Confronting The Rock & Joe Rogan On The Advice of "Follow Your Passion" | Cal Newport
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0:0 0:00:00:00.000 | uh, interview between Joe Rogan and the rock Dwayne, the rock Johnson, the rock is an interesting
00:00:08.880 | character. So this interview caught my attention. Um, one of the reasons why I'm interested in the
00:00:14.160 | rock and Jesse, you just probably won't surprise you is that, um, I'm often confused for the rock,
00:00:21.200 | right? Like this happens a lot. Like people will be like, oh yeah. Um, I saw you interviewed on
00:00:27.200 | the rocks podcast. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. I was on a Cal Newport show. Yeah. And it's
00:00:32.080 | just, you know, it's a physical stature thing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's probably been your,
00:00:36.080 | uh, garage gym. Yeah. You know, like people will come by and be like, oh, cool, man. Like
00:00:39.760 | the new ports have the rock working out in the garage gym. No, no, no, it's me. It's Cal like,
00:00:44.560 | oh, we were thrown because of the similarities in your physical workout. My Hemsworth also is,
00:00:52.240 | I'm interested in Chris Hemsworth because all, you know, this happens a lot. Like I'll be picking
00:00:55.200 | my kids up from school and people be like, Thor, like, no, no, no, that's, that's Chris Hemsworth.
00:01:00.640 | Anyways. So I was listening to, um, this interview with, with Joe Rogan and the rock,
00:01:05.440 | and they had a discussion early on that I wanted to bring up. All right. So early on,
00:01:11.760 | they were talking about the importance of having some sort of passion that you pursue.
00:01:19.280 | And this was in the context of a discussion of, you know, some people have it hard
00:01:23.200 | and you're kind of grinding day to day. And they're saying like, in this situation,
00:01:26.800 | you'd need something you're going after something you're getting after that. You have this passion
00:01:31.440 | that you're pursuing, that you can focus your energy on. Otherwise you just get stuck with
00:01:35.280 | you're on social media all day. You're eating crap. You're drinking all the time. It's the,
00:01:40.320 | having some sort of passion to pursue. They were, they were presenting this in the context of life,
00:01:45.520 | not just in the context of work as a necessary component to sort of avoiding all the traps.
00:01:52.880 | That can really trap a lot of people these days into a life of resentment or disappointment.
00:01:58.560 | So I wanted to tackle this a little bit, right? Because you could see this idea as maybe
00:02:05.120 | contradicting my book. So good. They can't ignore you, which was arguing against the common Maxim.
00:02:12.160 | Follow your passion. So let's, let's put these two next to each other. So good. They can't ignore you.
00:02:19.440 | And the idea as spoken by my doppelganger, doing the rock Johnson, that passion is the key
00:02:24.400 | to actually escaping a shallow life. Well, here's the thing I believe after listening
00:02:33.200 | to this interview, and I want to clarify this, we're highly aligned on this because what the
00:02:39.120 | rock and Joe Rogan were talking about, what they did not say, if you listen to this interview,
00:02:42.560 | what they did not say was right now, I want you to think really hard today and figure out your
00:02:50.240 | one true passion and then go after it. That's not what they said. What the rock was saying instead
00:02:56.320 | is you need to have that. The pursuit of something you're passionate about is going to free you,
00:03:01.360 | but he did not say where that pursuit actually came from. He did not say that you identify that
00:03:07.040 | passion easily. And from the very beginning, and we know that in part, because we can look at the
00:03:11.520 | life of Dwayne Johnson himself, and he gets into this in this interview, the haphazardness,
00:03:17.600 | or should we say the randomness with which the early stages of his path to where he is today
00:03:24.000 | actually unfolded. When he talked about football, that was going to be his thing. Not everyone
00:03:29.600 | knows this about Dwayne Johnson, but he was a relatively successful college football player.
00:03:33.920 | He's a big guy, but he knew at some point he realized that wasn't going to be his ticket.
00:03:39.920 | He wasn't quite good enough. And when you play at the high level, you get that sense. He didn't have
00:03:43.920 | what it would take to succeed at the NFL level, so then he gets into wrestling. But this for a while
00:03:48.720 | is really not a great situation. He talked about wrestling at bars and selling his headshot for
00:03:56.960 | $5 a piece just to make enough money that he could buy a sandwich. It was a random unfolding of
00:04:03.840 | things that got him to eventually a point where he pursues his life with a lot of passion.
00:04:09.600 | So he didn't identify a passion in advance, but lives his life with a lot of passion.
00:04:12.720 | So what lesson do we extrapolate that from for the rest of us? Well, the idea that I uncover
00:04:16.800 | in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is that passion is something that you cultivate,
00:04:21.280 | not something that you discover. Passion is not, I do some reflection and I figure out this is what
00:04:28.320 | I'm passionate about. It's something you cultivate. And how do you cultivate it? Well, you cultivate
00:04:33.200 | it with discipline. You cultivate it with curiosity. It's a combination of those two things.
00:04:40.720 | You're curious, you're engaged in the world and options and what's possible. Through this
00:04:45.360 | curiosity, you find something like this could be interesting. Let me pursue it with discipline.
00:04:49.440 | And through the discipline pursuit is where you learn, is this thing building momentum or is it
00:04:54.800 | a dead end? Curiosity plus discipline. And when something starts to click, you up the discipline,
00:05:01.920 | you up the intensity. And over time that blossoms into passion. And so we see this in the Rock's
00:05:08.880 | path. He goes from football into wrestling, the wrestling is not going well. He makes some
00:05:13.040 | changes, gets involved with WWE and suddenly things are really starting to click. And he
00:05:18.480 | gives that full intense discipline, really develops his body, develops himself as someone
00:05:23.680 | able to play characters. And he begins to pursue his life with this particular goal with a real
00:05:30.560 | passion. That passion then is what carried him from that and the movies and all the other things
00:05:34.960 | he's involved with today. That was a passion that was cultivated from discipline and curiosity.
00:05:38.720 | That I think is the lesson probably if we sat them down here. If we got Joe and The Rock,
00:05:46.160 | I don't know if they'd accept an invitation, but we should send it out. Hey, Joe and The Rock,
00:05:49.040 | come on by the Deep Work HQ. Come on into the studio. We'll talk to you. I think they would
00:05:54.080 | agree with this. And certainly I think Dwayne Johnson would probably agree with this.
00:05:58.000 | Yeah, it's not about I know in advance what I'm supposed to do. It's about approaching the things
00:06:02.640 | that you think might be worth doing with enough discipline that you have the opportunity for that
00:06:08.560 | to cultivate and blossom into passion. If that's a possibility. We discover and develop passion
00:06:16.080 | over time. We don't find it through a short moment of self-reflection. So I really like this idea
00:06:22.720 | that the discipline, passion, pursuit of things is critical for the deep life. But nuancing that
00:06:29.120 | with you don't get there by starting with the passion. You actually start with the discipline
00:06:32.720 | and the curiosity. And if you're doing that right, the passion will come later.
00:06:36.800 | I'm not done with that interview yet. Yeah, I'm going to check it out.
00:06:41.360 | I started listening to it yesterday while I was exercising. And that caught my attention.
00:06:46.480 | I don't know what happens later in the interview.
00:06:49.680 | When he talked about Rogan and the raw coming to the HQ for guests, it reminded me of how
00:06:55.680 | Mad Dog always talks about, I mean, he gets a lot of guests, but he puts in calls like Kyle Shan and
00:07:01.920 | Dave Campbell, like some big time NFL coaches. He just calls us to see?
00:07:04.400 | Well, I mean, he has his guys do it, but a lot of them just say no. I mean, he's got a lot of
00:07:09.200 | good guests on, but he always makes jokes about how, "Yeah, yeah, we got the call into Kyle."
00:07:15.200 | Got the call. I bet we would get a 10% of the big time. If we regularly invited big time guests,
00:07:21.520 | I think we'd be surprised. I think like 10% of the people we invited might come,
00:07:26.480 | but we just don't ask because we don't do a lot of interviews. I don't think The Rock would come,
00:07:30.800 | but you never know. That's like the weird thing about it. You never know like, oh, this particular
00:07:34.640 | celebrity turns out to secretly be a fan. I forgot about this, my agent, because we were doing
00:07:42.160 | publicity stuff for the new book. I forgot about this, but it turns out like Michelle Pfeiffer
00:07:47.840 | is a fan of Deep Work. Oh, really?
00:07:50.800 | It's like a random thing. She posted a photo of it years ago or something I'd forgotten about it. So
00:07:54.720 | you never know. So like Michelle Pfeiffer likes Deep Work. We know Rory McIlroy, McIlroy, whatever
00:08:00.560 | his name is. He's a big digital minimalism guy, right? The golfer. He plays the golfs. So you
00:08:06.800 | never know. So we could have Michelle and Rory. Yep. Yep. They can both come on the show. I was
00:08:13.120 | thinking we should invite Schwarzenegger because he has the book out. Yeah. I bet we have like a
00:08:16.960 | 20% chance he would come. Plus I think he's kind of bored. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Yeah.
00:08:20.800 | I mean, he did Ryan's show. He's been a lot. He's been a lot of shit. He's on Ferris again. I read
00:08:24.800 | his book the other day. Yeah. How was it? I mean, it was fine. I would recommend his
00:08:31.120 | autobiography. Yeah, I've read that. Yeah. His autobiography, you're going to get the same. I
00:08:34.640 | mean, it's longer, but it's way more. I think you're going to get the same lessons and it's
00:08:38.160 | like a better book. But wait, if we're going to invite him, I shouldn't say that. I loved his new
00:08:42.320 | book. Let's get him on. Let's get him on the show. Oh, well, in the meantime, he smokes stogies.
00:08:48.240 | He smokes stogies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What's Zoe going to think? And we have
00:08:52.560 | Arnold in here smoking stogies. We probably have to go outside. But you know what? The
00:08:57.360 | Chinese healer across the hall does those weird oils that like they have a pretty distinct smell
00:09:03.280 | at the whole floor. Sounds like so why can't we have Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking stogies on our
00:09:07.840 | HQ? Zoe's are the super people are wondering for the building. All right. That's going to be our
00:09:14.640 | thing. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.