When I started my first real company, I wasn’t passionate about the product. Not even a little.
I was selling LED lighting retrofits to hospitals and commercial buildings. I didn’t care about lumens or wattage or color temperature. I couldn’t have told you the difference between a ballast and a driver if you’d offered me a thousand dollars. And yet that business ended up on the Inc. 5000 list twice, on Entrepreneur magazine’s Entrepreneur 360, and generated a million dollars in EBITDA in a single year.
Somewhere out there, a career coach is telling a room full of college kids that none of that should have been possible. You’re supposed to find your passion first. Find the thing you love, and the success is supposed to follow. That’s the rule everybody repeats.
I broke the rule and built a multimillion-dollar company anyway. So did almost every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever interviewed. Here’s why.
The Advice Everybody Gives and Nobody Checks
“Follow your passion” is probably the most repeated career advice of the last fifty years. It’s in graduation speeches. It’s in the self-help books. It’s in your feed, tucked between the ads, delivered by somebody who read it in somebody else’s feed. It feels good to hear, which is a big part of why it spreads.
The trouble is that it rests on an assumption nobody bothers to test. The assumption is that passion is a thing you already have, buried somewhere inside you, waiting to be found. Like a diamond dropped in the sand. Find the right one, and everything else falls into place. Miss it, and you’re stuck doing work that was never meant for you.
Psychologists call this phenomenon a fixed theory of interest. And when researchers actually studied it, they found it predicts something. But it is not the thing you’d hope for.
What the Research Actually Found
Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton at Stanford, working with a psychologist named Paul O’Keefe, ran a series of five studies on exactly this question. Do people do better when they believe passion is fixed and waiting to be discovered, or when they believe passion is something you build over time?
In one of the studies, they showed a group of students a video about black holes. Most of them found it fascinating. Then the researchers handed those same students a dense, technical article on black holes, the kind that starts out readable and turns into equations about halfway down the page.
Here’s what happened. The students who believed their interests were fixed, the ones treating passion like a diamond to be discovered, lost interest the second the reading got hard. The students who believed interest was something you develop kept going.
Look at what actually happened there. If you believe passion is supposed to feel effortless, then the first time something gets hard, that difficulty feels like a signal. This must not be my thing. So you quit and go looking for the next shiny object. O’Keefe, Dweck, and Walton found that pattern held across every version of the study they ran. The belief that passion is fixed not only fails to help, it actually teaches people to give up.
Where the Word “Passion” Actually Comes From
Here’s an insight someone shared with me years ago that I cannot forget and makes all of this come into focus.
If you look at the origin of the word passion, you’ll find that it doesn’t come from a root word that means excitement or joy. It comes from a Latin word that means “willing to suffer…to endure”. It’s the same root behind the phrase “the Passion of the Christ,” which refers to his suffering, not his enthusiasm.
Think about that. For most of history, passion didn’t mean the thing that lights you up. It meant the thing you’re willing to suffer for. Somewhere along the way we swapped one meaning for the other, and we ended up with a soft, feel-good version of the word that falls apart the moment you put any weight on it.
I stumbled onto this while writing a book. Beginning in 2020, I started interviewing dozens of successful entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what they all had in common. I wasn’t chasing a theory. I just kept asking questions and looking for patterns. Five things showed up in every single conversation, and passion was the first one, every time…but not in the way most people define the word.
It turns on which meaning of the word you’re using. If “follow your passion” means chase what you’re enthusiastic about, what excites you, what tickles your fancy, then it’s terrible advice. But if passion means the thing you’re willing to suffer for, then following it is exactly right. Same word. Two completely different instructions.
That’s the split that showed up over and over. Sure, some of them had a natural enthusiasm for the product or service they sold. But that enthusiasm is not what made them successful. It’s not what let them build powerful companies and become the people they became. What did that was passion in the truest sense: a willingness to suffer through the grind of entrepreneurship, to keep building, to keep refining the thing until it finally became something they could actually enjoy. The enjoyment came second. The suffering came first, and the suffering is what predicted who’d make it.
The Kind of Passion That Actually Predicts Success
I wasn’t emotionally attached to LED lighting. I’ve told you that. What I was attached to was building something that mattered for my family and for the people who worked for me. That attachment held up through the boring parts, through the technical questions I couldn’t answer in a room full of facility managers, through the slow grind before any of it worked.
That’s the distinction that is easy to miss. You don’t need a spark for the specific product, service, or industry. You need the willingness to endure the unglamorous middle of building something, long before it ever gets fun.
Cal Newport wrote a whole book on this. He calls it the difference between a passion mindset and a craftsman mindset. The passion mindset asks what the world can do for you. The craftsman mindset asks what you can offer the world, and it treats skill as something you build through deliberate, patient work.
Steve Martin said it plainer than any researcher ever could. For years, young comedians asked him how to make it, hoping for a shortcut. His answer was always the same: be so good they can’t ignore you. In his own memoir, he adds up the math on his career. Eighteen years doing standup. Ten of them spent learning. Nobody watching his “overnight success” saw the decade of enduring that came first. That is where true passion hides.
Why This Bad Advice Refuses to Die
If the research is this clear, why does “follow your passion” keep getting repeated at every graduation in America?
Because it’s a better story than the truth. “I found my passion and everything clicked into place” sells more books and earns more applause than “I picked something ordinary, suffered through the boring stretch for a few years, and eventually got good enough to love it.” The first version flatters you. It tells you your magic thing is out there and you just haven’t found it yet. The second version asks you to start enduring something today, with no guarantee of a good feeling on the other side.
And that’s the golden cage hiding inside this one. The gold is the promise that somewhere out there is a perfect fit, and all you have to do is keep searching until you feel the spark. The cage is the paralysis that promise creates. People spend years hopping from idea to idea, waiting to feel it, while the folks who picked something plain and stuck with it long enough to get good are the ones quietly building real things.
The gold is the lie. The searching keeps you comfortable, and it keeps you trapped.
Build It. Don’t Wait to Find It.
If you’re sitting around waiting to feel something before you commit to your business, your craft, or your next move, you’ve got the order backwards.
Pick something. Not the perfect something. Just something that meets a real need and gives you room to get better at it. Then go endure the part nobody puts in the highlight reel. The gaps you have to fill in as you go. The seasons where the calendar looks nothing like you pictured. The stretch where you’re honestly not sure it’s working yet.
Now, there’s a difference between the hard stretch every builder walks through and a thing you were never willing to suffer for in the first place. The first one you push through. The second one, the thing you’ll never endure for no matter what, you’re allowed to walk away from. High achievers know when to lose early. The trick is being honest about which one you’re actually looking at.
Passion, in the true sense of the word, shows up on the far side of that endurance. Not before it. You don’t find it lying around. You build it, one uncomfortable rep at a time.
Words of Wisdom
“The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labor.” – Proverb 21:25
Wanting something has never built anything. The sluggard in that proverb isn’t short on desire. He’s got plenty of it. What he won’t do is put his hands to the work. That reveals the huge gap between the people who wait to find their passion and the people who build it.
What to Do Next
I mentioned that five things showed up in every successful entrepreneur I interviewed. Passion, defined the right way, was only the first one. The other four are just as important, and most people are missing at least one of them without realizing it.
I put all five in a short ebook called The Five Indisputable Keys of Success. If you want it, it’s yours, free. No form to fill out, no hoops to jump through. Just reply to this week’s newsletter and ask, and I’ll send you the PDF directly.
And if you’d rather talk through where you actually are and what’s keeping you stuck, you can book a call with me directly at therealjasonduncan.com/talk.
– The Real Jason Duncan