Find Your Passion in 20 Minutes, Not 20 Years Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Follow your passion is the worst piece of advice  I've ever been given in my entire life. And I've started like 80 businesses. Entrepreneurship is my  entire thing. It's my hobby, my life, my family, my profession, everything all rolled into one.  And I still think that follow your passion is garbage advice. And I'm going to tell you why. And  by the end of this episode, I'm going to hand you the exact tactical playbook for finding the thing  you're actually obsessed with.

00:18 Because I've seen episodes like this before. How to follow your  passion, how to find what you love. And they're good. I'm inspired by them, but they're not good  enough because they're not tactical or specific enough. And that's the kind of guy I am. I want to  know what app to download, what tool to use, what prompt. Like, let's get real about this because  anything less than that is just guru fluff, highle motivation, like do what you love type  stuff.

00:41 And this is not that. This is the episode I wish I always had when I was 20 years old. But if  you're 60 years old, this is still the episode for you because I'm assuming you still haven't found  your passion yet or your obsession yet. So, when I say tactical, I mean we're going to dig through  your YouTube watch history, Google search history, Amazon orders, conversations that you've had where  you tend to hijack the whole table and talk for 20 minutes straight and not even notice that  you're doing it.

01:04 And I'm also going to show you how to use AI to do all this in like 20 minutes  instead of wandering around in the wilderness for the next 20 years. So, yes, the best stuff's  at the end, but I'm going to earn it first. Here's the problem with follow your passion.  and someone tells you that, they're probably assuming one or two things, and both of them  are probably wrong.

01:24 Number one, they're assuming that you already know what your passion is. Most  people don't. The vast majority of people don't, which is a crying shame, and it doesn't have to  be that way. And number two, they're assuming that you only have one. Nobody only has one hobby or  one passion, one obsession. We all have multiple. Most of us don't even know what they are yet.

01:43 So, I know a lot of you guys know my backstory, so I'm going to gloss over this really fast so  we can get to the good stuff, but I just want to set the tone and give you some context as to  why I feel like I have a unique insight to offer to this age-old discussion. So, I've done iPhone  repairs. I sold iPhone LCD screens and parts. And was iPhone repair my passion?

02:04 Absolutely not. I'm  not an engineering brain. I'm not a tinkerer. That is not me. I didn't lie in bed at night dreaming  about LCD screens. I've worked with RV parks, tree trimming, online snack business. None of  those were or are my life's calling. None of them. I saw a gap, I moved, and I built the thing.  And a lot of the time, once it was up and running, I'd rather hand it off to a great operator and  go chase down the next puzzle cuz I'm not a great operator.

02:32 It took me way too long to learn this  about myself, but for me, my puzzle is my passion, right? Going from zero to one, that is my passion.  And one might look like $1 million or $10 million. It might look like $1. It still feels amazing to  me. It still gives me that dopamine rush. And we say dopamine like it's a four-letter word, like  it's a bad thing.

02:51 Dopamine is amazing, but it should lead you to action, not just to information  and research and procrastination. Dopamine has to lead us to execution, to action. In this case,  to the first dollar hitting our Stripe account. That's the thing that I'm obsessed with. So,  of all the 80 plus businesses I've started, which ends up being like, you know, 3 to eight  a year, the through line on all of those has never been the industry, either like the macro  industry, like sales or the micro industry, like home services.

03:24 I don't care about any of  those niches. I love commerce. I love being a merchant. That's why I love farmers markets, cuz  it's like merchant central. That first customer is what I really love. And the industry that I  happen to be in at any given moment is just like the costume that it shows up in any given week.  And I want to be straight with you because I've talked about this a few times before, never this  tactically, but my own thinking on this topic has shifted over the years.

03:50 There's two schools  of thought on this whole passion verse profit thing. In my opinion, school number one says your  passion does not have to be your job. They can live in two totally separate buckets. do your job  and then do your passion in your 5 to9 job 9 to5 passion 5 to9 and I think for the vast majority  of human history that was true and people did not have the luxury of having their passion and profit  overlap make your money over here and go love your woodworking over there I've said a dozen times on  this

04:18 podcast and others follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion and for  my Utah folks follow the profit means something else entirely and you should do that too the hard  thing, the boring thing, the thing that pays, eat crap for a few years if you have to and earn the  right to go chase the fun stuff later. But today, we live in a world where I think school of thought  number two is much more feasible and should be possible for anyone consuming this episode right  now.

04:42 School number two says, "No, have your cake and eat it too. You can build a life where the  thing that pays you is the thing you would happily do for free anyway, or the thing that you would  even pay to do." because we happen to be walking straight into this AI age of abundance where the  cost of trying something, building something, selling, testing is dropping to basically zero.

05:02 It  used to take serious money and years to chase down some weird little obsession only to see maybe does  it have legs or not, but now you can spin up a website or an app, write the copy, make the video,  test the offer all in one afternoon. I mean, gez, just yesterday I'm on Twitter and I see this  AI generated video that looked very good, very real of a guy building like a miniature house  with like miniature concrete and rebar and 2x4s and shingles and everything.

05:30 Elon commented on  it. This guy had 500 Twitter followers. He's not an influencer. He's nobody, right? Elon commented  on it. It got 7 million views. And I'm pretty sure this guy that posted, Ethan, got the idea from my  episode because I posted about this in a real a year ago. We talked about it on MFM about like a  guy dollhouse. this should be an actual business and not just a hobby.

05:49 And I think I haven't talked  to him yet. I think he was inspired by that and he launched a Kickstarter. He had zero dollars in  funding, but he just made this AI generated video, tweeted it out to the void. Remember, almost  no followers. Elon comments gets a bunch of views. He's raised 50,000 so far. He has a viable  business. Like he launched a viable business with an AI generated video and no followers.

06:08 That's the  world we live in. Anyone can do that. So that old trade-off of money in one bucket, passion in the  other is breaking down in real time. More and more of us every day are getting to combine those  two buckets into one. And that's the bet I'm making right now, both in my life and on this one  episode. And it's the bet I want you to be making, too.

06:28 Hey, if this is helpful, please hit subscribe  on whatever platform, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. I appreciate you. So, here's something that kind  of blew my mind the first time I heard it. The word passion. Where do you think that word comes  from? It comes from the Latin word for suffering. Passion literally means suffering. It's not an  accident. So when people tell you to follow your passion, what they should actually be telling you  is go find the thing you're willing to suffer for because that's the real signal.

06:52 It's not the thing  that feels amazing on a sunny Saturday when you're drinking your hand and nowhere to be. Anyone loves  that. Of course we do. I'm talking about the thing where you will eat crap for two years straight and  keep showing up anyway. And it doesn't feel like eating crap. This is the thing where the bad  days still feel better than a good day doing something else.

07:09 My dad used to always say, "Bad  day of fishing is still better than a good day in the office." That's what I'm talking about.  All this passion advice tells you to sit down, close your eyes, journal, meditate, reflect, look  inward, find yourself. And that's a really good waste of a really good afternoon. You're not going  to think or reflect your way to obsession.

07:23 You've got to catch it in the act. And the thing is,  your obsession is already leaving fingerprints all over your life. You just never dusted for  them. You've never gone looking for them. You've got to become a detective of your own behavior.  And that that right there is what every single one of these tactics are. It's you dusting your  own life for fingerprints.

07:42 Okay? Just so you know, I'm not up here pretending that I have all this  figured out. I've said this a million times. I probably say it too much. I'm an introvert. I  have ADHD. I don't like leaving my office. I don't love talking to people in person. And for  years, the idea of posting short form video, putting my face on camera gave me anxiety. It's  cringe.

08:02 It's embarrassing. And don't worry if you think I'm about to tell you that you need to  post content to follow or find your passion. That's not what I'm about to say. That could  be a small piece in this, but it's a small piece. But one day it clicked. And honestly, I'm  glad it clicked by one of my videos going viral, cuz if I posted 30 videos and none of them went  viral, I probably would have stopped.

08:20 Thankfully, like my 17th or so went viral. And it was like,  "Oh, still cringe. still worried about what people think, but my love of this dopamine and upside is  now outweighing my dislike of this cringe. Okay, there's a whole world on the other side of cringe.  And whether you end up posting content or not, you're still going to have to get over that.

08:42 You're going to have to get over the cringe thing because people either will talk or you're going  to think that people are talking. And really, it's the same thing. They're probably  not talking, but if you think they are, then it doesn't matter. You got to get over the  cringe aspect whether you're posting about it on the internet or not because people will know about  you doing something differently, right?

08:56 So, you just got to push through the friction. If I can  do it, you can do it. Okay, back to the playbook. Here's the tactics. I call this the obsession  audit. I need to buy that domain name. Actually, I mean, this could be a business. You can see my  ADHD playing out in real time right here. Okay, obsessionit.com is available. I'm buying it right  now, so you can't take it from me.

09:16 I don't know what I'll do with it, but who knows? Anyway, the  obsession audit number one, receipts. Here's the deal. Your real interests are already sitting  in your accounts. You just got to go read them back to yourself. So, open up your YouTube watch  history right now, last 90 days. What do you go down rabbit holes on at 11 p.m. when nobody on  earth is making you do this?

09:36 That's a tell. Then go look at your Google search history. Then, and  this one's going to sting a little, your Amazon order history and your bank statement. And if you  didn't know this, you can go to Amazon and you can export a spreadsheet of all of your Amazon orders.  Upload that bad boy to Chad GPT and it's going to tell you all kinds of stuff. And of course, your  bank statements.

09:55 Why not? Where are you spending your money that you don't have to spend? Not  the air filters, right? Or the bottles of water, your discretionary income. Because people are  likely to fund their real obsession even when they're flat broke. Okay? This is the stuff that  you're buying when nobody's watching and maybe you can't afford it. That stuff doesn't lie.

10:13 So,  AI AI can turn this from a boring like journaling exercise into a 10-minute superpower. Go to Google  Takeout. In fact, I've got it pulled up right here in another tab. It's takeout.google.com. Okay.  Export your YouTube history. It's free. Or just screenshot a few pages of it. Drop it into chat  GBT cla doesn't matter. And you give it a prompt that goes something like, "Hey, here's 90 days of  my YouTube watch history.

10:34 Ignore the random junk like, you know, how to fix your appliance. That's  an outlier. Show me the three obsessions hiding in here that I'd probably never want to admit to  myself out loud. That's the prompt. And then just watch what it spits back at you. It's going to see  patterns about you that you are way too close to see yourself or you don't want to see yourself,  right?

10:52 We're very biased creatures. Then do the exact same thing, same prompt with your bank  statement, Amazon export. Hand it to AI and say, "Categorize my discretionary spending and tell me  what I clearly care about based on where my money is actually going." and boom, that's going  to be a self-portrait that you didn't even know existed. Number two, the hijack test.

11:11 Okay, I  know there's at least one topic where you grab the steering wheel of the conversation and you don't  even realize you've been talking for 20 minutes straight. Your friends know exactly what this is.  You probably don't cuz you're too busy doing it. So, text five people who know you the best right  now and ask them one question. What do I not shut up about?

11:32 Just that. I promise the answers are  going to cluster up. There's going to be like three that say some version of the same thing and  that thing is pointing you at your obsession. And the AI version of this is kind of wild. By the  way, if you've got like six plus months of text, notes, voice memos, where you're rambling  to yourself in the car, journal entries, whatever, feed a chunk of that into the AI and  ask it what topics do I keep circling back to.

11:57 It's like having a less of a biased friend with  perfect memory of everything you've ever said and zero reason to be polite about the answer.  Number three, the childhood call back. Okay, think back to when you were 8 to 12 years old,  right before the world got its hands on you and told you what was useful and what was a waste of  time. What did you do for hours that nobody had to ask you to do?

12:17 I remember as a kid watching like  a whale watching video and for whatever reason I connected that to being a park ranger, like a game  warden, okay? And I was like, I want to be a game warden. I loved going behind my house in Logan,  Utah, and looking for animal tracks and catching frogs and trout fishing and setting traps. And  I had this Nerf bow and arrow and I would shoot feeasants with it.

12:42 Never hit one, but like to this  day, I love just going out in the woods and doing stuff, setting traps and whatever. That is one  of my obsessions that I could monetize and it went dormant for decades, but it's there. there's  an almost 0% chance that whatever it is you were obsessed with at that age completely went away  and you have no interest in it anymore.

12:58 I'm not talking about like three to seven years old when  you love cars and dinosaurs. Like I'm specifically talking about like 8 to 15ish. Okay? Cuz around  14, 15, high school takes over. The opposite sex, sports, whatever, and that obsession stuff kind  of takes a a backseat kind of like it's taken a backseat in your career so far, right? Which is a  shame.

13:20 What did you get in trouble for as a kid? Right? That's usually your gift. Showing up way  too early before you even knew what direction to aim it in. Talking too much in class. That could  be sales. That could be content. That could be anything. I'm kind of a closeted class clown.  If you put me in a class full of close friends, I'm going to be the biggest extrovert in the  world.

13:39 Were you the kid that took everything apart just to see how it worked? That's building you,  right? Were you bossing other kids around on the playground? That's leadership. Your teacher just  didn't have a nicer word for it yet. Number four, the energy log. This one takes like two weeks, but  it's stupidly powerful. So, hang with me. For two weeks, every time you finish an activity, okay,  it's a little tedious, but it's worth it.

13:58 Might be more effective than everything I mentioned  so far. Every time you finish an activity, rate it 1 to 10 on one single question. How do I  feel right now after doing this? Or this question, how much energy did that task give or take  away from me? Not while you're doing the task, but after. Right when you finish. Because here's  the truth. Most things drain you.

14:19 And that's normal. It's fine. We're here to work, right? You  want to hunt for the rare thing that should be draining you, but is leaving you with more gas in  the tank than what you started with. More energy, the net energy positive, if you will. That's the  green flag. And while you're at it, go ahead and track your time distortion. What's the activity  where you look up and 3 hours just vanished?

14:37 It felt like 20 minutes. That's flow, right? That's  what it you're in the flow. And that's right next door to obsession. So, keep it all in your notes  app and at the end of the two weeks, paste the entire thing into the same AI chat window where  you're already talking to it about this stuff and say, "Find the pattern. Tell me what charges me  up and what drains me and AI is going to spot it probably long before you do."

15:02 Number five, this  one's a little uncomfortable, so brace yourself. There's no comfort in the growth zone. The envy  map. What are you scrolling past on Instagram and feeling a hot little flash of jealousy? For me,  it's like homesteading. I see people like raising chickens and quail and and like organic compost in  their backyard and it's like I want to do that and I could do that but I'm just not right.

15:23 That's  a signal. But I'm being specific here. We're not talking about admiration. Okay, that's kind of  useless for this exercise. I want that ugly sting. The one where you go, that should be me. Like  let's say you were in a a high school band and you went to college and one of your bandmates stuck  with the dream, joined another band and now he's touring around the country in stadiums.

15:44 H that  should be me. I was a better guitarist than he was the whole time. Something like that. Obviously,  that's very niche. Not likely to be the case for you, but you you get what I'm saying. Write down  five people who give you that exact feeling. Maybe they're old friends from high school. Maybe  they're current friends. Maybe they don't know who you are.

16:01 Doesn't matter. Maybe they're an  influence. Doesn't matter. their life, their work, their business, whatever it is, you can find out  about them. And then look for the pattern across all five because that jealousy is not random.  It's not a character flaw. I'm not saying we should be jealous, but we can at least learn from  that feeling. That sting is your obsession kind of like waving its arms in the air trying to get  your attention.

16:19 We feel envy toward people who are living the life some like quiet part of us  already decided that we want. Guys, I want to tell you about something I've been building behind  the scenes. You've been watching my videos about AI tools and asking the same question. Okay,  cool. How do I turn this into a business? Not just playing around with AI, but actually getting  clients and getting paid.

16:38 That's my community. It's called Playmakers. playmakersai.com. It's  an AI agency program where we show you how to start an AI consulting business where you can  charge local businesses $500 to $5,000 a month to set up and manage AI tools for them. It's not  a course you watch and forget about. We do three to seven live training calls every week taught by  me and 23 other expert AI agency owners.

16:58 You get plug-and-play templates, claude code tutorials,  AI voice agent frameworks, automation templates, and a 30-day roadmap so you don't fall off  track. This is stuff you can just copy, paste, and deploy for clients on day one. And of course,  how to find clients as well. We also have a 5-day first client challenge where we can walk you  through landing your first paying client in 5 days.

17:24 You also get my frameworks for cold email,  Facebook ads, SMS, cold calls, and then I hand you my leads galore spreadsheets with actual leads  in your niche, in your area. We've already got over 200 people in there building real agencies.  If you miss a live call, it's all recorded. So, if you've ever thought about starting an AI  consulting business or AI implementation business, go check out playmakersai.com.

17:43 Number six, the 100  questions dump. Sit down and write out a hundred questions that you genuinely want the answer to  before you die. Yeah, 100's a lot. Doesn't need to be business or money focused, but the whole point  is it needs to be a lot because the first 20 are going to be surface level garbage, right? This  is the stuff you think you're supposed to care about.

18:04 Push through it to 60, 70, 80, 100, and  the real answers are going to be in like the deep cuts where your brain is like finally running out  of the polite surface level answers and and it'll start telling you the truth. And this this is a  perfect job for AI. Open a voice memo. Ramble out a hundred questions while you're driving around.  Dump the transcript into AI and say, "Cluster these into themes and tell me which theme shows  up the most."

18:27 That biggest cluster. That's the thing your brain can't stop chewing on even when  you're not paying attention. And number seven, this is the teach it for free filter. What's the  one thing you would happily make a whole video about or explain to a a a stranger next to you  on an airplane uh for zero bucks just because you physically cannot make yourself shut up about it.

18:49 That's your obsession hiding in plain sight. And you do it for free. That's the whole point. And  the stuff you would teach for free is often the same stuff that people will eventually pay good  money for, especially if they can see your passion and zeal for it. That's how this whole podcast  started like 262 episodes ago. Number eight, this is the big one because the other seven are  about like reading the clues that you already have sitting around.

19:15 But the last one is gonna go out  and generate brand new ideas. So, you're going to go wide here and fast. You can't think your way to  your obsession. I said that in the beginning. You find it by trying 30 things badly, right? You  kind of got to fail in small ways a lot. Most people are trying two or three things their whole  entire life. And I want you to try two or three things a month.

19:37 Give yourself full permission to  quit fast without any stakes. We don't want you to feel guilty about quitting. Quitting is like  one step closer to success. You're not getting married to any of these ideas. You're just dating.  We're dating around. And the goal is like reps, okay? And the cheat code inside the cheat code is  something I say a zillion times on this podcast.

19:58 Sell it before you have it. Run the ad before  you build the product. Right? This kid posts this video on Twitter before he really had anything.  50,000 bucks and Elon retweet amazing. Post the offer before you own a single piece of equipment.  It drives me insane. I just talked to a guy that wanted to start a forestry mulching business  and the first thing he did was go out and buy a mulchure that cost like 113 grand and he's ready  to finance the whole thing before he's talked to one single customer.

20:20 To him, it was easier and  less scary to talk to a bank about borrowing the money than it was to talk to Joe Blow with 7 acres  that has some kudzu that needs to be removed. It's backwards. Run the ad first. Post on Facebook  Marketplace next door. See if your phone rings and the market is going to tell you the truth way  faster than your feelings ever will.

20:36 And while we're here, one bonus move that ties this all  together. Post your stuff publicly, okay? Like, just do it. The experiments, the ugly versions,  all of it. Yeah, it means that people are going to see the ones that fail, but they're probably  not going to remember them. Who cares? I'm still doing this. I've launched things in the last 6  months that millions of people have seen that have failed or been abandoned.

21:00 I don't give a crap.  They don't either. They forgot for the most part. The downside is, yeah, someone's going to watch  you fail. And that's not a real downside. So, we've got a a finite limited downside and an  unlimited upside. Posting publicly keeps you accountable. And I am like I'm on this heater  of a an obsession with accountability lately. I had to film a couple videos just last week and  I'd been procrastinating them for 10 days and they were important videos and my team was like,  "Chris, come on.

21:26 Come on. Come And I was busy, but I had the time, right? I just kept doing other  less important things. And finally, I woke up last Friday, and I said, if I don't film all three of  these videos, which was like a 5 hour process to do this. This was on a Friday. If I don't film  all three of these videos by the end of today, midnight, Central Standard Time, I will give each  of you guys 100 bucks.

21:44 Everyone in this group chat 100 bucks. You know what? I did them. And I  probably I I definitely would not have done them that day had I not said that. I attach stakes to  it, right? We need stakes. We need accountability. and business idea. Someone needs to invent  an app that like productizes that stakes, right? Where you like you connect your credit card  and it's like, "Hey, maybe you connect your inbox as well."

22:08 And it's like, "If I don't get to inbox  zero every Tuesday by 3 p.m., donate $100 to this charity or whatever or send $100 to whatever."  It works, okay? And posting publicly is another way of accountability. It puts eyes on you. And  eyes on you means finding customers and partners finding you instead of you having to chase them  down. And remember, every time you hit publish, it's like a free lottery ticket, right?

22:29 We're  playing the lottery here, but it's free. So, play it as many times as you can. And last thing,  this is one I actually want you to remember if you forget every other word I just said. Everybody  treats obsession like it's a buried treasure, like it's this one perfect thing sitting out there  fully formed and you just have to go wander around on the map until you trip over it.

22:49 But that is  wrong. That's not how it works. This thinking keeps people stuck for years. The truth is that  it took me way too long to learn. Obsession is something that gets built. You got to start with a  seed of passion, but you really get obsessed with the things you get good at. Think about anything  that you love. You probably didn't love it on day one when you were terrible at it.

23:10 You got a little  bit good. That felt great. Then you did more. You got better. And somewhere in there, the interest  turned into obsession. And the passion followed the progress. But it doesn't ever start the other  way around. So, all these tactics I just gave you, those are for picking a direction. But once you  have a direction pointed, the move is simple.

23:31 Pick the thing that gives you the smallest win the  fastest. Right? Dave Ramsey would call this baby steps. He wants people to pay off their smallest  debt first, even if it has a lower interest rate, because momentum is very real. Remember, focus  is overrated. Momentum is underrated. We want to do little things, lowhanging fruit things that  keep us momentum.

23:48 You want to stack two or three wins and then you want to let getting good do the  heavy lifting that motivation was never going to work for you anyway, right? It's a muscle. You  work it out and it grows. And the final filter of all this, the real one is stop asking yourself  what do I love? Start asking what am I willing to suffer for? Okay, remember full circle here.

24:11 Passion means suffering. Everybody wants the highlight reel of being obsessed, but nobody wants  the boring grindy like nobody's clapping three in the morning middle part. But the real question is  not like what makes you happy. It's what bad days doing one thing beat a good day of doing anything  else. Find that and you found your obsession and that is the only one that ever actually pays.

24:36 So start by being a detective this week. Pull up your YouTube history. Test, you know, text your  five friends. Write the hund questions. Let Chad GBT find the pattern that you're too close to  to see. Then go try something today. Remember, let dopamine lead to action, not information  gathering. Do this stuff before you're ready because you're already way more ready than you  think you are.

24:56 And yes, like guys, business is hard, okay? Finding this stuff is hard. But  you've probably heard the old adage, choose your hard. Being overweight is hard. Eating healthy is  hard. Right? Choose your hard. short-term hard or long-term hard, I choose short-term hard, but you  are capable. You can do it. It's doable. If a kid like me who just didn't want to be broke anymore  can stumble into 80 businesses and find the thing that I will happily do until I die, then you can  absolutely do that for yourself.

25:20 Oh, and fun fact, in the day or two that elapsed between when I  recorded this and when you're listening to this, I went ahead and viodated this really cool tool  called Obsession Audit. And you can find it at obsessionit.com. I promise you I was not intending  to do that when I started recording this episode, but bias for action. I got to do it. So, it's  free and it should help this process go a little smoother for you.

25:45 But of course, you could still  do it yourself, just a little more clunky. If you know someone that is lacking in obsession or  happiness or fulfillment or motivation or in a crappy job, please send this to them. It  could literally change their lives. You can have your cake and eat it too. I promise. I  promise you. It's going to take some work, some effort, some testing, some launching, a lot  of failing, but I promise you it will be worth it.

26:08 I'm laughing at myself because I almost just  said, and I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. That was really weird. I've never almost  said that as if I'm closing a a church talk or a prayer. I'm clearly deeply ingrained with the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and and it shows. So, thanks for listening, hanging  out on the Kerner office. You guys are awesome.