uh, interview between Joe Rogan and the rock Dwayne, the rock Johnson, the rock is an interesting character. So this interview caught my attention. Um, one of the reasons why I'm interested in the rock and Jesse, you just probably won't surprise you is that, um, I'm often confused for the rock, right?

Like this happens a lot. Like people will be like, oh yeah. Um, I saw you interviewed on the rocks podcast. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. I was on a Cal Newport show. Yeah. And it's just, you know, it's a physical stature thing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's probably been your, uh, garage gym.

Yeah. You know, like people will come by and be like, oh, cool, man. Like the new ports have the rock working out in the garage gym. No, no, no, it's me. It's Cal like, oh, we were thrown because of the similarities in your physical workout. My Hemsworth also is, I'm interested in Chris Hemsworth because all, you know, this happens a lot.

Like I'll be picking my kids up from school and people be like, Thor, like, no, no, no, that's, that's Chris Hemsworth. Anyways. So I was listening to, um, this interview with, with Joe Rogan and the rock, and they had a discussion early on that I wanted to bring up.

All right. So early on, they were talking about the importance of having some sort of passion that you pursue. And this was in the context of a discussion of, you know, some people have it hard and you're kind of grinding day to day. And they're saying like, in this situation, you'd need something you're going after something you're getting after that.

You have this passion that you're pursuing, that you can focus your energy on. Otherwise you just get stuck with you're on social media all day. You're eating crap. You're drinking all the time. It's the, having some sort of passion to pursue. They were, they were presenting this in the context of life, not just in the context of work as a necessary component to sort of avoiding all the traps.

That can really trap a lot of people these days into a life of resentment or disappointment. So I wanted to tackle this a little bit, right? Because you could see this idea as maybe contradicting my book. So good. They can't ignore you, which was arguing against the common Maxim.

Follow your passion. So let's, let's put these two next to each other. So good. They can't ignore you. And the idea as spoken by my doppelganger, doing the rock Johnson, that passion is the key to actually escaping a shallow life. Well, here's the thing I believe after listening to this interview, and I want to clarify this, we're highly aligned on this because what the rock and Joe Rogan were talking about, what they did not say, if you listen to this interview, what they did not say was right now, I want you to think really hard today and figure out your one true passion and then go after it.

That's not what they said. What the rock was saying instead is you need to have that. The pursuit of something you're passionate about is going to free you, but he did not say where that pursuit actually came from. He did not say that you identify that passion easily. And from the very beginning, and we know that in part, because we can look at the life of Dwayne Johnson himself, and he gets into this in this interview, the haphazardness, or should we say the randomness with which the early stages of his path to where he is today actually unfolded.

When he talked about football, that was going to be his thing. Not everyone knows this about Dwayne Johnson, but he was a relatively successful college football player. He's a big guy, but he knew at some point he realized that wasn't going to be his ticket. He wasn't quite good enough.

And when you play at the high level, you get that sense. He didn't have what it would take to succeed at the NFL level, so then he gets into wrestling. But this for a while is really not a great situation. He talked about wrestling at bars and selling his headshot for $5 a piece just to make enough money that he could buy a sandwich.

It was a random unfolding of things that got him to eventually a point where he pursues his life with a lot of passion. So he didn't identify a passion in advance, but lives his life with a lot of passion. So what lesson do we extrapolate that from for the rest of us?

Well, the idea that I uncover in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is that passion is something that you cultivate, not something that you discover. Passion is not, I do some reflection and I figure out this is what I'm passionate about. It's something you cultivate. And how do you cultivate it?

Well, you cultivate it with discipline. You cultivate it with curiosity. It's a combination of those two things. You're curious, you're engaged in the world and options and what's possible. Through this curiosity, you find something like this could be interesting. Let me pursue it with discipline. And through the discipline pursuit is where you learn, is this thing building momentum or is it a dead end?

Curiosity plus discipline. And when something starts to click, you up the discipline, you up the intensity. And over time that blossoms into passion. And so we see this in the Rock's path. He goes from football into wrestling, the wrestling is not going well. He makes some changes, gets involved with WWE and suddenly things are really starting to click.

And he gives that full intense discipline, really develops his body, develops himself as someone able to play characters. And he begins to pursue his life with this particular goal with a real passion. That passion then is what carried him from that and the movies and all the other things he's involved with today.

That was a passion that was cultivated from discipline and curiosity. That I think is the lesson probably if we sat them down here. If we got Joe and The Rock, I don't know if they'd accept an invitation, but we should send it out. Hey, Joe and The Rock, come on by the Deep Work HQ.

Come on into the studio. We'll talk to you. I think they would agree with this. And certainly I think Dwayne Johnson would probably agree with this. Yeah, it's not about I know in advance what I'm supposed to do. It's about approaching the things that you think might be worth doing with enough discipline that you have the opportunity for that to cultivate and blossom into passion.

If that's a possibility. We discover and develop passion over time. We don't find it through a short moment of self-reflection. So I really like this idea that the discipline, passion, pursuit of things is critical for the deep life. But nuancing that with you don't get there by starting with the passion.

You actually start with the discipline and the curiosity. And if you're doing that right, the passion will come later. I'm not done with that interview yet. Yeah, I'm going to check it out. I started listening to it yesterday while I was exercising. And that caught my attention. I don't know what happens later in the interview.

When he talked about Rogan and the raw coming to the HQ for guests, it reminded me of how Mad Dog always talks about, I mean, he gets a lot of guests, but he puts in calls like Kyle Shan and Dave Campbell, like some big time NFL coaches. He just calls us to see?

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 good guests on, but he always makes jokes about how, "Yeah, yeah, we got the call into Kyle." Got the call. I bet we would get a 10% of the big time.

If we regularly invited big time guests, I think we'd be surprised. I think like 10% of the people we invited might come, but we just don't ask because we don't do a lot of interviews. I don't think The Rock would come, but you never know. That's like the weird thing about it.

You never know like, oh, this particular celebrity turns out to secretly be a fan. I forgot about this, my agent, because we were doing publicity stuff for the new book. I forgot about this, but it turns out like Michelle Pfeiffer is a fan of Deep Work. Oh, really? It's like a random thing.

She posted a photo of it years ago or something I'd forgotten about it. So you never know. So like Michelle Pfeiffer likes Deep Work. We know Rory McIlroy, McIlroy, whatever his name is. He's a big digital minimalism guy, right? The golfer. He plays the golfs. So you never know.

So we could have Michelle and Rory. Yep. Yep. They can both come on the show. I was thinking we should invite Schwarzenegger because he has the book out. Yeah. I bet we have like a 20% chance he would come. Plus I think he's kind of bored. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

Yeah. 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 his book the other day. Yeah. How was it? I mean, it was fine. I would recommend his autobiography. Yeah, I've read that. Yeah. His autobiography, you're going to get the same.

I mean, it's longer, but it's way more. I think you're going to get the same lessons and it's like a better book. But wait, if we're going to invite him, I shouldn't say that. I loved his new book. Let's get him on. Let's get him on the show. Oh, well, in the meantime, he smokes stogies.

He smokes stogies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What's Zoe going to think? And we have Arnold in here smoking stogies. We probably have to go outside. But you know what? The Chinese healer across the hall does those weird oils that like they have a pretty distinct smell at the whole floor.

Sounds like so why can't we have Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking stogies on our HQ? Zoe's are the super people are wondering for the building. All right. That's going to be our thing. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.