Stop Chasing Passion — Find the Thing You're Willing to Grind Calluses For

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-04-27T10:00:16Z

The word 'passion' literally means suffering. Cal Newport argues passion is a byproduct of mastery: practice a little more each day, let competence breed satisfaction, and satisfaction will fuel passion — it's a flywheel, not a prerequisite.

90% of People Can't Name Their Passion

A 24-year-old walked up to us at a restaurant in Austin. Smart, hardworking, "ready to jump in the pool but doesn't know which lane to swim." His whole life, teachers and parents laid everything out — what classes to take, what tests to study for, what grades to hit. The moment he graduated, the structure vanished, and he was tossed into total chaos. Everyone told him to "follow your passion," but he couldn't even say what his passion was.

He's not alone. Mark Manson has said on the podcast that the vast majority of people can't articulate their passion. Shaan Puri is 36, successful by conventional standards, and says he still hasn't figured it out. Sam Parr says he's constantly tearing down, rebuilding, and questioning what he's working on — it's produced some of the best pivots of his life, but groping through the fog "feels terrible."

When you don't know where your passion lies, you default to what's familiar — doing what you've already done, what your parents did, what your friends are doing. A lot of people mistake familiarity for love.

Blisters Are a Receipt That Says "Price Paid"

After Joseph Campbell coined "follow your bliss," he realized people had misunderstood — they started looking for something that would make them happy all the time. That's not what he meant at all.

Campbell's definition of "bliss" has specific traits: you're naturally drawn to it, you feel alive doing it, it's often irrational, you lose track of time, you do it during hours meant for rest and relaxation. The thing other people see as work, you do voluntarily in your free time — that's a critical signal.

But he later put more emphasis on "blisters." Blisters are the calluses on your hands, physical proof you've paid the price over and over. You can't will yourself into developing those calluses through sheer discipline — something has to be pulling you toward it. If you find yourself willingly enduring a particular kind of pain, that's probably your direction.

The Word "Passion" Literally Means Suffering

The etymological root of "passion" is suffering. "The Passion of the Christ" is about Jesus being nailed to the cross — that's not love, it's agony. So "follow your passion," etymologically speaking, always meant "follow the thing you're willing to suffer for."

But modern culture equated it with "follow your joy." This semantic drift didn't happen long ago. Before the Gilded Age, your career was decided by your parents — whatever your father did, you did. "Leisure" was a privilege of the wealthy; the term "gentleman of leisure" didn't appear until the late 1800s. The weekend was popularized by Henry Ford in 1926 — he discovered that giving workers time off actually boosted productivity and loyalty. The golden age of American leisure was the post-WWII era, roughly 1950 to 1970, when veterans used the GI Bill for free college, the economy boomed, and a single income could cover a house and two cars.

Today's data shows we're working harder than ever while being told "you must find your passion." Cal Newport wrote in So Good They Can't Ignore You: Passion is a byproduct of mastery. And where does mastery come from? Sustained enthusiasm. You practice a little more each day, inch closer to mastery, and mastery itself generates deep satisfaction, which feeds back into enthusiasm. It's a flywheel, not a destination you have to locate before you start.

Find the Loop You Love

Shaan offered an incredibly practical framework: any job can be broken down into a loop you repeat over and over.

The healer loop: someone comes to you in pain → you diagnose the root cause → prescribe a solution → send them off with a little less suffering. Doctors and therapists run this loop tens of thousands of times over a career. In college, Shaan took the MCAT dreaming of becoming an orthopedic surgeon for an NFL team. He found someone living that exact dream and shadowed him for two weeks. What he discovered: the daily loop was patients showing up, you telling them their cartilage is gone or their ligament is torn, and that even after surgery things won't go back to the way they were. Constant pain, minimal creativity. Two weeks in, he was emotionally drained. He asked himself: Am I still doing this because 14-year-old me thought it sounded cool and it would make my parents proud?

The founder loop: see the status quo → imagine it could be better → build a product → sell the product → build a team to build and sell the product. Early stage is building, mid-stage is selling, late stage is team-building. That's what you'll do for the rest of your life.

His own loop: get curious about something → go deep → passionately share the best 1% with like-minded people → watch them light up → do it again the next day. Books, podcasts, YouTube — the format doesn't matter, the loop is the same. Six years in, still full of energy.

Don't Pick the Industry You Love — Pick the Growth Motion You Love

Shaan used to choose projects by industry — healthcare sounds meaningful, fashion sounds fun. Then he learned a brutal truth: the time you actually spend on the product is vanishingly small. Whether it's Hampton or The Hustle, Sam says the time he spent on the product was "zero" — all of it went to people stuff: managing, leading, organizing. Even when you're building around a product, most of your time goes to growth.

"You spend the majority of your time selling the thing, not building the thing and admiring how great it is."

If your product grows through enterprise sales, your days are spent doing enterprise sales, hiring enterprise salespeople, and managing an enterprise sales team. If it's e-commerce, your days are spent running ads, optimizing landing pages, and sending emails. So the real choice isn't the industry — it's the growth motion.

Shaan's favorite is content, followed by ads (essentially the paid amplification of content). His least favorite: viral growth and direct sales. Sam told a story: when The Hustle was a media company, they had some seven-figure ad contracts that required wining and dining clients. On one trip to New York, he laced up those "stupid brown dress shoes" every salesman owns, finished the meeting, threw the shoes in the trash, got into the cab barefoot, and swore he'd never do it again. Shaan said the thing he hated most was "sucking up to influencers" — at his previous livestreaming tools company (later acquired by Twitch), he had to beg 19-year-old streamers to use his product while they wouldn't even look up from their screens. One night he had dinner with his biggest competitor, and they commiserated. The competitor said, "I'm so tired of being on my knees." Like two UFC fighters consoling each other backstage after a bout.

The #1 Deathbed Regret: Living the Life Others Expected

Sam recommended the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The author is a nurse who spent years in palliative care, documenting the regrets terminal patients brought up again and again. Her five regrets:

Number one, far ahead of the rest: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two: I wish I hadn't worked so hard — mostly said by men who missed their kids' games and were absent for milestones. Number three: I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Number four: I wish I'd stayed in touch with old friends — many dying patients spent their final weeks trying to track down lost friends, only to find they couldn't reach them. Number five: I wish I'd let myself be happier — many realized only at the end that happiness is a choice, and they'd stayed stuck in comfortable inertia, pretending to be content.

Sam emphasized one point: following your passion does not equal starting a company. He's seen too many people equate "follow your passion" with "quit your job and launch a startup doing what you love," only to end up in financial ruin. Bill Gurley's book mentions that 70% of people don't enjoy what they do every day. There are 24 hours in a day — sleep 8, work 8 — half your waking life is spent at work. Finding a loop you love is worth fighting for, but that loop can exist inside a good job. It doesn't have to be a startup.

Start by Listing the Blisters

Before getting into anything, people fixate on outcomes: I want six-pack abs, I want financial freedom. Shaan says you should list the blisters first. Want to get fit? The blisters: showing up on days you don't feel like it, putting your phone down, pushing every set to failure, strict diet discipline. What determines whether you'll stick with it is the blisters, not the reward. Blisters are actually easy to predict — you can identify exactly what they are ahead of time, then ask yourself: Can I live with that?

Let Others Reveal You to Yourself

Sometimes you can't see your own signals, but the people around you can. Naval Ravikant grew up thinking he'd be a scientist — scientists pursue truth, the highest calling. His mother said, "I think you'll be a businessman." He was baffled. She explained: "You've never said it, but you've always done it. Every time we walk into that pizza shop, you're telling me everything they're doing wrong and how they should fix it." She saw his pattern before he even knew it existed.

Adam Neumann's story is similar. Before WeWork, he was running a struggling children's clothing brand. He asked his girlfriend at the time what he should do. She said, "Go into real estate." He'd never touched real estate. She explained: walking down the streets of New York, a man's eyes can land on many things — women passing by, dogs, food. "Your eyes always go up. You're always looking at the buildings, wondering what's inside, imagining what they could become." She saw what he couldn't see in himself.

Grab the Pole, Because the World Is About to Throw You

Sam told a story about taking his kids on the airport tram. It was their first ride, and they were thrilled. He said, "Hold onto the rail." They didn't get it — the train hadn't moved yet, and they were standing just fine. The train lurched forward, and his 30-pound daughter went flying into a fellow passenger's suitcase.

That, he said, is the nature of all advice that's easy to give and hard to follow. Figuring out what makes you feel alive, building an internal scorecard instead of an external one, not letting comparison steal your joy — these sound like clichés, but they are the rail. If you don't grab it, the world will keep throwing you around. Grab it, and you'll still feel the jolt when the train rounds a corner — but at least you'll still be standing.