Don't "Follow Your Passion" in 2025

TL; DR: You’re “passionate” about many things, or nothing. It’s hard to focus on just one. Try out one possible passion for three months. Make sure it’s a high-leverage pursuit. You’ll learn a lot about yourself. (If you don’t want to read my story, just read the parts in blue).

The rule “follow your passion” is meaningless.

That's because less than 20% of us know what we truly want. (If you're in that 20%, you don't need to read the rest of this.)

This is going to be a long one, with a lot of details about my personal story. If you want to skip around, I’ve put the “lessons” in a blue font so you can find them easily.

If you haven't yet found your true purpose and don't know what you want, consider this a blessing. You have an almost infinite realm of possibilities spread out before you like a buffet with hundreds of tasty dishes.

Thousands of paths lay open for your exploration, and you can't choose the wrong one.

The Real Purpose Behind Every Purpose

You’re in this world to learn, grow, and perfect yourself. As more people do this, we all improve one another and make the world better.

This is at the core of every religious and spiritual tradition. It’s part of the psyche of every great athlete, artist, philosopher and entrepreneur.

There are millions of ways you can achieve these higher levels of refinement, and some of those ways can only be done by you.

So how do you discover the right path?

Well, the short answer is to do it by trial and error. The more complicated and complete answer is to do it by high-leverage pursuits.

The Cliff Dive

Whenever you choose a career, an art, a sport, or a cause, do it like you’re diving off a cliff.

I’ll give you an example.

When I was 20, I was on a mission to save the planet.

I was majoring in Environmental Studies, but that was just a superficial part of the whole pursuit.

I was going to be the environmentalist version of Indiana Jones, outwitting the evil corporate Nazis who wanted to moonscape the last of the old growth forests.

My classmates were mostly thinking about getting positions with State Parks or the Forest Service. Some of the more ambitious ones talked about becoming environmental lawyers, and others just wanted to be professors.

If I had done the same, I would have had a milder, safer life. Maybe I would have been happy. But I wouldn't have learned much about myself.

Instead, I dove off a cliff.

I joine a radical environmental movement. I camped on platforms in old growth trees to slow down logging operations.

I confronted timber workers, government bureaucrats, and law enforcement.

Because I took an extreme path, I had a life-threatening experience that taught me more about myself than any other incident ever has.

What happened that night forced me to question everything I was doing with my life. It led me to go in a completely different direction.

When you're choosing a career, an art, a sport, or a cause, go for the highest and most extreme version you can handle. Greater efforts lead to greater discoveries, even if those discoveries show up as failures.

The Descent Into Clarity

In my case, I wasn’t yet done, but I had reached a turning point.

I was shivering in a wet sleeping bag under a tarp on a sheet of plywood, suspended 80 feet off the ground in a giant fir tree in the mountains of Idaho.

All the trees around me were gone. The logger who cut them down had aimed several of them so they swiped the outer branches of my own tree as they fell, swinging me back and forth in broad, terrifying arcs.

The previous night, I had watched lightning destroy a tree a few hundred yards away.

Now I was sitting on a lightning rod, the tallest thing within 100 feet, when a record storm hit the world.

I counted the time between each flash of lightning and the resulting thunder. They were seconds apart and growing closer.

I made a decision. I began to toss everything that couldn’t fit in my backpack.

Food, water bottles, and ropes all went over the edge into the darkness.

I didn’t have a figure eight, a necessary piece of gear in order to rappel down out of the tree. So I improvised by linking two carabiners together and weaved the rope through it.

Halfway down, one of the carabiners came partway open and caught the rope. I bounced around in panic for a few seconds, then forced myself to be calm.

With a flashlight in my mouth and one foot resting on the stub of a broken branch, I managed to ignore the hailstones pelting me from the sky and fix the tangled mess.

When I reached the ground I ran for cover and thought about all the ways I could have died over the past 72 hours.

One thing was clearer than ever: I was not willing to die for the old growth forests.

I felt like a coward, and I hated myself for the next few months. But I never would have gained the same lesson by taking an easier route.

Knowing I wasn’t willing to die for the planet, I had to find something to live for.

It didn’t take long to find another pathway through the world.

Unfinished Business

If you’re ever unsure of what to live for, look to your past for unfinished business.

What did you love in the past? What dreams have you set aside or boxed away in the attic of your heart?

Start there. This is how you’ll begin to find your way.

I grew up singing in choirs, long before I knew what an environmentalist was. When I was 18, I had what I would call a mystical experience.

It was like my voice and all the other voices with me were blending perfectly in one magical harmony that vibrated in sync with the entire universe.

We were in a competition that day, and we earned a Unanimous Superior rating from the judges—the equivalent of a perfect 10.

As a radical tree-hugger, I was enchanted by the harmonious power that I could feel in the natural world. As a failed tree hugger, I began to look back on my experience with music and I felt like it was the same mystical power.

I was eager to explore this power again. Maybe I could recreate that magical experience for others while reliving it myself.

So I signed up for a bunch of music theory and conducting courses at the local city college. I joined two choirs and looked into getting a second Bachelor’s degree so I could teach music.

This took me down a new path that I never could have imagined while I was sitting on a tree platform.

I made friends with an opera singer, and soon I was listening to Verdi and Puccini for hours every day. This made it suddenly important to start learning Italian. I added an Italian class to my music curriculum.

From there, a series of events led me to live in Italy for a few years. And one Sunday afternoon, walking around to relieve the effects of a late-night party, I happened upon the Appian Way.

I decided that day that I was going to ride a bike down that ancient Roman road, all the way from Rome to Brindisi. And I did.

What I Learned from Years of Tree Sitting, Bike Tours, and Italy

What did I get from all of these experiences (and several others that I won’t mention today)?

I had a bunch of seemingly unconnected adventures, but each one led to another and gave me an insight about myself and my place in the world.

This is what you get when you don't “follow your passion.” When you don’t have a clear passion to follow.

Follow your curiosity.

Follow your desire.

Follow your intuition, your interests, and your needs.

As you engage with the world, her wisdom will reveal itself.

I learned that I love having new adventures. I feel called to be a sort of serial adventurer, as well as helping other people along the way.

I've noticed that whenever somebody asks me about becoming a writer or starting a business or traveling in a foreign country, I get super excited. I immediately think of 17 ways to help them.

When I recognize a fellow traveler pursuing an adventure of their own, I'll do almost anything for them.

This is how I discovered that helping other people have adventures may finally be my calling.

How to Choose Your Life’s Work (For Now)

Do something.

If you don't have an overwhelming passion that makes your decision inevitable, pick something that you're curious about.

What would you do if you had a gun to your head and you had to choose something right now?

Commit to becoming a fanatic for the next three months.

Making it temporary will make it easier to focus.

Pursue the most radical, energized, dramatic, and extreme version of it and a couple of things will happen.

First, you'll gain clear insight into whether this is something you want to pursue further.

Second, you might become completely sick of your choice and have a gut level feeling that you've made a wrong turn.

This means you've just eliminated a distraction. Now you’re free to try again .

So, what is your next move? What are you going to do with your life?

The answer might be so profound that it blows you away.

Tool of the Week: What to Do With Your Life

1. Try out an extreme version of one of your passions.

2. Commit to going all-in for a short period of time—usually 3-12 months 

3. Jump off a cliff

4. If you’re stuck at step 1, look for unfinished business in your past. Choose from there.

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob