90% of People Can't Name Their Passion Because They're Looking in the Wrong Direction

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-04-27T12:10:17Z

Shaan Puri says stop picking careers by industry — pick the growth loop you love. The actions you repeat daily determine your happiness, not the product you sell.

The episode was sparked by a specific encounter: Puri was eating at a restaurant in Austin when a 24-year-old listener walked up and said, I know I'm smart and hardworking, but I have no idea which direction to go. He'd been guided his entire life by the structure of the education system — what classes to take, what tests to pass, what grades to get — and then on graduation day, all that structure vanished. Everyone told him to "follow your passion," but nobody told him how.

Joseph Campbell's Correction: From "Bliss" to "Blisters"

Puri cited Joseph Campbell, the man behind the "hero's journey" narrative framework. Campbell's original advice was "follow your bliss." But he later walked it back, saying he should have said "follow your blisters" instead.

Campbell's "bliss" had specific criteria: you're naturally drawn to it, you feel alive doing it, it's often irrational, you lose track of time, and you find yourself doing it even when you should be resting. The thing other people consider a grind but you do voluntarily — that's the telltale sign.

But too many people interpreted "bliss" as "the thing that makes me happy," and Campbell came to regret the phrasing. His "blisters" addendum meant this: the calluses on your hands are proof of repeated sacrifice. If you willingly endure pain for something, that's probably the direction you should go — you're drawn to it so strongly that you'll put up with the suffering.

The Word "Passion" Literally Means "Suffering"

Parr added an etymological footnote: the word "passion" comes from the Latin for "to suffer." "The Passion of the Christ" is about Jesus being crucified — that's not love, it's agony. So Campbell replacing "bliss" with "blisters" actually brought things closer to the original meaning of "passion": you love something enough to suffer for it, you feel called to do it.

Before roughly the 1930s, "following your passion" wasn't even a concept ordinary people entertained. Your father's trade was your trade. Henry Ford's factory system is what popularized the very idea of a "weekend" — before that, there wasn't even a standard work week. The golden age of American leisure culture ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, when veterans used the GI Bill for college, the economy boomed, and a single income could cover a house, a car, and a family. "Passion" as a career criterion is a remarkably recent invention.

The More You Ask "Why Am I Not Happy," the Less Happy You Become

Parr cited Cal Newport's thesis: passion is a byproduct of mastery. And mastery comes from sustained enthusiasm — the willingness to do the same thing over and over until you're exceptionally good at it. Parr's own example is piano: the night after a lesson, he walked past the piano room exhausted but still sat down and played a pirate-style barcarolle. Half asleep, but a little bit better than before.

He also referenced the argument in Bad Therapy: people who constantly ask themselves "Why am I not happy?" or "Am I not following my passion?" or "Shouldn't this feel better?" tend to be more dissatisfied than those who never ask these questions. Relentless self-examination of your own happiness becomes a source of unhappiness itself.

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

Puri brought the philosophy down to a practical level. He said he used to choose projects by industry — healthcare sounds meaningful, fashion sounds fun — but once he was in it, he discovered that you spend shockingly little time on the product itself.

He asked Parr: across Hampton and The Hustle, how much time do you spend on the actual product each day? Parr's answer was "zero." All the time goes to people problems — management, leadership, organizing a team. And even within team-building, a huge chunk goes to growth, not the product.

Puri's conclusion: you don't need to pick an industry or product you love. You need to pick a sales and growth motion you love. If your product is driven by enterprise sales, your daily life is enterprise sales. If it's driven by Facebook ads, your daily life is buying media and optimizing landing pages. Figuring out which growth motion you enjoy matters far more than figuring out which industry you like.

Puri's personal favorite is content, followed by paid acquisition; he likes viral growth and direct sales the least. Parr told a viscerally memorable story: when The Hustle was a media company, it needed enterprise deals. Once he flew to New York, put on the sales-guy uniform — blue jeans, sport coat, ugly brown dress shoes — finished the meeting, threw the shoes straight in the trash, got in the cab barefoot, and swore he'd never do it again.

Find Your Loop

Puri distilled this into a framework: find the loop you love. Any job can be broken down into a cycle that repeats endlessly.

He used the "healer's loop" as an example: a patient arrives in pain, you diagnose the root cause, prescribe a treatment, and send them off with a little less suffering. Doctors and therapists run this loop tens of thousands of times over a career. In college, Puri took the MCAT, dead set on becoming an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine. He found a perfect embodiment of that dream — an NFL team's orthopedic surgeon with his own private practice — and shadowed him for two weeks.

What he found was that the daily loop looked like this: patients come in with chronic pain, you tell them their knee cartilage is gone, their shoulder ligament is torn, and even after surgery they'll never be quite the same. Day after day of facing suffering, with minimal creativity. Puri left every evening emotionally drained, then asked himself: have I been saying this since I was 14 just because it sounded good to my parents?

The "founder's loop" is different: you see the status quo, imagine a better version, build the product, sell the product, then build a team to build and sell. Early on it's the building loop, then the selling loop, then the team-building loop. Puri says he finally found his true loop at 30: get curious about something, research it deeply, passionately share the best 1% with like-minded people, watch them light up, then do it all over again the next day. Six years into podcasting, he says he's "fresh as a daisy."

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: Number One Wins by a Landslide

Parr recommended the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The author is a nurse who spent decades in palliative care, observing thousands of people at the end of their lives. She distilled the five most common regrets:

Number one, by a wide margin: 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 regretted missing their children growing up. 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 reconnect, only to find they couldn't. Number five: I wish I'd let myself be happier — they didn't realize until it was too late that happiness is a choice you can actively make.

Passion Doesn't Have to Become a Career

Parr added an important caveat: following your passion doesn't mean turning it into a job. He's seen too many people make that mistake — especially in creative fields, where monetizing a passion kills the passion and creates financial hardship at the same time. His advice: if you want to try, save up 6 to 12 months of expenses first. Money doesn't necessarily make you happy, but a lack of money will definitely make you miserable. There's no shame in keeping your passion as a hobby.

Puri's counterpoint carries weight too: in a 24-hour day, subtract 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of work — half your waking life is spent working. Bill Gurley's book says 70% of people dislike what they do every day. Settling for "good enough" on the thing that consumes half your conscious existence is an enormous price to pay.

Their eventual consensus: the answer isn't necessarily entrepreneurship. Find the loop you love, whether that loop is sales, marketing, connecting people, or something else entirely — the key is that it gives you energy and makes you feel alive.

Sometimes Other People See Your Direction Before You Do

Puri shared two stories about being shown the way by someone else. Naval Ravikant grew up thinking he'd be a scientist — a truth-seeker, an inventor, the highest calling. His mother said, I think you'll be a businessman. Naval said he'd never once mentioned business. She replied: you've never said it, but you've always done it — every time you walk into that pizza shop, you tell me everything they're doing wrong and how they should fix it. She saw his direction before he could see it himself.

Adam Neumann's story is similar. Before WeWork, he was running a children's clothing brand that was going nowhere. He asked his girlfriend at the time what he should do. She said: go into real estate. Neumann said he'd never touched real estate. She said: a man walks down a New York street, and his eyes could land on a lot of things — women passing by, dogs, food — but your eyes are always looking up, at the buildings, at what's inside them, imagining what they could become.

List the Blisters First, Then Decide Whether to Walk the Path

Puri closed with two practical pieces of advice. First, before starting anything, list out the "blisters." Want to get fit? The blisters are: going to the gym on the days you don't feel like it, training to failure, controlling your diet, putting down your phone. Whether you stick with it comes down to those blisters, not the vision of having a six-pack.

Second, cultivate the ability to notice — notice where you have disproportionate, irrational enthusiasm, notice where you go further than most people would. That enthusiasm might not come with a neat label anyone's ever given you. And sometimes, like Naval's mother and Neumann's girlfriend, someone else will see it before you do.

Parr ended with an image from an airport: he was riding the terminal tram with his kids, telling them to grab the handrail. They didn't see the point — the train wasn't moving yet. Then it lurched forward, and his 30-pound daughter went flying into a stranger's suitcase. All that advice that sounds like a cliché — figure out what makes you feel alive, build an internal scorecard instead of an external one — that's the handrail. The world will jerk you forward without warning, and anyone who isn't holding on gets thrown.