The Best Advice Ever?

Apr. 26, 2019

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“Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook agree: There Is One Thing That Separates Successful People From Everyone Else.”

This is a headline from an article from Inc.com by Marcel Schwantes.

And, before even clicking on it, it’s obvious whatever it says will be the most important thing I have ever read.

[reading…]

Hmm, here’s what it says.

Love what you do, do what you love.

This is the motto the smartest humans of all time agree on “without a shred of a doubt.”

That’s beautiful. That’s amazing. That’s…

[thinking…]

Kind of worthless.

It sounds awesome at first and it would indeed be fun to do what we love.

But quotes like this never address the most important question:

What if I don’t know what I love?

A lot of people don’t like their current jobs. They want something else.

But what?

How do I follow the geniuses’ advice?

They tell us to do what we love, but they never talk about how hard it is to find something we love.

Finding a passion is extraordinarily hard. It doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t just appear.

And the reason is that passion usually comes from laser-like focus (not mystical epiphanies).

First we are deeply committed to something, then we become passionate.

Take relationships, for example.

In a swipe-right mentality, there are so many options. She’s cute and she’s cute and she is, too.

When surrounded by so much cuteness, how do we ever start a deep romance?

If we’re just looking on the surface, we’ll bolt at the first sign of trouble. Why not? If this cute one isn’t fun anymore, why not try the other one?

And the exchanges don’t stop. We never get to the deep connection. We never get enough information, so we never know what to choose.

The passion eludes us.

The only solution is to dive all the way in. Pick something somewhat interesting, and then give it your undivided attention.

Once we do that, we’ll know for sure if we love it. We’ll move out of the neutral zone and into the certainty zone.

Deep commitment will lead to passion we didn’t know we had or to a definite feeling of dislike, which will lead to the next thing.

The geniuses only describe the truth after we’ve crossed the finish line, after we’ve already been doing work we love.

Finding what we love is the hard part.

And the only way to find what we love is to pick something and drown in it.

How do we find our passion?

One deep commitment at a time.

My book is called The Inevitability of Becoming Rich, and you can find that here.