why is following your passion bad advice? Oh man, wrote a whole book about this. Yeah. Yeah, we've done a whole video about it as well. Yeah. Well, now it's the big thing. I think a lot of people talk about it. The latest is I think Scott Galloway has been talking about this in his new book and Mark Cuban talked about this.

So let me just set the context though, like why I was writing about that was I was finishing up academic work, right? So I had gone to grad school, got my PhD, was doing a post-doc, which is like the holding pattern before you go on the academic job market, right?

I had this thought, if I was ever going to understand what leads people to really love their work, this would be the highest leverage point in my life to figure that out. Because if I go on this academic route that the momentum was going towards, that's it, that's job for life, right?

It's like, okay, I want to make sure I really understand this question of how people love their work. So that's what motivated the book. So I look in the question, the first answer that comes up everywhere back then at least was follow your passion, right? So I look into that, like, okay, so why do we think this is true?

The whole thing is nonsense, right? We think this is some wisdom that Plato wrote about and then Thomas Aquinas then talked about and the founding fathers and it's this old piece of advice. No, if you go back and look at the etymology, the phrase follow your passion is from the early 1990s.

Oh, wow. Okay. It's like a very new idea, right? This was not the way we thought about careers. I was the first generation because I went through school in the 90s, graduated, went to college at like 2000, right? I was the first generation to be told this. So it's not ancient advice, right?

In fact, ancient advice is much more different about how to actually build a life of meaning or do work of meaning, right? So the advice was new. So I looked at a little further. Do we have scientific evidence that says, yeah, when you match a pre-existing inclination with your occupation, you're happier?

No, none of that research exists. What does exist if you study the research literature on job satisfaction is way more general traits. Like, do I have autonomy? Do I have a sense of mastery in my work? Am I connected to other people in my work? Do I feel like my work is important?

And none of these have to do with matching your job to a really specific passion. So then I said, okay, why is everyone giving this advice? And so I started tracking down the backstories of famous people who had famously said, follow your passion. Nine times out of 10, it's not what they did, right?

They stumbled into whatever they ended up doing and it transformed into a passion. So all this evidence came together and I said, this is nonsense. Passion is great. You don't start with it. You're probably not wired for a particular job that happens to exist in the 21st century knowledge economy.

There's probably not a gene that you inherited that said you were meant to be a brand manager for like an athletic apparel company based out of whatever, right? So that's not how you end up passionate about your work. You cultivate passion. And the more I looked into it, the more it became clear.

You get good at something as you get better at something, you get more control over your life and your career, and then you got to take that control for a spin. And that's when you really begin crafting your working life over time into something that really resonates, right? So the passion is cultivated.

The passion is grown. You want to end up passionate about your work, but if you're 22 and saying, let me figure out now what I'm supposed to do. And if I just figure that out and match that to my job, I'll be happy from here on out. It's a Disney fairy tale.

- What about natural inclinations in the sense that visionary versus operator or systems people versus big idea people, that sort of idea, where does that fit into this thing around passion? - It matters, right? Because ultimately, what you're trying to do is if you get good at something, you get control.

So you want to say, what advantages do I already have pushing me towards getting good at something, right? So if you've already been training for something, well, let's keep that in mind because I've already done a lot of work for this. If you feel like you have an inclination towards a certain type of thing, you're very technical.

Okay, it's probably going to be easier for you to get really good at something in a technical field, right? Maybe you have some sort of family connection to whatever. Hey, let's not ignore that, right? I mean, whatever is going to get me quicker towards being good at something that's valuable is what I want to care about.

So what I often say, it's about lowering the threshold, right? So follow your passion. The threshold is find your one true passion. And if you miss, you're screwed, right? I'm lowering the threshold to, there's a lot of things you could probably cultivate into a really passionate professional life. There's a lot of things, not everything for sure, right?

But there's probably a lot of things. The hard part's not finding one of those things. It's what you do once you choose it. It's the work you do for the next 10 years. So, you know, I'm not throwing a dart at a job listing board and saying, I guess that's what I'm going to do.

But I'm also not super fretting that if I don't make this choice exactly right, I'm going to be in trouble. If it's like, this seems interesting to me, I have an inclination for this. It looks like there would be a lot of flexibility and opportunities if I got good at this.

Be like, that's good enough. That's good enough. Now let's do the hard work of actually cultivating passion here. Nice. Okay. So, yeah. So the first book of yours I read was So Good They Can't Ignore You and very much vibed with the message. And then the next book of yours I read was Deep Work, where it seems like so many people that that word has really seeped into the world.

And do you have a sense of how many people know that you originated that word versus it's just part of English vocabulary now? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, that was my goal for sure, is I wanted that piece of vocabulary to spread. Because my thought was more important than any particular piece of advice was just people separating deep work from non-deep work.

And once you recognize deep work is very important, then people can kind of figure out, oh, I'm not doing a lot about this. How do I do more of this? What's happening in my job? I mean, I give advice in that book, obviously, but the variety of what people are actually doing is much greater than that.

So that was my goal. I don't know how many people associate it with me. It shows up in weird places. There's a menu somewhere in Microsoft Outlook where it's not a deep work option, but there's a little explanation for like a focus mode option. And it says to support deep work.

So it's kind of floating around in there. I don't know if I haven't got my royalty check on that yet. I do hear people say it. People often attribute it to me. I mean, here's the thing about that book. It came out quiet, right? Like I published that book, super disappointed.

It just, it didn't have a lot of buzz around it when it came out. They had lowered my advance for that book versus so good. They can't ignore you because like, no, it's so good. They can know you didn't do great at the time. Uh, and so they had lowered the advance.

The book came out. I was, I was thinking because I, I didn't understand publishing back then. Right. So what I knew was, I was like, this is a killer idea. So why is this not being promoted everywhere and spread everywhere? And, you know, my agent sat me down and was like, that's not how it works.

It's what did your last book do? Like, that's, what's going to matter in your last book. Didn't it take off right away? So like, they're not going to put as much into this. And because I was really upset. I had a friend who his family went to pick it up from a bookstore and they're not even carrying it on publication week.

Right. I was like, I'm kind of down with this. And then quietly in the background at some point, they're like, you know, this is kind of selling, never on a best seller list has never been on a bestseller list. Like this is just kind of selling. Oh, it's still kind of selling.

Oh, then more people were talking about it. And then more people were inviting me to come on their podcast. And it was just this really interesting slow burn where there was no one point where I realized like, oh, this book is doing really well. But I look back now, that thing's closing in on like 2 million copies.

Oh, nice. Yeah. It's just, it's been out there without ever having been on a bestseller list. Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine the people who have read the book are like a zillion X lower than the people who use the word and know what the word means. That's probably true.

That's probably true. Yeah. You know, the most interesting person I heard use it was on the Tim Ferriss podcast years ago, Jamie Foxx. I'm sure he has no idea who I am, or that I wrote it, but I was like, okay, my work here is done. So, um, being able to cultivate time for deep focus work.

This is something I struggle with. You and I are vaguely in similar sort of careers, sort of, you've got the academic thing going. I sort of have the business thing, I guess, on the side, which keeps occupied some percentage of our time. Really, I guess one thing I often think is, oh man, I wish I had more time in my life for deep work.

Yeah. Um, any, any tips for what you know about me and this, this career that we're both in? Yeah. Or maybe a slower definition of productivity. See what I did there? I'm connecting it. I'm connecting it back to my work. I mean, I think to me, and this is the research that kind of went into the slow productivity, uh, overload is the, the, the key villain here.

Right. So like every active project that you're working on is going to necessarily bring with it overhead, right? Like we have to talk about it. We have to have meetings about it. We have to have emails about it, which isn't bad. Like projects require collaboration. I'm more and more realizing the problem then is when we aggregate too many of those projects because all that overhead adds up.

Right. So if there's six different active projects going on, it's really, really difficult to find time for deep work because that's six projects worth of administrative overhead that all just overlap now. Right. And it's all, all competing for the same time. So I've really never found a better general solution than reducing the number of things that I'm working on, which I'm like you.

I mean, I, I have so many interesting ideas and opportunities. And so I don't know if you do this, I go cyclical, right? So I'll, I'll, I'll have a bunch of ideas and I'll start doing things. And then I get really overloaded. Like, this is not good. I can't do deep work anymore.

And then I really scale back and then I get bored and then I start like adding things back. And so my last overload was pandemic. Right. So like pandemic hits, I start to get kind of in a entrepreneurial hustle mode because look, I'm a professor and a writer. Right.

In those early months of the pandemic, it was, are the universities going to shut down? Like, I mean, they were, we have to freeze parts of your pay. It's because the money wasn't coming in. And then at the same time, there's all these rumors that the publishing industry was going to start clawing back advances and like slashing and that, you know, Barnes and Noble was going to go out of business and all this type of stuff.

And so I went into a mode of, I got to get more irons in the fire. I got a whatever. And then you fast forward a year and a half. And I'm like, Oh no, like I have too much. I can't the overhead. So that's the killer. The projects are awesome.

It's the overhead that comes with the projects that adds up. So you either reduce the number of projects or you find a way with the projects you have, you have to be really careful about controlling that admin overhead. This is when we talk about it. This is the processes for like where the information goes.

Like you have to liberate those projects from just send me a message when you need something. Let's just have a ad hoc back and forth communication to figure things out. So you either have to get super structured or you have to simplify. Yeah. Yeah. There was a time I think last year before your book had come out, you had done a casual episode on Tim Ferriss.

I mean, to the degree that any episode on Tim Ferriss is casual, but it's like the book hadn't quite come out and you were like exploring the idea of slow productivity. Yeah. And you mentioned this overhead thing and it sort of clicked something in me where I realized kind of like in physics, you know, like parallel versus series circuits.

It's like you assume a parallel circuit is actually better because like, Oh, if I have these three things, then doing them all three at the same time, the whole like consistency thing, you know, I thought that the best way to write a book is work on it a little bit each day.

And if you work on the book a little bit each day and work on your YouTube videos a little bit each day and work on the business a little bit each day, surely everything gets done. Yeah. No, it doesn't. Like basically zero gets done. And instead of what I found super helpful was doing things in series rather than parallel.

Yep. This week I'm just going to intensely focus on just the book and then I'm going to forget about it. And the next week is going to, I'm going to batch from some YouTube videos. And then next week I'm going to work on the product and then go back to the book.

Yeah. And even that, it was sort of felt annoying because I, what I really wanted to do was I'm just going to not make YouTube videos until I finished this book. But then the business would have died. And so it's like, I've been trying over time to figure out what is the absolute minimum?

Well, what's the, what, what is the minimum number of the maximum number of projects that I have to have going at any one time and how do I just limit it to those things? So once I do one thing, then I move on. Yeah. Well, actually that's, that's a really good strategy.

I was actually just talking about something like this at the event I was at before this, because I was talking to actually a corporate crowd who had a lot of work. They tend to have a lot of work put on their plate. They couldn't say no to. So it's an interesting case.

So what do we do about that? And what I was advising they do is I said, okay, so you have this list of things you have to do, write them down. Now let's put at the head of the list, a small section that we call active. It's like, okay, these are the things I'm actively working on right now.

Everything else let's sort and call that waiting. And what you're going to tell everyone and what you're going to do is only work on the active things. Right. And that means like that's what you're sending emails about having meetings about. If it's not on the active list, you're not, you're not dealing with it.

And as you finish an active thing, you can pull something else from the waiting list to have something new. So you only have one to three active things. Right. And I said, look, this works really well because you're only generating admin overhead from a small number of things. So you've agreed to all these things, but you've, you've neutralized the admin overhead.

Also be super transparent about this. I told him, put it in a Google doc and show everybody, here's your thing. It's position seven. And like, as soon as it gets pulled in the active, I will let you know. I'm like, I'm all in on this right now. Like call me.

This is what I'm doing this week. Like, let's get into it. Like, let's get this done. Like people know you have your act together. And so then they asked like, well, what about, we have really big projects sometimes. Like it's going to take a whole year. And the answer was, yeah, you have to break it into these smaller things and use these smaller chunks with the same method.

I think that's what you were doing. Right. And it's not, you're right. It's not great in the sense that it's not what your mind wants to do because it's not really the right way is what you said probably. And by right way, I mean, the human brain as evolved, right.

It's probably, I'm obsessed about this book till it's done. I'm obsessed with making these YouTube videos until like the season is over or whatever. Like, that's probably the right way to do it. But taking a chunk, one chunk at a time and just doing that chunk, that's sort of like the best compromise because at the very least during that week, you're not in the impossible micro situation of having to jump back and forth between 10 things.

And because it's just impossible. Yeah. The macro switching is still frustrating, but at least the work gets done. But yes, that's a little, I mean, I feel the same way. I mean, all I want to do when I write is just write. And I can get away with about three months of that.

I take the summers. So like I can do about three months of just writing and nothing else, but I need more than three months to finish a book. So like, I'm happy for three months of my book writing. Yeah. How are you thinking of that in relation to your podcast now?

And I guess the, the, the YouTube channel, which seems to be blowing up. Yeah. So the podcast gets a half day a week. That was the, that was the, the, the agreement I made with myself when I finally started a podcast in 2020 was it gets a half day a week.

So to develop it, it's going to be slow. It's like slow productivity. It's going to be slow because I have to figure out what I'm doing, you know, get good at what I'm doing first before I can do something else. And if I want to, if I want to add more, it has to fit within a half a week.

Right. So for me, that meant it starts simpler. And then I finally could make enough money from advertisements to have a producer and now the producer can take these things off my plate. So now I can spend more time on that. And then finally we're like, okay, we can, we want to do video, but it's got to fit within a half day a week.

Okay. How are we going to do this? Well, we're going to have to set up this video rig and here's the people who are going to work on it. And here's the pipeline. And I don't ever want to see a video editing piece of software or anything ever. Right.

We have this pipeline figured out. And it's, we, we can't do X, Y, or Z for video, which would be better for the YouTube channel, because that would take too much time. So what we can do is take the video straight from the podcast and put it out there.

And then over time we're like, you know, YouTube doesn't really love that. It's like, okay, we were able to bring on someone now who can work on the video produced by the podcast and figure out how to like, where did start and what thumbnail to put on. But all of it was slow because the podcast couldn't get more than a half day a week.

So I treat the podcast more like a service obligation as opposed to a one-time project I'm trying to do. And I treat those two things differently because I'm always going to be doing the podcast. So now I have to really contain it and understand it and control its footprint so that it cannot expand beyond that footprint.

But like a book chapter is different. It's like, I got to get this done. It's best that I just focus on this as hard as I can until it's finished. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I've landed on a similar conclusion with my YouTube channel in that it gets one day a week.

Yeah. So fascinating. Yeah. So most Wednesdays, except today where it's tomorrow. So tomorrow is filming day all day where Tintin, our producer will come in in the morning at 9am with a coffee and we'll chat shit for about an hour and then we'll film a video and the video will be prepped there.

And then he will, he will have rocked up with some title and thumbnail ideas. We may have some research that a researcher has done, but broadly I'll sit down with a title that's given to me. I'm like, okay, how would I teach this topic? Yeah. And then I draw some stuff on a whiteboard or whatever.

And then I hit record and I talk. Yeah. Then we go out for lunch and we'll come back and we do another video and we get two videos done in a day and it's a really fun day. It's fairly chill. Yeah. And the YouTube channel is like still growing with the, with that method.

This is the opposite of Mr. Beast. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's like, I'm going to spend the next month building some crazy thing. I, by the way, I love the same day prep. I do the same thing. Right. I think there's a lot of energy in it. Yeah. It's like, like I vaguely have an idea of like, here's a topic we're going to do, but yeah, come in.

I go to my studio and it's like, let's prep. It takes like 90 minutes. You know, my, my producer pulls the questions and stuff like that. And, but yeah, I love the energy of let's figure out what we're going to say. Ooh, this is good. Press play. Like let's, let's like write it with it.

Okay. But I'm assuming it took you, I mean, you, you've probably evolved this whole process over time, right? Like someone, if they were new to making YouTube videos, couldn't jump straight into this process. I'm assuming you figured out what's the pipeline, like who needs to edit, what, what type of things work, what prep matters, what prep has been a waste of time.

It's that like evolution. I'm assuming we've run the entire gamut all the way from me spending five days, seven days a week working on YouTube videos and word for word writing scripts, bullet points. What's the difference. What was the difference for your channel between seven days a week and bullet point scripts and the one day a week, two videos a week you're doing now?

Um, basically none. This is, this is kind of, this is kind of the key point. Yeah. This is kind of the key point is, uh, yeah. Activity does it by default, alchemizing the results. Right. This is the thing. Like I get this question a lot in our, in our YouTuber academy where people are like, okay, you know, at least saying make one video a week, but what if I spend more time making higher quality videos?

Isn't that better? And I'm like, yes, in theory, yes, that's true. If more time actually leads to a better quality video, which is just like, you know, our highest performing, uh, one of our highest performing videos of all time. We put out about a month ago and I had a conversation at a friend's birthday party with a dude who was asking me some questions about how to get rich.

Yeah. The following day I thought, Hmm, let me talk about this on camera. I hit record, no prep. Boom. We've got a million views in like a week. Yeah. And it's like, what? Yeah. Zero prep and videos that we painstakingly prepared for six months with a whole producer and a whole research team have gotten a fraction of the views.

Yeah. There's just like no rhyme or reason to yeah. Activity and outcome. Well, it's what I like about, I don't know if it's your YouTube Academy or maybe some of the videos you did about like how to be a professional or just be a YouTuber. What I liked, I was watching that.

What I like is how much of it is, um, yeah, you have to train how to be like how to be on camera. You got to get just practice. It's, you know, it's not the, like here you're going to come up with like the magic idea and then you're guaranteed to succeed.

It's like, no, it takes time. It's you gotta, you gotta keep doing things, but things that take time that you have to keep doing are not conducive with overload. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.