How to find your thing

Why does it matter? Because 'follow your passion' might be the most harmful career advice ever given.

The word 'passion' literally means suffering — and most people throwing that phrase around have no idea. This episode tears apart the standard career playbook and rebuilds it from scratch, using actual frameworks for the 24-year-old who's smart, hungry, and completely lost.

• The fog of uncertainty you feel while searching isn't failure — it's the actual process
• Look for blisters, not bliss: voluntary suffering is the most honest signal you have
• The industry you choose almost vanishes from your daily life; the growth motion doesn't
• People around you can spot your loop before you can

Searching for your passion while feeling lost isn't a sign you're failing — it's exactly what the process looks like

Shaan is 36, regarded as successful by most measures, and still doesn't know what his passion is. He thinks about it constantly. That admission alone should reset how you're framing your own uncertainty.

The problem with 'follow your passion' as advice is that 90%-plus of people don't know what their passion is. When you graduate and suddenly go from hyper-structured (classes, tests, marks, deadlines) to completely unstructured, the fog feels like a malfunction. It isn't. Sam puts it plainly: when you're in the fog, you end up following your familiar — you do what your parents did, what your friends did, what you already know. Familiarity masquerades as direction.

What makes this worse is timing. While you're supposed to be searching, being lost feels like evidence you're doing something wrong — so you abort the search early and default to the known. The reframe Shaan offers: the discomfort of uncertainty is not a detour from the process of finding your thing. It is the process. Stop treating it like a warning sign.

Blisters beat bliss — voluntary suffering is the only career signal that can't be faked

Shaan has actual blisters on his hands right now from training for a Murph — doing pull-ups until his palms tore up. That's the receipt. That's the point.

Joseph Campbell — the hero's journey guy — famously said 'follow your bliss,' then watched everyone interpret it as 'chase whatever feels good instantly.' He later wished he'd said follow your blisters instead. The distinction matters enormously: blisters are evidence of a price paid over and over again that willpower alone couldn't have sustained. If you find somewhere you willingly suffer, that's the signal — you're so drawn to it that even the hardship doesn't repel you.

The etymology clinches it. The word 'passion' comes from the Latin for suffering. The Passion of the Christ is Jesus being nailed to a cross. Following your passion, correctly understood, means following something you love so much you'll suffer for it. Cal Newport's version of the same chain: passion is a byproduct of mastery, and mastery comes from enduring enthusiasm. You can't white-knuckle 10,000 hours. You need genuine pull.

Practical move: instead of asking 'what am I passionate about?' — a question almost no one can answer — ask 'where do I have evidence of voluntary suffering?' That's findable. That's a real data point.

Enthusiasm is the rudder, not just the fuel — and it reliably delivers you to the frontier where opportunities appear

Paul Graham's essay 'How to Do Great Work' — the one that takes two days to read — contains one line Shaan keeps coming back to: let enthusiasm be not just the motor but the rudder of your boat. The motor gets you moving. The rudder is what this is actually about.

Enthusiasm, especially the irrational disproportionate kind, takes you to the frontier of whatever field you wander into. Shaan walks through Sam's fitness obsession as the demonstration. Sam started somewhere around the 50th percentile of health and fitness knowledge. Something irrational drove him — he didn't question it, didn't need a reason. He started injecting testosterone, doing the NFL combine as a civilian, tracking every calorie and body fat percentage. He reached the frontier.

At the frontier, you notice gaps nobody else sees yet. Sam spotted the male testosterone epidemic before most people had language for it. He told Shaan about semaglutide before it was called Ozempic. They both invested in Hone Health — now over a nine-figure run rate. That investment came directly from Sam going so deep into a personal enthusiasm that the market gap became obvious.

You don't have to know why you're obsessed with something. You just have to not doubt it.

Pick your sales motion, not your industry — because founders spend less than 15% of their time on the actual product

Sam used to pick businesses based on how cool the industry sounded. Healthcare. Fashion. Apparel. He kept learning the same lesson the hard way.

The industry fades to oblivion fast. Shaan asks Sam directly: how much time per day do you spend working on the actual product at Hampton or The Hustle? Sam's answer: none. All the time goes to people — managing, leading, organizing. And even when you're organizing people, a massive chunk of that is around growth, not product. Shaan's estimate: less than 15% of a founder's time touches the actual product. The rest is building the team and solving the hard growth problem.

So the variable that actually defines your daily life isn't the product — it's the growth motion. Enterprise sales company? You're doing enterprise sales, hiring enterprise sales people, managing enterprise sales teams. E-commerce brand running on Facebook ads? You're running ads to landing pages and sending emails. SEO play? You're doing SEO every day for years. Shaan's simplified version: 'I don't need to pick an industry I love or a product I love. I need to pick a sales motion that I love.'

For him, that's content and ads. His least favorite: influencer wooing and enterprise sales. He literally threw his brown dress shoes in a trash can in New York City mid-trip and hailed a cab barefoot after one too many circle-back-and-promise meetings.

Every career is a repeatable loop — and you can audit the loop before you commit

Two weeks shadowing an NFL team's orthopedic surgeon nearly saved Shaan from a decade-long mistake. He took the MCATs in college, had the dream mapped out. Then he watched the actual loop up close.

Somebody comes in with chronic pain. You tell them their cartilage is gone. You do surgery or give a steroid injection. You send them back out better than they arrived but worse than they want to be. Then the next person comes in. Then the next. Forty years of that. Shaan left emotionally drained after two weeks and realized: this is an extremely low-creativity loop where you see people suffering all day with no real resolution. The guy doing it loved it. Shaan did not. He dodged medical school.

The founder loop, by contrast: see the world as it is, imagine it better, build a product, sell the product, build the team that will build and sell the product. That's it. You'll run that loop on a daily and macro level for as long as you're a founder. Shaan's current loop — the one he actually loves — is: get curious about something, dig in, extract the top 1%, enthusiastically share it with like-minded people, repeat. Six years into this podcast and he says he's 'fresh as a daisy.'

The blisters are knowable in advance. Map the loop, name the suffering it requires, and decide honestly if you'd do that tens of thousands of times.

70% of people hate how they spend their days — and half of your waking adult life is at work

A hospice nurse spent decades watching thousands of people die and compiled the five most common regrets. The number one regret, by a huge margin: 'I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.'

According to Bill Gurley's book, 70% of people do not like how they spend their days. Shaan's math: 24 hours in a day, sleep 8, leaves 16. Work 8. Half your conscious waking life — from roughly age 20 to 65 — goes to whatever you chose for work. The stakes of that choice are almost impossible to overstate, and most people accept a bad answer without much of a fight.

The trap is external scorecards. Sam walked through a $18 million penthouse in his building out of curiosity and came back down the elevator feeling like he needed more — despite already being happy before he went up. Comparison is the mechanism that whiplashes you away from internal clarity. Shaan's frame: building an internal scorecard (based on your own enthusiasm and blisters) is the pole you hold onto on the airport tram. The world is going to jerk you around regardless. Without that pole, you go flying into someone's suitcase.

The people closest to you have already spotted your loop — they're a legitimate data source you're ignoring

Naval's mom told him he was going to be a businessman before he'd ever said the word. His reaction: 'I never said anything about being a businessman.' Her response: 'You never said it, but you're always doing it. Every time we walk into a pizza shop, you tell me everything they're doing wrong and what they should do instead.' She spotted the loop before he could see it himself.

Adam Neumann's girlfriend — later wife Rebecca — told him to go into real estate when he was failing at a kids' clothing brand. He'd never touched real estate. Her reasoning: whenever they walked down the street in New York, his eyes went up. Always looking at the buildings, what was in them, what they could be, not what they were. She connected dots he hadn't connected.

The move: ask the people who spend real time around you what they notice you obsessing over when you're not performing. Not what you say you care about — what you actually do, repeatedly, without being asked. Their observations are data. Probably better data than your own self-assessment.

The internal scorecard has to come before the world builds one for you

Every framework in this episode points at the same underlying problem: most people let the external world define the game before they've figured out what game they actually want to play. The blisters, the loop, the sales motion — these are all tools for building an internal scorecard early enough that it can actually hold against the whiplash.

What this episode reveals is that 'finding your thing' isn't a moment of discovery — it's a noticing practice that runs continuously. The people who do it well aren't necessarily more self-aware; they just stopped doubting the signal when they found it.

Light yourself on fire. People will come from miles away to watch you burn.

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Topics: career advice, entrepreneurship, passion vs purpose, finding your thing, Joseph Campbell, Paul Graham, loops framework, regrets, motivation, identity