Stop Following Your Passion (Do This Instead) - Ep. #316

Chris Koerner (0:00)

Follow Your Passion is the worst piece of advice I've ever been given in my entire life. And I've started like 80 businesses. Entrepreneurship is my entire thing. It's my hobby, my life, my family, my profession, everything all rolled into one. And I still think that Follow Your Passion is garbage advice. And I'm gonna tell you why. And by the end of this episode, I'm gonna hand you the exact tactical playbook for finding the thing you're actually obsessed with. Because I've seen episodes like this before. How to follow your passion, how to find what you love. And they're good, I'm inspired by them, but they're not good enough, because they're not tactical or specific enough. And that's the kind of guy I am. I wanna know what app to download, what tool to use, what prompt, like, let's get real about this. Because anything less than that is just guru fluff, high level motivation, like do what you love type stuff. And this is not that. This is the episode I wish I always had when I was 20 years old. But if you're 60 years old, this is still the episode for you, because I'm assuming you still haven't found your passion yet or your obsession yet. So when I say tactical, I mean, we're gonna dig through your YouTube watch history, Google search history, Amazon orders, conversations that you've had where you tend to hijack the whole table and talk for 20 minutes straight and not even notice that you're doing it. And I'm also gonna show you how to use AI to do all this in like 20 minutes, instead of wandering around in the wilderness for the next 20 years. So yes, the best stuff's at the end, but I'm gonna earn it first.

Here's the problem with follow your passion. When someone tells you that they're probably assuming one or two things, and both of them are probably wrong. Number one, they're assuming that you already know what your passion is. Most people don't, the vast majority of people don't, which is a crying shame, and it doesn't have to be that way. And number two, they're assuming that you only have one. Nobody only has one hobby or one passion, one obsession. We all have multiple. Most of us don't even know what they are yet. So I know a lot of you guys know my backstory. So I'm gonna gloss over this really fast so we can get to the good stuff. But I just want to set the tone and give you some context as to why I feel like I have a unique insight to offer to this age-old discussion. So I've done iPhone repairs. I sold iPhone LCD screens and parts. And was iPhone repair my passion? Absolutely not. I'm not an engineering brain. I'm not a tinkerer. That is not me. I didn't lie in bed at night dreaming about LCD screens. I've worked with RV parks, tree trimming, online snack business. None of those were or are my life's calling. None of them. I saw a gap. I moved and I built the thing. And a lot of the time, once it was up and running, I'd rather hand it off to a great operator and go chase down the next puzzle because I'm not a great operator. It took me way too long to learn this about myself. But for me, my puzzle is my passion, right? Going from zero to one. That is my passion. And one might look like $1 million or $10 million. It might look like $1.

It still feels amazing to me. It still gives me that dopamine rush. And we say dopamine like it's a four letter word, like it's a bad thing. Dopamine is amazing, but it should lead you to action, not just to information and research and procrastination. Dopamine has to lead us to execution, to action. In this case, to the first dollar hitting our Stripe account. That's the thing that I'm obsessed with. So of all the 80 plus businesses I've started, which ends up being like, you know, three to eight a year, the through line on all of those has never been the industry, either like the macro industry, like sales, or the micro industry, like home services. I don't care about any of those niches. I love commerce. I love being a merchant. That's why I love farmers markets, because it's like Merchant Central. That first customer is what I really love, and the industry that I happen to be in at any given moment is just like the costume that it shows up in any given week. And I want to be straight with you, because I've talked about this a few times before, never this tactically, but my own thinking on this topic has shifted over the years. There's two schools of thought on this whole passion versus profit thing, in my opinion. School number one says your passion does not have to be your job. They can live in two totally separate buckets. Do your job and then do your passion in your five to nine. Job, nine to five, passion, five to nine. And I think for the vast majority of human history, that was true, and people did not have the luxury of having their passion and profit overlap. Make your money over here and go love your woodworking over there. I've said a dozen times on this podcast and others, follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion. And for me, Utah folks, follow the profit means something else entirely, and you should do that too. Do the hard thing, the boring thing, the thing that pays, eat crap for a few years if you have to, and earn the right to go chase the fun stuff later. But today, we live in a world where I think School of Thought number two is much more feasible and should be possible for anyone consuming this episode right now. School number two says, no, have your cake and eat it too. You can build a life where the thing that pays you is the thing you would happily do for free anyway, or the thing that you would even pay to do. Because we happen to be walking straight into this AI age of abundance, where the cost of trying something, building something, selling, testing, is dropping to basically zero. It used to take serious money and years to chase down some weird little obsession, only to see maybe does it have legs or not. But now you can spin up a website or an app, write the copy, make the video, test the offer all in one afternoon. I mean, jeez, just yesterday, I'm on Twitter and I see this AI-generated video that looked very good, very real, of a guy building a miniature house with miniature concrete and rebar and two-by-fours and shingles and everything. Elon commented on it. This guy had 500 Twitter followers. He's not an influencer. He's nobody, right? Elon commented on it. It got 7 million views. I'm pretty sure this guy that posted to Ethan got the idea from my episode because I posted about this in a reel a year ago. We talked about it on MFM about like a guy dollhouse. This should be an actual business and not just a hobby. And I think I haven't talked to him yet. I think he was inspired by that and he launched a Kickstarter. He had zero dollars in funding, but he just made this AI generated video, tweeted it out to the void. Remember almost no followers. Elon comments, gets a bunch of views. He's raised 50,000 so far. He has a viable business. Like he launched a viable business with an AI generated video and no followers. That's the world we live in. Anyone can do that. So that'll trade off of money in one bucket, passion in the other is breaking down in real time. More and more of us every day are getting to combine those two buckets into one. And that's the bet I'm making right now, both in my life and on this one episode. And it's the bet I want you to be making too. Hey, if this is helpful, please subscribe on whatever platform, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. I appreciate you. So here's something that kind of blew my mind the first time I heard it. The word passion.