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 stock boosting for founders. Yeah.
All right. So, Sam, I was in Austin last week and I was at a restaurant. So, we're sitting down at the table. A 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 and Sam blah blah blah." And I asked him, I go, "What's one thing you want us to talk about?" We're getting, we're almost a thousand 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 uh 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, yo, 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 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. And 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 I will mostly it sounds like I based off your oneline 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. So, yeah. Yeah. Circle that explains how Star Wars works and Harry Potter and all the great stories. They sort of start with the same structure. So this guy Joseph Campbell, he gave a lot of interviews about um his philosophy. And he had this better this phrase that I think is a little bit better. It 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 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% of people do not know their passion. 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 and I think about it all the time.
Yeah, I'm I'm with you. You're I'm always trying to figure it out. I'm perpetually reinventing myself and and starting from scratch and questioning what's going on and reinventing myself for better and for worse. That's been the place of some amazing things of some amazing changes in my life. But it's also a period of great uncertainty and sticking around in the fog of uncertainty sucks. It feels shitty when you're doing it. And 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 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 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 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 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 he said he kind of off-handedly it's attributed to him that he said I wish I had said follow your blisters instead. And what 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 along the way. And blisters, this idea of blisters is like on my hand right now. I've I have these blisters because I've been training for this Murf and I've been doing pull-ups all the time. So, my hands on both sides 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.
It's like a It takes you like two days to read this goddamn blog post, but it's great. And in it he has this one phrase that I remember which is let enthusiasm be not just the motor but the rudder of your boat. So basically enthusiasm is obviously 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?
And then the interest often irrational cuz 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 you went to the frontier of how to do this thing like best known best practices plus some experimental [ __ ]. 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 gang busters business. And we both invested in Hone Health, which is now, you know, over nine figures run rate. It's doing great. It's it's a wonderful business. And so, it's only when you're at the frontier do you notice gaps in, hm, there's not really a trusted brand for doing this, right? Or uh hm, 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 Ozmpic back before OMIC was even called Ompic. You were like, I'm taking semiglutide. 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 I'm kind of paying the price of uh your point making here.
Yeah. Or I could be friends with someone who's going to do all that [ __ ].
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 dayto-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 etmology of the word passion is?
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 love that? Yeah. Uh it stands for suffering. And uh and so the idea of bliss versus blister is interesting because blister 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.
Just do it. Do it. Don't love your job. Job you love. You know what I mean?
So, up until like you've heard of the guilded age. So, in the guilded age, that was where this idea of leisure time first got popular in America. And it was a sign of class, meaning if you were rich, then you would spend your days in a state of leisure. A man of leisure. Have you ever heard that phrase? That was a phrase that was invented in the late 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 the 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 the 1930 there was no vacation or there was no work weeks or work weekends. Did you know that?
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 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, um, not eight, but if we 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 197 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 there literally that was like the golden age of of leisure cuz 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?
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 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 often times significantly more discontent with their life there was a Cal Newport who wrote deep work he had this thing where he said passion is a byproduct of mastery and if you extend understand 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 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 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 re 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 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 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 cuz I'm real passionate about healthcare or I'm going to do um you know, I started this clothing business cuz 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 an oblivion. The time you spend on a product is very minimal. Like how much time would you say in whether it's Hampton or the hustle, how much time per day would you say you spend 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 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, uh, 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 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 ecom, I have an ecom 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, orchestrating 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're gonna spend most of your time doing is improving your SEO if that's the main growth channel. So I realized, oh, I should actually just figure out what type of what type of sales or growth mechanism I like and that's the constraint.
What do you like, by the way?
So for me, it's content. I was like, I like making content. And so I should pick things. I should pick games that content is the main way to make it grow. My second favorite is ads. I like ads, which is also content, but it's like the more payto-play scalable version of content. The thing I like the least is um 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 whining 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 them 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."
The 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 it's okay to lie.
Favorite my least favorite is the wooing of influencers. We did a streaming well 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 where I'm I'm metaphorically on my knees with this uh you know some 19-year-old streamer who's not not looking up from his phone and his manager who is you know his girlfriend is sitting next to me. They don't ask a single question. They're making more money than they know what to do with, making millions 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. I'm like he he just literally told me he was like, "I'm so tired of sucking." And 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 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.
All right. So my my phrase for this is you want to find a loop that you
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. 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. And I knew my passion was to be in sports medicine, to be an orthopedic surgeon. And I went and I actually, before I went to med school, I spent two weeks shadowing a 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 yet 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 you've 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, this emotionally tired of dealing with suffering all day. And I was like, do I have to do this just because I've been saying this since I was 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 on the whole and 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, and that's what you're going to do for the rest of time. So, like, do you like that? And so, there's many of these. A farmer has a loop, right? It goes with the seasons. You plant the seeds, you water them, 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 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 feel myself doing, you know, like more and more and more? I don't feel tired doing this. I get energy doing this. Yeah, 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 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 loop I love. And I've now been doing this podcast what, six years, something like that. And I'm 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, I think, 5 years ago. I told you about it when I read it. It's called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
