Follow Your Effort, Not Your Passion
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The host argues that "follow your passion" is bad career advice because passion is a feeling, while effort is observable evidence. The mechanism is reps: wherever you already put time in, you accumulate repetitions, get measurably better, and eventually get paid for that competence. Effort also tends to track natural strength — people quietly gravitate toward what they are already good at — so auditing effort surfaces a strength map without any self-assessment guesswork. The earnings from that competence then fund the passions, which stay hobbies. The route is explicitly allowed to zigzag: the host moved through fitness, music, sports, and media training, with the single through line being that each move leaned on something she was already good at. Success follows the effort; the passion gets financed by it.
Origin
Extracted from Habits & Hustle
How to run it
- 1
Audit where your time actually goes
Ignore what you say you love and look at where the hours already land. The question is not "what am I passionate about" but "where am I putting in the time." That log is the raw data for everything downstream.
Pro tip Look at unpaid, unforced time as well as work time — that's where effort is most honest.
- 2
Map effort onto strength
Cross-reference the effort log against what you're good at. The host's claim is that these two lists usually overlap, because people naturally gravitate toward things they perform well at. Where effort and strength meet is your candidate lane.
Watch out Don't force the map to point at your favourite hobby — that defeats the purpose of using effort as evidence.
- 3
Build reps in that lane
Deliberately concentrate more time in the identified area. The stated mechanism is volume: more time in something means more reps, more reps mean you get better, and getting better is where success actually comes from.
- 4
Monetise the competence, even if it's unsexy
Pick the version of that strength that pays, not the version that Googles well. The host cites Scott Galloway's point that the very wealthy made money in metals, mines, and other unglamorous fields — not the hashtag-friendly entrepreneurial jobs.
Pro tip Boring, well-executed businesses are a feature, not a compromise.
Watch out Chasing the 'sexy' version of a field usually means chasing a crowded, low-margin market.
- 5
Ring-fence the passion as a hobby
Keep fishing, video games, swimming, or documentaries as things you do for pleasure. The income from what you're good at buys more time and money for those, so they get more of you, not less.
Watch out Converting a hobby into a job risks destroying the pleasure that made it a hobby in the first place.
- 6
Let the path zigzag and re-evaluate
Expect several direction changes. The through line is not the industry but the rule: at each fork, lean into what you're good at. Re-run the effort audit as your skills evolve and let the career compound across categories.
Pro tip Treat each move as evolution rather than failure — the host changed fields repeatedly before it cohered.
In the wild
The host describes a career that moved through fitness, music, sports, and media training with no obvious sequence. Looked at from the outside it reads as directionless. But she identifies a single consistent rule underneath every move: at each juncture she leaned on the things she was already good at rather than the things she claimed to be most passionate about. The effort — and the strengths that effort revealed — took her into a lot of different directions, and the career evolved over time rather than being planned. She eventually found her way, and now argues this is what other people should do rather than committing early to one declared passion.
→ A coherent career built by following strength through multiple industries rather than one declared passion.
The host uses her own leisure habit as the test case. She loves watching documentaries on Netflix, but points out plainly that she isn't making a living doing that — if she tried, she'd be broke, because there's no money in it. Instead she does something she's good at that does make money, and uses that income to pursue the hobbies that are her actual passions. Her conclusion is that the two do not have to be connected: if they happen to overlap, great, but a lot of the time they don't, and the cultural pressure to force the overlap is what leaves people stuck.
→ Income from a competence funds the hobby, instead of the hobby being forced to produce income.
Common mistakes
Treating passion as a guaranteed income source
The host calls 'just follow what you love and that will be enough' a pollyannic line that gives people a false sense of reality. It can work — but not always, and betting a livelihood on the exception is what produces the starving-artist outcome she describes.
Filtering opportunities for how sexy they look
Screening out unglamorous fields because they aren't the hashtag-worthy entrepreneurial jobs removes exactly the categories — metals, mines, mundane services — where the transcript says the real money was made.
Waiting for one perfect lane
Expecting a single lifelong field blocks the zigzag. The host's own path crossed four unrelated industries; the consistency was in the decision rule applied at each move, not in the destination.
From the transcript
“a better strategy is to follow where your effort is and see where you're putting in the time and wherever that is you will get…”
“wherever our effort is is where we build reps and the more reps we have in something the more time we put into something the…”
“so when they are following their effort they will notice and you will notice that that effort is very use very much usually in line…”
From the episode
Episode 574: Why Passion Won't Lead to Success