Speaker A
This is a video I'm making for the young man who stopped me on the street of Rodeo Drive and said that he had made $80,000 doing sales, and he stopped because he was no longer passionate about it.
A candid discussion on passion, business challenges, and why pursuing passion alone isn't enough for success.
Key Takeaways
- Passion alone is insufficient for business success; most work will be unglamorous and challenging.
- Scaling a passion-based business often means doing many tasks unrelated to the passion itself.
- True passion work without scaling means doing only what you love but limits growth and income potential.
- Success requires embracing discomfort, persistence, and problem-solving beyond just following passion.
- It is acceptable to make money doing one thing and be passionate about another.
What the video covers
- The video responds to a young man who made $80,000 in sales but lost passion and asked for life advice.
- The speaker shares his own journey from management consulting to building a $46 million fitness business.
- He explains the challenges of turning passion into profit, including repetitive tasks and unglamorous business duties.
- The speaker highlights that most business activities related to passion are often tedious and not enjoyable.
- He emphasizes that true passion work means doing a narrow set of tasks without scaling, which is rare.
- Making money often involves doing things unrelated to passion, such as logistics, sales, and accounting.
- The speaker warns against using passion as an excuse to avoid hard work and discomfort.
- He stresses the importance of consistent execution, problem-solving, and embracing difficulties in business.
- The video challenges the simplistic notion of 'follow your passion' and offers a realistic perspective.
- Ultimately, success requires tolerating hardship and making tough decisions beyond just passion.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and initial question from young man
- 01:04Speaker's fitness business journey and $46M exit
- 02:01Transition from nonprofit to for-profit fitness business
- 02:55Challenges of running a gym and repetitive work
- 04:11Scaling gyms, licensing, and supplement company
- 05:20Reality of pursuing passion in business
- 07:28Unpleasant business tasks beyond passion
- 11:31Why passion is a poor filter for business success
- 13:03Only way to purely do passion is no scaling
- 15:53Final thoughts: embracing hardship and realistic success
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And you asked me, "What should I do with my life?"
Speaker A
And I didn't have time to answer you when I was walking, but I wanted to give you a longer answer right now.
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You said you stopped because you didn't think sales was your passion.
Speaker A
And what really got me thinking about that is that I actually was in your position. I had a management consulting job. I saved up $50,000 from that job.
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And then I said, I'm not passionate about this. I'm going to go do something that I am passionate about, which at the time was fitness.
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And for those of you who are new to my channel, I took fitness and went full cycle all the way to a $46 million exit.
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But I want to give you the steps in between there and tell you how it actually ended up today because fitness is still a passion of mine.
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So then why don't I do it as my business?
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I was a consultant, right? And I did the same thing, and I was miserable.
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And so then I started the free training project, which was like a nonprofit where I just did people's workouts for them.
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And I was like, "Oh, this is cool."
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And then I figured maybe I could do this for profit. Like, wouldn't that be the dream? Never work another day in my life.
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And what was interesting is that as more and more customers came in, I started to get tired of actually making so many programs.
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And so then I was like, maybe if I just start a gym, that's the real deal, right?
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And so then I signed a lease, put all the money I had into getting this gym going.
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And it was the hardest thing that I've ever done. I came into it thinking that I'd be training like the star athletes, right?
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But I wasn't. I actually found out I was training lots of moms who wanted to lose weight and didn't really care that much about fitness.
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And even in the few moments where I had just maybe one person that showed an inkling of interest in fitness to the degree that I was, it still got kind of boring because I ended up having to do the same thing over and over and over again.
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And so the difficult part with that specific part of my passion journey is that I couldn't get out of it because I already signed a lease, right?
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I had to just keep going.
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The reason I'm making this is because your passions and your interests are often incredibly narrow.
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And addiction is a narrowing of things that bring you joy. Fulfillment is a broadening of them. Fast forward.
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So then I scale up the gyms, and then I start doing turnarounds, flying across the country, filling up other people's gyms because I really got good at marketing and sales.
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Then I licensed that model, 6,000 locations. I started a supplement company, sold through that distribution base.
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And then I sold all of that to private equity at a $46.2 million valuation.
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And the reason that I find this so interesting is that today I still love fitness, and I don't talk about it because I actually don't want it to mix with my life in a weird way.
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Like it's this kind of like holy grail for me. And I have an amazing HQ job.
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And so then it begs the question, wait a second, why don't you do your passion?
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Because if you did your passion, you wouldn't work another day in your life.
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And it's just a very simplistic and inaccurate view of the world.
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There's only one way that you will truly be able to only do your passion.
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It means that you would only do this very narrow thing, right? For me at the time, it was training more advanced athletes who liked powerlifting and had the same work capacity and schedule as me, who were willing to pay me tons of money to do it.
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Right? In order to get those people, you have to do a lot of stuff that is not that to get them.
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The vast majority of your time will not be anything that you're passionate about.
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And if that's the case, even when you're pursuing your passion, and I'm saying this as someone who's gone full cycle with this, I now have a gym that has no memberships, and it is not for profit.
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And I'm saying this that it is okay to make money doing one thing and be passionate about another.
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And I recently filmed something where I was showing my home gym to Coupe from Garage Gym Reviews. Shout out to Coupe.
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Great guy. If you're into home gyms, you should check out his channel. Not affiliated.
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And he asked if I would invest in an equipment business. And the answer is yes, but not because it's a passion.
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I do have a deep interest, and I know a lot about it, but like think about what it really means to own an equipment company.
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I got to source metals. I'm not really passionate about that.
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I got to figure out logistics. Not really passionate about that.
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I'm going to probably have to go reach out to different influencers and get them to start using my pieces and sending it out to them and getting feedback on it. Not really a passion.
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But all of those things are required to build this business around the thing that I'm passionate about.
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And so the reason I'm making this is that most of the stuff sucks even if it starts as something you love.
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The passion is a very bad judgment filter. Everything within a business, especially if you're the owner, will suck because business is a funneling mechanism of the hardest and worst problems related to the thing that you supposedly love.
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Elon Musk talks about this where he says there are problems that are too hard for anyone else to solve or problems that are too painful that no one else either can't solve it or they don't want to solve it.
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And so you have this idea, I'm going to pursue what I'm passionate about. I'm going to paint paintings all day. Even then, quickly you're going to be outpaced by the amount of paintings that you can probably produce.
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And so I said there's only one way that you can truly do the passion is that you do not scale.
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You choose to make paint your painting. You choose to make your wallets. You choose to do your level of consulting or whatever it is.
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And you only do the amount that you feel like doing, and you only do it when you feel like doing it.
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And you're so good at doing that that people come and spend more and more money with you, and you just increase your prices.
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That is the only way that I can conceive someone would actually purely do only what they're passionate about and still be able to make a living.
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Now, collecting the payments, still doing the sales, setting up the website, paying your taxes, doing the accounting, sourcing materials, going on the things to go get the inspiration, none of that is probably stuff you're passionate about.
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And so, I say this because it's not true. Pursue your passion is only true in the vague and never in the specific.
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When you actually play it out, when you stop just believing the stuff saying and just think, what does this really mean, it doesn't pencil.
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And I only say this as somebody who went all the way with it.
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All right? I was into fitness, and I started the gyms, and I scaled the gyms, and I did the turnarounds, and I scaled to 6,000 locations.
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I started the supplement company. I started the software company, sold all of it to private equity.
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I did the whole thing, and what do I have today? A gym that has no members, and I love it, but it's not what I make money on.
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And I say this because you are fooling yourself. You're using the excuse of passion to disguise your inability to tolerate hardness.
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And so a huge amount of success really comes down to just executing day in and day out and solving problems intelligently and making decisions that are harder short term and easier long term and sitting in the discomfort of unsolved problems that aren't the biggest problems of the day.
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That is how you grow a business.
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And so your passion likely won't get you very far. Chris Rock has a great saying. He says,
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"Follow your dreams if they're hiring."
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And so, you have to embrace how much it will suck and put yourself.
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No, you just have to get used to eating [ __ ] because it is your duty. because you made a decision and you made a commitment to the people that you love that you want to provide for them. Now,
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if you're not somebody who provides for anyone yet and you just provide for you, amazing. And at some point in your entrepreneurial journey, you're going to have other people's families who rely on your decisions. You can't take days off
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because it's not about you anymore. It's about everyone, even in the the first levels, the people who work for you. You should hopefully be even closer to them than you are to the customers that you ultimately serve. Zooming back out,
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listen to every mega successful entrepreneur. The ones who are honest will tell you one thing across the board is it sucked and it sucked for way longer than I thought it would suck and it sucked way worse than I expected it
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would. I don't even like saying passion. Interests get you started. Proficiency keeps you going, but pain tolerance helps you finish. And so I can only say this about me, which is that I was so afraid of failing that I know that I
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would have kept going until someone physically prevented me. And so Phil Knight tells the story in Shoe Dog where he says, "You're not out of business when your bank account runs out." He said, "You're out of business when you
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have padlocks on your door and people physically stop you from doing work." The main point of this is that the rules society pretends to have, they are made up. Until someone physically restrains you from working, you can keep going.
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The vast majority of people stop because of perceived failure in their mind. And I love this quote by Jaco Willick. He said, "All failure besides death is psychological.
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It's literally made up stakes with madeup goal lines that we decide that we fell short of. But we were the ones who decided where to draw the line. And so to the same degree to that young man who
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quit sales early in the career cuz he wanted to find something he's passionate about. The reality is that it doesn't matter what path he chooses to take. All of them will include tons of stuff that he will hate doing and that he will have
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to keep doing for extended periods of time. And that in the pain of having to do these repeated things that you are not enjoying, what do you think you do?
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You try and figure out better ways to do them so that you hate them less. And what do you think that is? It's called getting better. The skill deficiency that you might have and that this young man might have, that many people have is
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something called frustration tolerance. It's the number of times that you can be rejected and try again. And here's the best part. It's learnable, which means it's a skill. So, let me give you an example. So, think of the guy at the
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club who tries to make out with every girl. In romance, very cringy. Do not do that. But in business, if no one knows how many times you go up to the next door and you knock on the next thing or
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you send the next email, you're bound to find an opportunity, which the reason the guy in the club still does that is because when he does it, eventually a door opens.
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He wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't work. As cringey as that may sound, but one of the early lessons that I wish someone had told me, and I want to transfer it to you now, is that when you
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start, you will be cringey as [ __ ] You will be awkward. You will be weird.
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People will look at you, the people you're friends with, people you're dating, hopefully not for long, will will make you feel like you're being not cool. And the reality is they're right.
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Because when you start, you will suck. and you will have no reputation. You will have no track record. And is that a reason to not do it if you're a loser? Yes. Because it means that you care more about their
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disappointment in you than your own disappointment in you. And some people never care enough about their own opinion that they let everyone else's opinions literally rule the rest of their lives. And these are people who won't even be at your funeral.
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people who you're going to you went to high school with, people you went to college with, people that you're co-workers.
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You know, there's probably right now in your head you're like, "Oh, what would other people say?" There's probably only four people, three people whose opinions you actually care about, might even just be one. And if you can stop saying other
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people or thinking about this vagueness of it and get really specific and say, "What's the name of the person? Whose actual voice am I hearing?" If you then just get to ask the question, is this person's opinion of how I live my life
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going to be the most important thing that I spend the next 80 years listening to? If the answer is yes, then I mean, more power to you. But I don't know about you, I wouldn't want the one voice
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that I'm listening to for the rest of my life be some random dude that I worked with or my uncle that said something or my dad or my mom or your sister, whatever. Because the only real voice that you actually have to listen to
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that's not made up is yours. You need frustration tolerance. Sitting in the unknown with the confidence that you will continue to try because it is solvable even though you don't know how to solve it yet. It just comes down to
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that. It comes down to knocking on more doors. It comes down to trying to build the web page again when there's a bug and it doesn't work. It comes down to spending money on ads even though it doesn't give you any ROI, saving up your
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money and doing it again. It comes to posting another video even though you got negative comments or people are like, "Maybe you should try something else." Hey, they're just doing it because they they care about you.
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They're doing it because they they want the best for you. They don't want you to pursue this path and it's, you know, you're really not meant for it, right?
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Of course, you're not [ __ ] meant for it. You just started. Of course, you're not good. How do you think anyone gets good? You suck for a long time and you get a little bit better until you suck
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so little that you're actually good. And that sucking period, slow down, takes a long time. It takes a long time to get through that. And that is frustration tolerance. How many times can you do the same thing without reward, without
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reinforcement, and keep going? That is the hard part because it's very difficult to observe that. We just had somebody who started on our YouTube team and he said it's a different thing. He's like, "I've watched all your videos.
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I've seen all your stuff." He said, "It's a different energy being here at 4:00 a.m. and then seeing you at 4:00 a.m. here and then being here on Sunday at 4 and seeing you at 4:00 and seeing that every single day." And to be clear,
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I'm not always there at 4. I'm there at 4, sometimes 5:00, sometimes 6. All right? But every single day, seeing that, he was like, it really shifted my perspective in terms of like, he's like, "You're where you're at now and you're
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still working like this." I bring this up to say that like it is far more politically correct and convenient for me when someone asks what's your advice to someone who's starting out is to say follow your passion. And it's because no
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one will fight you. And because you can't say I was smarter than most people. That's not correct. Can't say that. You can't say I had advantages.
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They were given to me. That's not going to really fly super well. I mean it'll be okay. You can't say I was just pure luck. Can't say that. And so they default to something that every everyone just like move on with your life when
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you say follow something you're passionate about. I I think I've gotten to a point and this is a weird transition that I'm in right now being honest where I I I I really I think my like I mean I still have some [ __ ] to
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give but a huge [ __ ] just went out the back door. I really do not need to do this at all financially. Zero.
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And I think about, well, I have to do something for the rest of my life. And I would like it to be something that helps other people in some way. And so, I'm willing to be hated for some stances
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that I take that I believe to be true, even though they are unpopular. And even if they make me look cringe for saying them, which is that you have to learn to suffer and you have to learn to suffer for
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something that you deem worth suffering for. And I don't know of anything more valuable to suffer for than the person that you ultimately want to become, the man that you want to become, the woman that you want to become.
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And when I think about that man, I think about how much suffering would that man have to go through to become the person that I envision.
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Is it the amount of suffering that I've been through? Not even close. But that means that I have to go through even more than I've been through right now to become that person. And so I then think, okay, well, is there an alternative
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path? What if I just stop gassing it now? What if I just stop making videos?
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I don't have to deal with any of these comments. I don't have to deal with any of the hate videos that I get made, right? I don't have to deal with the people calling me fake guru or grifter.
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Like I [ __ ] like all my go grab it. It's free. All right. I wouldn't have to deal with any of that.
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But then I think about that man that I want to be and him looking looking at me looking back into today.
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Would he be proud of that decision? And the answer is no. And then that shame that I feel for not living up to that man's standards is what gets me back in the ring. And so I don't know
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what that man or that woman looks like for you. And if you already are that person, more power to you. But most of the people that I talk to, especially a lot of the young men that I talk to,
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they feel like they're very far away from the man that they want to be. And what they have not learned is the amount of pain and frustration that you will have to go through on a consistent basis in order to become that person. And I'm
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not saying that cuz it will always be ahead of you, right? Like you will never meet your potential. Like until you die, you won't know, right? And once you're dead, you won't know either because you'll be dead. But I think the goals
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that are worth pursuing are goals that we cannot achieve while we are alive. I think this whole follow your passion thing is almost like the Hollywood love story movies, right? It's very convenient. It fits within a 90minute story arc, but at the end of every one
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of the fairy tales, now they're married. Now they've got 50 years together and he doesn't like picking up his socks and she wants to have her own career, but he wants support in his career. So, how are they going to reconcile those
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differences? Right? Reality. And to be clear, I don't think people who say follow your passion have any melon in all. And I think that also when you look back on your own career, you have rosecolored glasses and you think, "Oh,
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I'm so glad. I love what I went through." It's like, "No, no, no. Nostalgia is memory minus pain." So, think about your life when you're like, "Oh, nostalgia. I remember when we used to live here." It's like, "Yeah, you
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were stressed out of your [ __ ] mind because we had to pay rent every month.
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That's what I remember when we lived here. Oh, I remember when we were young and broke. Those are the good old days." It's like, yeah, if you forget about the fact that you were constantly in existential dread, didn't know what you
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were doing, had no skills that you had that you could trade for any appreciable amount of money, working all the hours that you had, and still not really making any meaningful progress, sacrificing the few things that you could have had with your youth to have
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something that is completely unknown in the future, all off the idea of just some hope or dream that you have that it might work out in someday in the future.
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And everyone questioning you and you questioning yourself the whole way because you're like, am I being delusional? I'm the only person of the people that I know that's even trying to do this. And you will be different because you want to live a different
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life than them. And that makes sense. It's just difficult because you will be in the minority. And most of your life, most of our lives as humans, we are taught to do what the pack does. The whole class gets in line, you get in
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line, right? If the whole class gets up to leave the class, you get you leave class. Whole class goes to lunch, you go to lunch, you go to recess, right? You do everything together. Being the odd man out is not fun. It's out group. It
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literally was a survival mechanism. But you have to go against that very hard wiring to become the man or woman that I think you ultimately want to be. Or at least for me, that's what I had to do.
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And so to that young man that I that that stopped me on Rodeo Drive, is sales your life path? I don't know. Is it wholesaling? Is it real estate? Is it starting a marketing agency? I don't know. But what I do know is that every
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single one of those paths you can be successful on. I also know that every single one of those paths will suck and will take longer than you expect they will. And I also know that every single winner that I have ever spoken to, I can
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see in them that they have one thing, which is that they will just keep [ __ ] going. They will not know what's going to happen next and they will keep going. They will fail and they will try
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again. And there's something incredibly dangerous about being the type of man that no matter what happens, your competitors know that you will not stop because there's literally nothing they can do unless you get killed. Besides that, they know that you're going to get
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up and try again. And when you try that many times for the rest of your life on one thing, you tend to get pretty [ __ ] good at it. And when you get pretty [ __ ] good at something, you
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become very hard to stop. Hopefully that helps you which is pick a path and commit to the path because the person you want to be is at the end of it and everything between you now and that man
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then is the pain that you have to learn to get through and by the time you learn how to get through that pain you will be that
Topics:passionbusiness adviceentrepreneurshipfitness businesssales careerscaling businesshard workproblem solvingexecutive advicecareer guidance
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