It's not about finding your passion.

I actually don't like that word passion.

If you think about it, passion to succeed at anything requires time and effort and boredom and tedium.

So let's just say a simple example.

You're learning to play the piano.

When you first sit down at the piano, you have to play these really insipid tunes, it's so boring.

You have to learn finger exercises and scales on any instrument, you have to learn scales, etc.

It's tedious, man.

If you think it's got to be passion, forget it, you're never going to get far.

The thrill comes after a year of playing the piano and you get better at it.

Better and better and now it starts coming fun, then 10 years it's more fun, then 20 years it's fantastic.

The other night I had dinner with Stevie Wonder, it was the most amazing thing I ever seen.

I was watching him play the piano and he's blind.

He's improvising, and it's just absolutely brilliant and amazing.

And as I'm seeing this, I'm thinking, I could see the thousands of hours he's been putting in just touching these keyboards and knowing where the where the where the keys are.

You know, it was just mind blowing how amazing it was.

That is the power that the human brain naturally has through hours and hours and hours of effort, that's how it works.

He didn't get there because it was passion.

He got there because he was a child prodigy at the age of 11, he was signed to a contract with Motown Records.

He was playing that as he was a kid, hour after hour after hour after hour.

He had a love for the piano, but it wasn't like every time he sat down it had to be passionate about it.

He had the patience to put up with all of the boring stuff.

So you want to discover what you were meant to, what you have a connection to, what you have a love for, when you're 18, 19 or 20, that's the best time to discover it.

And it doesn't have to be something highfalutin or or worth, you know, like intellectual.

You could be great with your hands, you could be great with your body, you could be great with images and visuals, you could be great with words.

You can be great in many different areas.

They're all equal, they're all great.

You want to know that you want to feel it inside of you, it's like a feeling, it's not an intellectual thing.

You feel when you're doing sports that it's it's good, it's a natural thing, it's what I'm meant for.

When you're involved with words, like I was, when I was eight years old, it felt right, felt like a natural fit, I have to follow this path.

When you're three or four years old and it's music like Stevie Wonder and you're hearing this in your head, wow, that's it for me, right?

You feel it, you feel this connection.

Now you fast forward to when you're 18 or 19 years old and you're having to make a career choice, your 20s, the most important phase of your life.

That's going to make or break you.

If you spend your 20s trying to learn skill in something that connects to you deeply, then things are going to happen to you by the time you reach 30.

It may not be something so specific, for me, it was writing and words, but I didn't know what to write.

I tried novels, I tried journalism, I tried theater, I tried screenwriting.

But you know what, it gives you a direction and you try and you try and you try.

And you know that's what you were meant for.

That's what you were destined for.

You you feel connected to it.

You feel a love for it.

And so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff, you're able to do it because you know, in the end it'll pay rewards, you'll get better and better at it.

So you can't think of everything in life having to be pleasurable and having to be passionate.

It's going to be boredom, there's going to be tedium, how do I deal with it?

You have to feel a greater love than just mere pleasure or passion, it's got to be something so deep within you that to not do it will make you deeply unhappy.

For me not to write or be a writer.

I don't think I'd be alive right now, I would have been so miserable, I would have been so alienated from who I am.

So that's what will get you through.

That's that's what a life's task is.