3516: Screw Finding Your Passion by Mark Manson on How to Prioritize Life

[00:00:00] Before we start, please check out our new podcast, Good Sleep. Have you ever noticed how a calm mind can really set the stage for a good night's sleep? That's the idea behind our new podcast, Good Sleep. Greg, our host from Optimal Relationships Daily, is here to help ease you into a peaceful night's rest with some positive affirmations. And these affirmations aren't just comforting, they can help ease anxiety and nurture positive thoughts, setting you up for true good sleep.

[00:00:25] So press play on Good Sleep tonight because a good tomorrow starts with a good night's sleep. Just search for Good Sleep in your podcast app and be sure to pick the one from Optimal Living Daily. This is Optimal Living Daily, Screw Finding Your Passion by Mark Manson of markmanson.net and I'm Justin Malik. Welcome back to Optimal Living Daily or the OLD podcast where I read to you from some of the best articles I can find and get permission from,

[00:00:55] covering personal development or self-help, minimalism, productivity and more. So with that, let's get right to it and continue optimizing your life. Screw Finding Your Passion by Mark Manson of markmanson.net.

[00:01:14] Remember back when you were a kid, you would just do things. You never thought to yourself, what are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football? You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football.

[00:01:27] You built sandcastles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster. Nobody told you to do it. You just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement. And the beautiful thing was, if you hated baseball, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it or you didn't.

[00:01:55] And if you loved looking for bugs, you just did that. There was no second level analysis of, well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to look for bugs. Does that mean there's something wrong with me? How will looking for bugs affect my future prospects? There was no bulls**t. If you like something, you just did it. How do I find my passion?

[00:02:21] Today, I received approximately the 11,504th email this year from a person telling me that they don't know what to do with their life. And like all of the others, this person asked me if I had any ideas what they could do, where they could start, where to find their passion. And of course, I didn't respond. Why? Because I have no f***ing clue. If you don't have any idea what to do with yourself, what makes you think some jackass with a website would?

[00:02:50] I'm a writer, not a fortune teller. More importantly, what I want to say to these people is this. That's the whole point. Not knowing is the whole f***ing point. Life is all about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. It's not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks or you scored a dream gig writing indie movies.

[00:03:17] The common complaint among a lot of these people is that they need to find their passion. Like all bulls**t. You already found your passion. You're just ignoring it. Seriously, you're awake 16 hours a day. What the f*** do you do with your time? You're doing something, obviously. You're talking about something. There's some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing.

[00:03:45] And it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it. It's right there in front of you. You're just avoiding it. For whatever reason, you're avoiding it. You're telling yourself, Oh, well, yeah, I love comic books. But that doesn't count. You can't make money with comic books. Well, f*** you. Have you even tried? The problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem is productivity. The problem is perception.

[00:04:14] The problem is acceptance. The problem is the, Oh, well, that's just not a realistic option. Or, Mom and Dad would kill me if I tried to do that. They say I should be a doctor. Or, That's crazy. You can't buy a BMW with the money you make doing that. The problem isn't passion. It's never passion. It's priorities. Even then, Who says you need to make money doing what you love?

[00:04:40] Since when does everyone feel entitled to love every f***ing second of their job? Really, What is so wrong with working an okay, normal job with some cool people you like, and then pursuing your passion in your free time on the side? Has the world turned upside down? Or is this suddenly a novel idea to people? Look, here's another slap in the face for you. Every job sucks sometimes. There's no such thing as some passionate activity that you'll never get tired of, never get stressed over,

[00:05:09] never complain about. It doesn't exist. I am living my dream job, which happened by accident, by the way. I never in a million years planned on this happening. Like a kid on a playground, I just went and tried it. And I still hate about 30% of it. Some days more. Again, that's just life. The issue here is, once again, expectations. If you think you're supposed to be working 70-hour work weeks and sleeping in your office like Steve Jobs

[00:05:38] and loving every second of it, you've been watching too many s***y movies. If you think you're supposed to wake up every single day dancing out of your pajamas because you get to go to work, then you've been drinking the Kool-Aid. Life doesn't work like that. It's just unrealistic. There's a thing most of us need called balance. Your passion is right in front of you. I have a friend who, for the last three years, has been trying to build an online business selling whatever.

[00:06:07] It hasn't been working. And by not working, I mean he's not even launching anything. Despite years of quote-unquote work and saying he's going to do this or that, nothing actually ever gets done. What does get done is when one of his former co-workers comes to him with a design job to create a logo or design some promotional material for an event. Holy s***. He's all over that, like flies on fresh couch. And he does a great job.

[00:06:35] He stays up till four in the morning, losing himself working on it and loving every second of it. But then two days later, it's back to, man, I just don't know what I'm supposed to do. I meet so many people like him. He doesn't need to find his passion. His passion already found him. He's just ignoring it. He just refuses to believe it's viable. He's just afraid of giving it an honest-to-God try. It's like a nerdy kid walking onto a playground and saying, well, bugs are really cool,

[00:07:05] but NFL players make more money, so I should force myself to play football every day. And then coming home and complaining that he doesn't like recess. And that's bulls***. Everybody likes recess. The problem is that he's arbitrarily choosing to limit himself based on some bulls*** ideas he got into his head about success and what he's supposed to do. Another email I get all the time is from people wanting advice on how to become a writer. And my answer is the same.

[00:07:35] I have no f***ing idea. As a kid, I'd write short stories in my room for fun. As a teenager, I'd write music reviews and essays about bands I loved and then show them to nobody. Once the internet came around, I spent hours upon hours on forums writing multi-page posts about inane topics. Everything from guitar pickups to the causes of the Iraq war. I never considered writing as a potential career. I never even considered it

[00:08:04] a hobby or passion. To me, the things I wrote about were my passion. Music, politics, philosophy. Writing was just something I did because I felt like it. When I had to go looking for a career I could fall in love with, I didn't have to look far. In fact, I didn't have to look at all. Chose me in a way. It was already there. Already something I was doing every day since I was a kid without even thinking about it. Because here's another point that might make a few people salty. If you have to look for

[00:08:34] what you're passionate about, then you're probably not passionate about it at all. If you're passionate about something, it'll already feel like such an ingrained part of your life that you'll have to be reminded by people that it's not normal, that other people aren't like that. It didn't occur to me that writing 2,000 word posts on forums was something nobody else considered fun. It never occurred to my friend that designing a logo is something that most people don't find easy or fun. To him, it's so natural

[00:09:03] that he can't even imagine it being otherwise. And that's why it's probably what he really should be doing. A child does not walk onto a playground and say to herself, how do I find fun? She just goes and has fun. If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you're not going to enjoy anything. And the real truth is that you already enjoy something. You already enjoy many things. You're just choosing to ignore them.

[00:09:34] You just listened to the post titled Screw Finding Your Passion by Mark Manson of markmanson.net and I'll be right back with my commentary. The grind never stops as a business owner. When you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do and that's where LinkedIn Jobs comes in. We've been lucky finding our team here at Optimal Living Daily and I think LinkedIn Jobs would have taken luck out of the equation finding us the best quickly. With LinkedIn Jobs, posting your job for free is just the beginning. You can pay to promote it

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[00:10:34] Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash selection. That's linkedin.com slash selection to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you to Mark. He has a tough delivery, but it's hard to argue with some of the points here, especially when he talks about the problem not being passion, but priority. I think the common issue for many is I can't do A, B, or C because I have X, Y, and Z commitments.

[00:11:04] Those commitments are really our priorities. Maybe they're huge, like taking care of kids, or their feelings, like having job security, even though we might not like that job, and taking a risk is too scary. That all makes sense, but that doesn't change Mark's point. We have those other priorities, and if we really want to chase that passion, something's gotta give. Maybe it's sleep. Maybe it's leisure time. Money. All of the above, possibly.

[00:11:34] When I started this podcast, I was working 12-hour days minimum, and for very little money. My priority at the time was finding work that I enjoyed, and I was lucky enough to feel like I could take that risk for a year or so. But, and this is a big but, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. There's a lot of tedious stuff that goes along with doing this podcast, as there is with every job Mark said that. It's more about what we're willing to tolerate. I'm willing to tolerate it because my priority

[00:12:04] is working for myself building something, and I would sacrifice a large paycheck to have that kind of freedom. Is it my passion? Some parts. But there are plenty of things this work entails that is definitely not my passion that I still have to do every day. But that's every job, and that's okay. Just like Mark said, he still hates like 30% of his job, even though many would say they'd give anything to have his job. So, good stuff to think about here. Thank you for coming back to listen. I would not be able

[00:12:33] to keep doing this if it weren't for you. Both the monotonous parts, but also the fun parts. Wishing you a great rest of your day, and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.