figuring out what to do with your life

or what kind of work to go into,

one of the most common pieces of advice

that gets thrown around is,

"Just follow your passion, yeah!

"Just gotta find your passion, man.

"And go after it to the ends of the earth."

This word, passion, it keeps cropping up

again and again.

And we're constantly being told

that we simply need to go find out

whatever ours is.

No longer shall we be relegated to the work

of previous generation's tedious, boring,

factory work that our parents did before us.

Oh no, no, no. This is the now.

You can go make super hero capes for dogs

if that is what your passion truly is.

Actually, that's not a bad idea.

But, no, "follow your passion",

as inspiring as it is, is bad advice.

It build its foundations off of its assumptions

that everyone is just born

with a pre-existing passion.

It's like we're all onions and all you've

gotta do is peel back the layers

to figure out what's inside.

Though, I don't know about you,

but I'm not an ogre.

And for most of my life,

I would've been pretty hard-pressed

to tell you what the heck my passion is.

'Cause I just didn't know.

And this is the problem that most people face.

Either they don't have anything in their life

that they can identify as a real passion

or there's a lot of things all over the place.

Lots of vibrant interesting things

that they could identify as passions

but they don't really know which one

to latch on to and pursue.

This problem is all the more common

for students or people who don't really have

a whole lot of experience in their careers yet.

I'm guessing that you probably fall

into one of those two categories.

Which is unfortunate because this is also

the point in your life where you're being asked

to figure out what to do with that life.

Luckily, there is better advice that you can use.

Cal Newport, the author of the fantastic book,

So Good They Can't Ignore You,

summed it up perfectly for me when I asked him

for his advice on choosing a major.

He said, simply, "Pick something you have

an interest in, and then go full-bore and try

to get as good as you possibly can at it."

This advice, this focus on building skills

and gaining experience,

this is the most effective way to figure out

what work truly fulfills you.

You're not born with some innate thing

you're supposed to do with your life.

Rather you're born with personality traits

and certain qualities of work that you'll enjoy.

Maybe creativity, maybe working with people,

or working with very logical things,

autonomy or a sense of impact in your work.

These specific qualities are going to be

unearthed and slowly discovered as you make more

connections with people, as you do more things,

as you create things, and gain skills.

In the book I just mentioned, Cal talks about

a concept in the scientific community

called the Adjacent Possible.

If you think about all of our

collective, scientific knowledge

as an ever-expanding bubble,

then the Adjacent Possible

is right outside that bubble.

Right within our grasp.

That's where most new discoveries are made.

As we continue to make new discoveries,

and we continue to grow that bubble

the Adjacent Possible grows as well.

New things we didn't even know were possible before

start to come out of the fog and start

to be within reach.

In an article for the New York Times,

Steven Johnson states it eloquently,

"The strange and beautiful truth

about the Adjacent Possible is that

its boundaries grow as you explore them."

This concept perfectly illustrates

how you can go about finding work that you love.

As you learn and do more and meet new people

new opportunities and possibilities

are gonna emerge that you didn't

even know existed before,

and that were completely inaccessible

in the past.

Also, this focus on skills and experience,

rather than passion or enjoyment,

is gonna become immensely helpful

when you reach the dip.

A concept that the author Seth Godin

popularized in his book of the same name.

The dip is the point at which pursuing

a skill becomes difficult or boring.

Let me tell you, this always comes

no matter what skill you're pursuing.

At first, things start out fun.

Your interest in the subject keeps

your motivation levels high

and you're able to grasp the low-hanging

fruit pretty easily.

As time goes on, though,

eventually those easy progress gains

stop coming and the initial novelty

of the subject wears off.

To give you an example,

beginning weight lifters often make huge

progress gains when they first start lifting.

I'm talking, like, adding 50 pounds to their

initial squat after just a few weeks.

Lifters call these the "noob gains."

They happen because beginning lifters

are using muscles that they already had

but in ways that they haven't been used before.

Also, they're not really lifting enough weight

to truly challenge their body's ability

to recover quickly.

Pretty soon, though, most lifters hit a plateau.

A point where gains, either, really slow down

or stop altogether.

Even though they're continually hitting the gym

as much as they were before.

This is the dip for lifters.

They have to do a couple of things

to really push through it.

Number one, they have to adopt

smarter training techniques that take

into account the additional recovery time

needed for higher levels of performance.

But number two, they really just have to adopt

a lot of sheer determination to keep

pushing through and making progress

even though the rewards have started to diminsh.

This is the exact same with any skill

that you're pursuing.

At first, it's going to be easy.

The initial levels are going to be easy

to conquer, it'll be fun.

But, eventually, those rewards will diminish

and to continue building that skill, to reach

true excellence, you do have to adopt

smarter training methods and you also have to

simply have the grit to keep pushing through

even though it's not fun.

Once you do push through that dip,

and once you do start building true excellence,

this is where things actually do start

to get fun and interesting

because now you have the skill

to start doing things that most people can't do.

You also have enough experience and work

under your belt that people trust you

and they know who you are.

That means they're gonna start bringing you

more interesting proposals and projects

which are gonna be a lot more fun

than the grunt work you've been doing before.

This has been my experience exactly.

I'm definitely not alone in my belief

that the pursuit of excellence and skills

and experience is far better

than trying to find your passion.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner

of the Dallas Mavericks, once wrote a blog post

a few years ago that really crystallized

this idea for me.

I want to wrap up this video by quoting the part

where he says, "Let me make this as clear as possible.

"When you work hard at doing something,

"you become good at it.

"When you become good at doing something,

"you will enjoy it more.

"When you enjoy doing something,

"there is a very good chance that you will

"become passionate or more passionate about it.

"And when you are good at something,

"passionate, and work even harder to excel

"and be the best at it, good things happen."

So stop trying to find your passion

through introspection or BuzzFeed quizzes

or whatever it is.

Just pick an interest you have

that has the potential to be useful

to other people in the future and then go after it

with as many smart training techniques

and as much sheer determination

as you can muster.

Good luck and thanks for watching.

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