How to find your thing

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Dude, when you use the word stack, I get all fired up.

**Shaan Puri** (0:03)
Dude, why don't we just describe our podcast that way. Us, founders, acquired, it's the most potent stack of desktop trip reducing for founders.

**Sam Parr** (0:11)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (0:20)
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, he says hi, and he was like, oh yeah, I love the episodes, 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.

**Sam Parr** (1:40)
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 also looked at the history of following your passion. Is that true?

**Shaan Puri** (1:54)
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.

**Sam Parr** (2:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (2:03)
The circle that explains how Star Wars works and Harry Potter and all the great stories. They sort of start with the same structure. So 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 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? 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 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. Like most people, 90 plus percent of people do not know their passion.

**Sam Parr** (3:17)
I, so I'm gonna 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 two 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.

**Shaan Puri** (3:32)
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 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.