How to find your thing

0:00dude 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 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

0:31episodes to you sam blah blah blah and i asked him i go what's one thing you want us to talk about we're getting almost a thousand episodes in you need a little inspiration and so i said what's one thing you want us to talk about he goes well i don't know what other people want but here's what i want he told me he's uh he's 24 years old he's like i know i'm smart i know i'm hard working 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

1:04my 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

1:38and what you should do instead great i think i 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 a hero's journey 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 um his philosophy and he had

2:16this 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

2:47wonder 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 he kind of discovered this story shape uh 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 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 plus percent of people do not know their

3:17passion i um so i'm going to cite mark manson a lot in this conversation because he had a podcast called uh what 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 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

3:50sucks it feels shitty when you're doing it and um 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 what is familiar for what actually lights us up and so even if you i

4:23had 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 a euphoria what he means by bliss is basically what are you enthusiastic about doing so using enthusiasm as your guide

4:59so 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 uh pleasure relaxation um 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

5:32for 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 a 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

6:03along 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 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

6:35very good signal you are so drawn to doing it that you're even willing to endure the hardships that come along the way that is ultimately what you're looking for and so that's the short idea and this has been echoed by the way many times over so paul graham wrote this long long essay i don't know if you've ever read it's called how to do great work years ago it's like 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

7:06obviously 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 uh like for example when you got really into fitness you started maybe at 50 percentile knowledge on health and fitness is that probably correct yeah and then the interest often irrational because dude why do you 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

7:38bad 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 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

8:11engine 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 to 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 nine figures run rate it's doing great it's a

8:46wonderful 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 uh 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're like i'm taking semi-glutide and um you know we didn't act on that insight but it took you when you go to the frontier you notice the gaps and the gaps are where all the sort of the opportunities are for for any uh 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 uh i'm kind of

9:20paying the price of uh your point making here or you could be friends with someone who's going to do all that shit all right so this episode is all about excellence a while back i shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at hubspot turned it into a 30-day operating system that you can check out right now it breaks down the systems that 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

9:56description 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 you'd love that yeah it stands for suffering and uh it's so the idea of bliss versus blister is interesting because

10:29blister is a significantly better word because passion following your passion uh 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

11:04this 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

11:37want 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 up until when like the 1930s do you know who popularized the weekend isn't it like henry ford with the factory system yeah so henry ford was his company was so big at the time they employed so many people he was like how do we get the most out of our workers and he actually determined through a bunch of research and like some like scientific data he was like if we actually

12:10give people weekends off and we and we create a standard work day which i actually think the standard work day for him was 12 hours um not eight 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 uh the years of 1950 and 1907 that was peak leisure this is when like

12:45the 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 if you're still young they would pay for your college and so all these young guys were like i was in germany fighting for my life now i'm in college and like the economy is booming i can get a job where i can have a house in dayton ohio where i can afford two cars and this idea of like i can have a i can buy an oven and a car

13:19and 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

13:51there'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 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 cal newport who wrote deep work he had this thing where he said pass uh passion is a byproduct of mastery and if you

14:26extend that well then where does mastery come from i would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm you know yesterday i had a piano lesson in the morning and then in the evening before bed i'm tired i'm walking to bed and i pass the room that has the piano i'm like ah let me get in here and play the sea shanty like i'm a pirate on the pirates like on a boat or something like that and i'm playing this song and i'm basically half half eyes open but it's but i got a little bit better right i've got one step closer to mastery and the only the only way you can get yourself to do enough load the 10 000 hours

14:57type of idea to achieve mastery is through enduring enthusiasm and so if you if you think that maybe that's the chain is enduring enthusiasm to enduring enthusiasm which leads to mastery and mastery is a deeply satisfying thing that leads to uh you know uh passion and and this idea of blisters where it's like look for the evidence of suffering because you're so you enjoy what you're getting out of it now can i give you my riff on this because i was like okay i like the idea but how do i actually do

15:28this 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 or i'm gonna do um 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

16:03the industry almost like fades to an oblivion the time you spend on a product is very minimal like how much time would you say whether it's 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

16:35them or managing them 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 uh what i realized was like dude you spent all your like when you've when you decide 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 got to 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

17:06but 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 going to 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 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

17:38managing 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh you know

18:09orchestrating or do you want and so there's a few of these right like if you're an seo game then you're going to play the seo that's what you 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 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

18:46um viral growth uh and sales those are my two least favorite dude i distinctly remember a time so the hustle was a media company so we had um a couple seven-figure deals a bunch of six-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 sales people 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

19:19them in the trash can and i got at the cab without shoes on and i said i'm never doing that again these shoes are done it's a dude version of taking off your bra after a long day dude because i was just like i'm out of 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 willing of influencers we did a streaming the company we sold to twitch it was a streaming app and uh so it was made for people who live stream on youtube and twitch and the number of absolute shitty meetings

19:54where i'm i'm metaphorically on my knees with this uh 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

20:26me he was like i'm so tired of sucking and 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 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 uh so that's my least favorite is the wooing of divas 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 to sit down and actually create

20:58the 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.com the agentic customer platform for growing businesses 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

21:30kind 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

22:05and i actually before i went to med school i spent two weeks shadowing a guy who did the exact dream job i wanted he was an orthopedic surgeon for an nfl team plus you know had his own practice wow it doesn't get any better than this and i go in and i realized the loop that he was doing which was basically somebody comes to you in chronic pain you say some version of like well that's just it is what it is you don't have any cartilage left in that shoulder or that knee or yeah it's damaged or it's ruptured and we're going to try our best to do surgery or to give you

22:36an injection a steroid but like it's never going to be the same as it was and you'll never change your behavior and like you know i'll do pain management for you or i'll do performance management for you and like i'll send you back on your way better than you were when you came in here but much worse than you want to be and that was what he did every single day and he'd been doing that for 40 years i realized that is not a loop i love it is extremely low creativity you see people suffering all day and more power to him he loved doing it i didn't 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

23:11because 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 we 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 a 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 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

23:44then 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 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

24:17of times and you don't have to know up front you would like to do a thousand times just to 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 the i'm not the founder loop is okay but the one i really love

24:49is 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 it's 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 um 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

25:23really practical on advice for that guy but let me ask you something first have you read this book i read this this um 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 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 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

25:59is not a researcher she actually just worked there she was a nurse yeah so she was uh 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 five regrets for dying of the dying where she put together a list of the five things that were most common amongst the people she worked with and i don't believe this book is scientific it's purely observational but her number i can tell you all five of them but the number one regret by a huge margin was i wish i had the courage to live

26:30a life true to myself not the life others expected of me that was the number one regret by a huge margin when she like tallied this 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

27:04said 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 wished they had the courage to say x y and z to someone they loved or a friend and um it also was when they were uh conflicted with someone and they had arguments someone and they're like i wish i had the courage to say i don't agree with you can we please hash this out but it's related to number one which is living the life that you want to live versus what you

27:35think you should the fourth 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 regrets and the last one was i wish i had let myself be happier and this idea is that happiness is a choice that people didn't realize that they could make and they stayed in comfortable patterns and they pretended to others and themselves that they were content and they feared change right up until change was forced upon them and so this book is really good and i highly i should actually go and reread it just telling the summary it kind of

28:09excites me because i did feel it felt awesome reading this in a very uh weird way but there's this man i told you about this 96 year old man in my building who i go and talk with all the time and gary vaynerchuk has said this all the time that he likes to go to talk to old people but i think reading this book is very similar to the joy i get i'm basically to the listener i'm friends with the 96 year old in my building and he tells me all these types of stories and i leave feeling better part of the reason why you enjoy reading this is because you think you have wisdom but also i can kind of learn from your mistakes which is a little bit of a morbid way to look at it but it's still a

28:42useful way to look at it and so i think that this book is a really good book for anyone to read while when they're asking themselves if they should follow their passion because the answer is almost always like yes but i would argue that the answer is you should follow your passion but your passion doesn't need to be your job i've seen so many people that have made that mistake 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

29:13us this includes what you see on instagram i don't think you should necessarily go start a business i don't think you should quit your job and do x y and z if you do want to do that i think try it but you should probably save up six to 12 months of expenses and life is a lot better when you have financial security because there is money may not make you happy but a lack of money certainly will make you unhappy and i've seen so many people that have followed their passion and it was a and because following your passion oftentimes means creative pursuits artists things like that you don't

29:45really 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 uh 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 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 girl gurley's books 70 of people uh do not like how

30:18how they spend their days right and i think in that book he makes a point which is like um you know 24 hours in a day you sleep eight that leaves 16 you work eight so half your waking hours essentially half of your conscious life you're gonna you know once you once you become of 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 uh 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

30:53so 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 you know 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 job that you love yeah yeah that's that's

31:26sort of what i that's what i mean yeah totally uh i don't think it's i don't think it's entrepreneurship at all right like i would say 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 uh i think it's finding that loop that you love if that loop is as a salesman or a marketer or a connector or uh you know whatever it may be there's as 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'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

31:58bike business where he he built this like a little seven cabin airbnb business and sold it for seven eight million bucks 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

32:31like 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 what that's supposed to look like i think that's a great quote isaac's the man and i want to preference this by or not preferences but i want to say that um 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

33:05intend on buying an apartment anytime soon right but today i or on sunday i looked at an 18 million dollar apartment because it was in my building and it was the penthouse and 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 i need more i need more i need to do more podcasts screw you came back down the elevator to your shithole oh my gosh is that loving home now have you ever done that have

33:36you ever done real life zillow where you just like go and like i always like i'll tell 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 uh 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 uh 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

34:07also 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 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 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 gonna be fun and i was like all

34:41right 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 uh you know what lights you up what makes you feel alive not what sounds good to

35:15others you do want to figure out an internal reward and a scorecard so that you're not going to the 18 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 on to if you don't have it you're gonna go you're just gonna get whiplashed by the world you're just gonna constantly be whiplashed and holding it you know you're still gonna feel it when the the train jerks you 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 world you know to daily life which

35:50is going to whip you around i call it braces money i had a friend that um 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 uh they make the world's best

36:21banking product i think you know this already i use mercury for all 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 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

36:53market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and column n a 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 uh the blisters then um there's two two kind of takeaways the first is name the blisters

37:31so it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome it's like oh yeah i'm gonna go i'm gonna 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 going to be looking at my phone i'm going to be pushing myself till failure on a bunch of different sets i'm going to 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

38:03you're gonna like it or not much more so than the rewards and so figure out uh 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 looking you're enjoying picking up and what that mastery actually is because it's not always doesn't always have a

38:36really 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 uh naval who's somebody i think we both kind of admire he tells a story about when he was a kid he thought uh 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 gonna be a businessman he's like business i never said anything about business man she's like you never said it but you're always doing it he's what so yeah like every time we walk

39:06in 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 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 um and i don't know if you saw adam newman from we work 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

39:39not 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 we work where he's he actually was working on a kid's clothing brand before we work and it wasn't working he was failing at it and um 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 really where did 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

40:10she goes a man's eyes can go in many places walking down the street in new york you can look at the woman who's 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 all the types of things 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 dude i've heard no i've heard i think her name's rebecca his the wife is rebecca newman i have heard five to ten and

40:42the newmans are storytellers so it could all be fake i have heard five stories about rebecca being the one you know whatever they say like behind every successful man is a is like a woman like pushing them i've heard like five 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 um 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

41:13shit say something bad about it right now my safe space this is the only place i could say anything i know she'll never find yeah talk trash about it right now um what else you got you want to talk about anything else no i do but i don't think it i i think we're good here we have we have to have this one has to have a clean slate um this is pretty cool what's the kid's name who you talk to the young guys who you talk to douglas so 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

41:47sound 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 um e-commerce or whatever is there for some reason and it's easy to get around it's pretty

42:18cool 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 eighth biggest podcast in the world and he went on rogan and he's like i went on the bet the number one podcast in the world right so it's like envy all the way up but does rogan when he did he did 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

42:52see 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

43:26but 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 there's 65 people sitting there i'm like what's going on what's happening here and so there 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 her of her videos clips of her videos for like it's an operation it's a full operation right she is the brand and um at the same time as impressive as it was

43:58it 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 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 him 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

44:31self i definitely don't want a buzzing office and 70 people to deal with and 70 people's like i don't want uh that scale i don't want head count like head count is something i'm actually like against um i'm looking for low aggravation and i'm looking for like kind of high high uh flow state low management state of you know how i want to spend my days but that's her flow state by the way she loves that i'm very close to cody forever she loves that everybody has a different one right like

45:01you have to know what what yours is i know i i can only speak without what i know and so you go to each one and same thing like uh you know chris's i picked up some like another example would be um 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 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 it's like it's okay i don't

45:35need more of that it felt good it felt amazing but it was a lot of pressure and live podcasts don't in my opinion have not translated oftentimes where i 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 well what do you know about this that i seem to not not know what did you catch that i seem to have missed he's also a a young single guy who like it's like literally would be like a rock star lifestyle if you if he chose if he chose it

46:07to be i'm looking to validate it is 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 for like you know that that guy you know the 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 falsify some assumption that i have um like i talked to this dude who is in e-comm uh his name is zach and he just actually came out he just announced what his company is it's like um he told

46:39me on the phone he's like yeah i have this like you know 100 million dollar run rate supplement brand i was like what i never i didn't even know you're doing that i thought you had an agency and a socks are you talking about is this uh finn no it's uh it's something called like men go to mars or something like that i don't know what it is something something mars is in the name zach's duck is his name so he's like yeah dude i built this brand two in two 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 tangali and ashwagandha and stuff like that i think that's the idea

47:10do you see it yeah mar 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 stack founders acquired it's the most potent stack of testosterone 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 this in my body bro those are gummies

47:47but 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 but 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

48:1815 margins to 25 margins if ai gives us this productivity boost so i think i think he comes a great place to be and i was like i think you might be right i'm pretty convincing i i really have no counterpoints uh you know i fold and i think this thing that i've been telling myself for seven years uh might no longer be true and i should uh i should revisit that assumption yeah you're also not selling supplements that seems like the game uh dude 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

48:50who the hell are you gonna know on the back of the label because who knows

48:58it's just the middle finger it says we're not required studies show nothing it wasn't we couldn't tell does this should i i i think i want to put this stack in my body i think i'm 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 uh no i lift weights and lose fat i mean yeah that's what you do and eat red meat right like if you're eating like i feel like you have

49:31some niche ones too that you do i don't know what they are but i just one of my spidey sense is diggling a lot of people think that if you eat wild animals like uh 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 are you still sparring do you still fight at all i i got really into boxing and i loved it i got hit in the head a couple times that i had a headache for like seven days and i was like i think i should chill um but it was awesome sparring was that

50:03from our sparring session dude it it was it was that footage was it fun oh dude it was super fun but 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 you 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

50:35is 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 gonna 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 uh i think that definitely could help your testosterone go up for sure um but no i don't i mean i the good stuff comes in syringes if we're being honest but in a 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

51:08did i ever tell you i think after we had that sparring session i came home and i was like i'm gonna 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 and um but he had 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 timberlands just to show me he wasn't like hurting me uh but oh

51:43my god it was it was the most brutal workouts it only lasted seven days i'm just glad i didn't quit he disappeared he ghosted uh like he just like his phone line disconnected he's 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

52:14wear 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 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 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

52:45i'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 hormosi 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 this other way and i it's working pretty well for me i don't know what to call this but it's sort of like you could be jacked and run it's like oh that makes sense to me yeah everyone in austin's that way um all right that's it that's

53:19the pod 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 bolas 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

53:53email 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