, you're going to 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 going to be spent that when you're, once you're of working age, once you're sort of in that 20 to 65 range. So I would say way too many people accept, uh, it is what it is, uh, 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, the, you know, the fight worth fighting for is like to, to fight for that, to fight till you get that, to fight.
But what I'm saying is that it's a lot, oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship and it is having your, a job that you you love. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's what I mean.
Yeah, totally. I don't think it's entrepreneurship at all, right? I have 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 finding that loop that you love. 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 and makes you feel alive, I think is worth doing. I'm going to leave you with, uh, one quote that was said on this podcast. Isaac French came on and he was here to talk about his Airbnb, like, business where he built this, like, a little 7-cabin Airbnb business and sold it for $7-8 million. I guess it's some, some cool business like that. But he said this phrase. I don't remember much about the Airbnb thing, but he said this one phrase or a quote, which was, um, 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 a like, it's a, it's almost like that's what level 10 looks like. Now you might not be a 10, but let's, let's agree that, that somebody who's really lit up by that, what they're doing, that's kind of how it 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 from many miles away to watch them burn. I would say that kind of describes in a visual format what that's supposed to look like.
I think that's a great quote. Isaac's the man. And I want to preface this by— or not preface this, 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 apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse 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 to I need more.
I'm not enough.
I need more.
I need more. I need to do more podcasts. Screw that. Came back down the elevator to your shithole.
Oh my gosh. Is that—
former loving home now shithole.
Have you ever done that? Have you ever done real life Zillow where you just like go and like, I always like, I 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 through a catalog and that's happened. Like, that happens to be there. I'm not actually going to buy this apartment. And that's like the easiest way to like start, like, you know, comparison's 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 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 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, they're super excited. Oh, we're on, like, a train. And, um, 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, no, hold on to this. It's about to It's about to go. And they're like, no, no, I just want to balance. This is going to be fun. And I was like, all right. Train starts. 30-pound daughter goes flying into someone's suitcase 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's suitcase right now. And so, like, the idea of, like, yeah, you, you do want to figure out, you know, what lights you up, what makes you feel alive, not what sounds good to others. You do want to figure out an internal reward and a scorecard so that you're not going to the $18 million penthouse and feeling like you need more when you walk out of there. And so it's like you need all this generic cliché goddamn advice. Because it's the equivalent of the pole to hold on to. If you don't have it, you're going to go— you're just going to get whiplashed by the world. You're just going to constantly be whiplashed and holding it. You know, you're still going to feel it when the train jerks you around. But like, now imagine like that's, that's to me like the metaphor of like how this sort of like grounded advice plays into the, you know, to daily life, which is going to whip you around.
I call it braces money. I had a friend that had this amazing job and he was like, I used to just sail like I would. Like, he was like, I was like a $30,000 millionaire. I would like save up 30 grand and then go and like sail. 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 braces money because I realized I'm passionate about that as well, not just sailing.
Today's 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 of my businesses. I think I have like maybe 7 or 8 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? Uh, 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, uh, 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 with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and ColumbNA, members FDIC. I want to leave, 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. It's like, oh yeah, I'm going to go, I'm going to start working out because I really want to be in shape. I really want to be fit. I want to be, I want to have, you know, a six pack. Okay, cool. I want to be jacked. Name the blisters. The blisters is I'm going to be waking up at this time. I'm going to be going to gym on days that I don't even feel like it. I'm gonna have to push myself when I'm there. I'm not gonna be looking at my phone. I'm gonna be pushing myself till failure on a bunch of different sets. I'm gonna have to, you know, watch what I eat. I'm gonna have to, right? 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. So 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, 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 will notice it for you. There's this— I'll give you two examples. Naval, who's somebody that 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 going to be. He thought scientists were the highest calling. They 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 going to be a businessman. He's like, businessman? I never said anything about businessman. She's like, you never said it, but you're always doing it. He goes, what? She goes, yeah, like every time we walk in that pizza shop, you tell me how they're doing this, 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 Neumann from WeWork went on Rick Rubin's podcast.
A bunch of people are saying— yeah, but you, Austin Reef, who I think told you or you saw his thing. Yeah. Austin kept saying it's like one of the greatest. He's like, Adam gets a lot of hate, but he is really worth listening to here.
Yeah. Austin was the one who was like, kept talking about it. He's like, dude, he's a master storyteller. He's like, I can't believe you're not more obsessed with him. And I was like, what? What kind of reverse neg? Okay, I'm interested. So I watched it. He tells a story about WeWork where he actually was working on a kid's clothing brand before WeWork, 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 real estate. Where'd that come from? Random. I've never done anything in 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 just passed you. You can look at the dogs. You can look at many things, the food. You can look at all types of things. Your eyes go up. You're always looking at the buildings and what's in these buildings and how they work and what this building could be for, not 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 engineering.
I've heard— no, I've heard— I think her name's Rebecca. The wife is Rebecca Newman. I have heard 5 to 10, and the Newmans are storytellers, so it could all be fake. I have heard 5 stories about Rebecca being the one, you know, whatever they say, like behind every successful man is like a woman, like pushing them. I have heard like 5 stories of her being like the Adam whisperer and like pointing him in the direction. I would— we need— 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 pod?
You know, my wife has never listened to this podcast.
Isn't that hilarious? You want to talk shit? Say something bad about her right now.
This is my safe space. This is the only place I could say anything. I know she'll never find out.
Yeah, talk trash about her right now.
What else you got? Do you want to talk about anything else?
No, I do, but I don't think it— I think we're good here. 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 young guy who you talked to?
Douglas. Douglas, this one was for you. Um, can I tell you about my trip to Austin real quick before you just— we can cut this out or whatever, but one of the—
this is going to sound like, you know, you guys can make fun of me for being cringe. Austin is MFM mecca. Did you get eyeballed like a ton?
Uh, yeah, a little bit. A little bit for sure. Yeah. I wasn't there for long. I was only there for like a day and a half, but so many of our peers are there. It's like our—
it's crazy.
You know, like I feel like every 30-something-year-old who's into some version of like startups, media, or, uh, e-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 kind of like going to the penthouse in your building or whatever. It's like, oh yeah, this great podcast. It's like, then you go to the 8th biggest podcast in the world, and he went on Rogan, and he's like, I went on the number 1 podcast in the world, right? So it's like envy all the way up.
But does Rogan— when he— did he mention it? Like, when Rogan's— are you like entering in this like epic center, or is it like low-key relaxed? Type of setup?
I didn't ask him a ton about it. I, I think it is kind of what you, what you see, and that Rogan is kind of what you see as well. Like, I think it's, it's pretty aligned. Um, I don't think there's like a big like facade, uh, that's there either in the set or anything else. Um, but, but I also visited Cody Sanchez's office, um, and we hung out for a little bit, and it was so interesting. I, I think it's kind of related to what we were just talking about, about like, you know, you want to, um, 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 a 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 could walk in, there's an energy, there's all these 65 people sitting there. I'm like, what's going on? What's happening here? And so there's, you know, you walk, oh, we're the sales team, we're the content team. There's just rows of dudes with headphones on just trimming shorts of her, of her videos, clips of her videos for like Instagram. It's an operation. It's an op— 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 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, yeah. More of this or no, 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, what you want less of. When I walked in, I was like, wow, this is really impressive. Also, note to self, 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 headcount. Like, headcount 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've been very close to Cody forever. She loves that.
Everybody has a different one, right? Like, you have to 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's, I picked up some, like, another example would be look for things. So what are you sampling? You're looking for things that right in your gut you say more, more, more or less, 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, eh, 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, it was like, it's okay. I was like, it's okay, I don't need more of that.
And 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 when I see— 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. So 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 he, if he chose, if he chose it.
But I'm looking to validate it. Is that like, because that's the reason I don't, right? Is I don't want to like travel so much with little kids or whatever. But I'm, you know, you do do things. I did travel to Austin, 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, the sit down on the campus and like, tell me, 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 in e-com. His name's Zach, and he just actually came out. He just announced what his company is. It's like, um, he told me on the phone, he's like, yeah, I have this, like, you know, $100 million run rate supplement brand. I was like, what? I never even— I didn't know you were doing that. I thought you had an agency, a SaaS.
Are you talking about— is this, uh, Fin?
No, it's, uh, 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 is his name. So he's like, yeah, dude, I built this brand too. In 2 years, we're at $100 million in run rate. It's a I think it's like an alternative to testosterone boosting brand. So you like, you take like fucking like Tongkat Ali and ashwagandha and stuff like that. I think that's the idea. Do you see it?
Yeah. Men Go to Mars and it's a, uh, 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, it's just founders acquired. It's the most potent stack. Testosterone boosting for founders.
It's a make your body, your mind, and your wallet better with this stack. Does this work? Should I take these? I mean, should I put this in my body?
Bro, those are gummies.
You can't use gummies.
But he was telling me, he's telling me like how great e-com is. I was like, bro, I'm trying to run away from e-com. And I was like, well, what do you know about e-com that like, what do you know that I don't? He's like, well, I just think with AI, like, having businesses that have real-world products is like way more defensible. All the digital shit is just like a race to the bottom. If you're 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 benefits of AI that we're going to like, we're going to go from maybe 15% margins to 25% margins if AI gives us this productivity boost. So I think, I think e-com is a great place to be. And I was like, I think you might be right. I'm pretty convincing. I really have no counterpoints. You know, I fold. I think this thing that I've been telling myself for 7 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— that is 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 fuck knows? On the back of the label? Because who fucking knows?
It's just a middle figure. It says we're not required.
Studies show nothing.
There was no—
we couldn't tell.
Does this— should I— I think I want to put this stack in my body. I think I'm into it.
What do you do? To make yourself feel like your testosterone is going up? Forget the numbers. What do you do in life to make yourself feel that?
Just yell in traffic? No, I lift weights and lose fat. I mean, yeah, that's what you do. And eat red meat, right? Like, have you ever eaten, like—
I feel like you have some niche ones too that you do. I don't know what they are, but I just— my spidey sense is tingling.
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 does the trick.
Are you still sparring? Do you still fight at all?
I got really into boxing and I loved it. I got hit in the head a couple of times that I had a headache for like 7 days and I was like, I think I should chill. But it was awesome. Sparring was—
Was that from our sparring session?
Dude, it was. It was.
We gotta release that footage.
Was it fun?
Oh dude, it was super 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 do, you don't, you weren't, you didn't get hurt at all, right? It was just, it just, no, he went so easy on me.
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 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 whooping my ass here. This is really, really nice. I really felt very taken care of.
Thank you. It's fun to have someone like in your face and you're like, oh, 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, the good stuff comes in syringes, if we're being honest, but in a bottle that I could buy on 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 that sparring session, I came home and I was like, I'm going to do this. And I went on Craigslist and I found a trainer.
Didn't you say he showed up in Timberlands?
Yeah, he showed up in Timberlands and jeans and like a huge set of keys, like a janitor ring of keys. And he was basically like a handyman.
But he had hands.
But he trained with the Diaz brothers in Stockton. He trained at their gym. And so he would do leg— he would leg kick me with fucking Timberlands on. The worst. Just to show me he wasn't hurting me. But oh my God, it was the most brutal workouts. It only lasted 7 days. I'm just glad I didn't quit. He disappeared. He ghosted. Like, he just— like, his phone line disconnected. He was gone. I don't know what happened to this guy, but it was the hardest 7 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 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 insane to me, but I think boxing is definitely good. I think it's really fun.
Okay.
I think that is that it is that it is that was it. 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 barefoot?
Nobody had the mustache. Everybody in Austin has a mustache.
Hybrid athletes, baby. That's what they do. It's, it's like, because everyone was like, 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, uh, business where you have the success, but you don't have the, like, grind culture suffering mindset, right? Like the Goggins, Hormozy, like it's just about pain and that's what it is. And you need to not see your family and not do this, not do that. It's like, I don't know, man, I'm doing this, I'm doing it this other way and it's working pretty well for me. I don't know what to call this, but it's sort of like hybrid. You could be jacked and run. It's like, oh, that makes sense to me.
Yeah, everyone in Austin's that way. All right, that's it. That's the pod.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
On the road, let's 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 D2C Pod. It's hosted by Ramon Barrios and Blaine Bolles. And this is a podcast about all things direct-to-consumer, D2C. 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 D2C, you know, website conversion, paid ads, Facebook ads, consumer trends, email marketing. If you want to know the stories behind your favorite brands, this podcast is for you. So check it out. Listen to D2C Pod wherever you get your podcasts.