ESYB2 013 - Should You Follow Your Passion
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[00:00:00] When you're choosing a niche or starting a business, maybe the most common advice you ever hear is follow your passion. And a lot of people hate this advice. A lot of people love this advice. Is this advice true? Let's evaluate it for what it is. It sounds fantastic, right? But we don't want to be literal because when we believe in literal things it's really easy for us to get misled and miss things.

So what's really going on here when you follow your passion? Passion Transcript is another way to maybe say something like your intrinsic motivation. There are two kinds of motivation. Intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation means it's motivation that comes from inside of you. It's long lasting motivation.

It's something like when you wake up, you want to do it. Extrinsic motivation comes externally. It's usually intense, but short lived. For example, if you [00:01:00] listen to a fantastic energetic song or reward yourself with a treat or a snack, those motivators, they're very good today, maybe in the next few minutes.

But then their benefits dissipate and they're no longer there. And to rekindle that motivation, you have to keep doing that more and more and more. And you have to consume more of that motivator. It's good to get you going. It's not good to sustain you. To sustain you, you need passion. Or in other words, you need intrinsic motivation.

You can. Sustain yourself with discipline. But discipline is not something most people have. The typical experience that entrepreneurs have very early in the process of starting a business, especially first time entrepreneurs is they get very excited. In other words, they get externally motivated by something, some idea, whatever, they start working on it.

Most people don't even get started, but the people who get started, typically, business is [00:02:00] full of early failures. So they, they fail early, they get discouraged, they lose confidence, they lose momentum, and because they have no consistent Inner voice pushing them. They don't have that intrinsic passion, intrinsic motivation.

They just quit. That's why it does help to have that intrinsic motivation. So when you're thinking about your business, think about what do you want to do long term and do you want to do this long term? But keep in mind also that boring businesses. Make money a lot of boring businesses services It's not something you like might love to do cleaning home repair But you know what they do make a lot of money and consistently and they're needed so that's just an example like And maybe working in technology.

Yeah, sounds cool and sexy, but programming is actually hard and boring and frustrating too. So, things that make money are often not that fun, precisely because not a lot of people want to do a lot of things. Because guess [00:03:00] what? Passion businesses, music Travel related, car related, fashion related, things that are really fun and people love, well, they are super, super, super competitive because everyone is trying to be in them.

So, there's a balance there that, yeah, it's good if you can do something. to tap into your long term motivation and passion. But it's not the only way to go. In fact, sometimes it's not. The only thing is, you should want to be in this business, you shouldn't hate it, you shouldn't dislike it, because if you build a successful business and you're really miserable in it, well, what was the point of building it anyway?

You could have just gotten a job that you didn't like in the first place and skipped all that struggle. The point of a business is to give you a little more freedom, a little more flexibility in working on what makes you happy. So, there has to be that balance of, yes, a little of passion, or hopefully, if you're [00:04:00] lucky, a lot of passion, but at least a little bit of passion and interest, and practicality.

It has to be practical. So, we're gonna circle around all these ideas throughout the course.

