“Follow Your Passion” is Terrible Advice

I built a company that made millions of dollars. And I couldn't have cared less about what it actually sold. Everybody told me that was impossible. They were wrong.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast. Today's episode is a Wednesday Special Edition. Every week I write a newsletter called What's Real? where I expose the lies most people believe and reveal the truths they were never taught. And every Wednesday, I bring that week's edition to you in audio, right here. Because the most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like golden cages. They look like success. The most successful people are the most deceived, because the lies that trap them look like achievements. That's what this whole show is about. On Mondays I sit down with somebody who believed one of those lies and discovered the truth the hard way. Wednesdays, like today, I bring you the Wednesday Special Edition. Either way, the mission is the same. Go to therealjasonduncan.com/articles and subscribe for free to get the What's Real? newsletter delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles - link is in the show notes. This week's post is called "Follow Your Passion Is Terrible Advice."

So let me tell you about that company.

It was LED lighting. Commercial retrofits, mostly. We'd go into a hospital or a warehouse, pull out the old fluorescent tubes, and put in LEDs that saved the building owner a fortune on their power bill. Good business. It landed on the Inc. five thousand list twice, and one year it made a million dollars in profit.

And I was not passionate about LED lighting. At all. Still not. In my first year I couldn't have told you what a ballast was if you'd offered me a thousand dollars.

So according to just about every career coach and graduation speaker in America, that company never should have worked. Because the rule everybody repeats is that you find your passion first, and then the success follows.

I broke that rule. And so did almost every successful entrepreneur I've ever interviewed.

Here's the trouble with "follow your passion." It assumes your passion is a thing you already have. Buried somewhere inside you. Just waiting to be found, like a diamond dropped in the sand. Find the right one, and everything falls into place. Miss it, and you're stuck doing work that was never meant for you.

Well, some researchers at Stanford actually tested that idea. They took a group of students and showed them a video about black holes. Almost everybody found it fascinating. Then they handed those same students a dense, technical article on black holes, the kind that starts out readable and turns into equations halfway down the page.

And here's what they found. The students who believed their interests were fixed, the ones treating passion like a diamond to go discover, they lost interest the second the reading got hard. The students who believed interest is something you build? They kept going.

Think about what that means. If you believe passion is supposed to feel easy, then the first time something gets difficult, that difficulty feels like a sign. "Guess this isn't my thing." So you quit, and you go looking for the next shiny object.

Now, let me show you something that reframes this whole thing. Where does the word "passion" even come from?

It does not come from a root word that means excitement, or joy. It comes from a Latin word that means 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.

For most of human history, passion didn't mean the thing that lights you up. It meant the thing you're willing to suffer for.

And that's the whole game right there. Because if "follow your passion" means chase whatever excites you, whatever 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.

I started interviewing successful people back in twenty twenty, trying to figure out what they had in common. And this split showed up every single time. Sure, some of them had a real enthusiasm for what they sold. But that enthusiasm is not what made them successful. What made them successful was that they were willing to suffer through the grind of building something, long before it ever got fun. The enjoyment came second. The suffering came first.

So what do you do with that?

If you're sitting around waiting to feel something before you commit, 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. And then go endure the part nobody puts in the highlight reel.

Now, I want to be fair here, because there's a flip side. There's a difference between the hard stretch every builder walks through, and a thing you were just never willing to suffer for in the first place. The first one, you push through. The second one, you're allowed to walk away from. High achievers know when to lose early. The trick is being honest with yourself about which one you're actually looking at.

But passion, in the true sense of the word, it 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.

There's a proverb that nails this. Proverbs, chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-five. It says, "The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labor." See, the sluggard isn't short on desire. He's got plenty of it. What he won't do is put his hands to the work. And that right there is the whole gap between the people who wait to find their passion, and the people who build it.

So that's what's real this week. Stop waiting to feel it. Go build something worth feeling passionate about, and let the passion catch up.

If this one hit home and you want to go deeper on it, I'd love to talk. Head over to therealjasonduncan.com/talk and book a call with me directly. That link's in the show notes too.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

The gold is the lie. As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.