Pursue Passion, Not Safety — The Life You’re Afraid to Build

Well, hello there, my friend.

Guess who?

It's Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

I am so pleased you are here.

You ready to do this?

Got a simple message for you as always.

Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to pursue passion and not safety in your life project.

I want you to pursue passion and not safety in your life project.

This message, as so many of these, are probably gonna make

some people uncomfortable.

Why?

Because I struggle to convince myself of the idea That we are born

for, we are born to be unhappy.

That we are born to spend this precious gift of time doing things

like in our work, our careers, that we truly don't want to do.

As I get older, I tell you one thing I feel so strongly is the, just the

crucial inestimable value of time.

Like, my days, like, from 3:30 AM most days I get up, 3:30 to 4:00 AM, till I

fall asleep in the evenings, I just go.

I just, I love this life.

It is just every day I'm doing so much interesting things, trying to

reach as many people as possible.

I, I really enjoy my life, and the thing that I feel every

single day is, where does it go?

It's like I'm so disciplined and I'm so on my game, but the, I just see

this time disappearing, and I'm 52 and I'm like, man, if I'd been thinking

like this at, like, 15, 25, 35, wow.

So I'm playing catch-up, 'cause I've suddenly realized the preciousness

of this gift of every single day.

I woke up this morning, literally my hit, my feet hit the floor, I blessed myself,

I said, "Thank you. Thank you, God, for the gift of one more day." And then I

have my time for prayer and I get after it because I know what this is worth.

And that is why, in this very brief moment, you and I are gonna talk

about why we wanna pursue passion, not safety in our life project.

I was talking to someone recently.

I do a lot of coaching, a lot of mentoring.

It's a great joy.

I love doing it.

And I was talking to someone recently, and they're, they're trying to figure

out in their life what they wanna do.

I'm talking to this, it was this, uh, this lady I was working with, and

she's trying to figure out what she wants to do next, and she's giving

me these ideas, and I'm listening to them going, "Yeah, that is so not you.

Like, so not you." She was talking about doing this really generic kinda thing,

and I'm like, "Yeah, but the barriers to entry there are, like, really low.

Like, pretty much anyone can do this." Not saying it's a bad career,

it's just… And I'm looking, looking at her going like, "Really?

Like, y- you don't sound very passionate about this.

Like, you don't sound like this is something that you're…" Like, you can

hear it in my, in, in my voice, right?

Like, I'm in the studio and you can hear the animation in me 'cause it's

real, 'cause I want to help you.

Like, you're listening to me, but I promise you that if you met me somewhere

randomly a- and you started talking about a challenge or a problem, something

you're trying to fix, I would just come alive because I love doing that.

It's what God has designed me to do.

It brings me so much satisfaction and blessing and, and I'm passionate about it.

But if you ask me to spend my days in a cubicle looking at spreadsheets, I promise

you one thing, I will get depressed.

I will definitely be depressed.

And I can promise you that I feel zero depression in my life.

None.

None.

Zero.

Because I feel so, so lucky, so blessed to be able to do this.

So the question, like some of you are listening to me now going,

"Oh, here we go." Like, "Yeah, Jonathan, well, this is your life.

It's, it's a bit fancy, but, you know, the rest of us have to do our thing."

And I'm just curious, I'm like, why?

Why is that?

Wh- wha- what is the belief that says, well, there's this little class

of people, it's like the 1% of the population that get to do really

interesting things with their lives, but everybody else just has to go and

do some mundane thing to pay the bills.

I'm not diminishing people's work.

I'm not saying that any, you know, job is beneath people.

I'm not saying that.

Friends, I've, I've like, you know, been a dish hand in kitchens.

I've like washed cars when I was younger.

I've, I've, I've done so many jobs, like right at the bottom of the

food chain, like I really have.

So I'm not looking down on anyone.

I'm just saying, why can't we all do things that we're

genuinely passionate about?

And most people are like, "It's just not possible." Well, why not?

I, I've been reading Greene's book, Mastery.

I do recommend it to people.

It's a solid read.

It demands a lot of you.

But it's-- this book, Mastery, it's literally looking at some of the great

figures of history, and it's just truly debunking this idea that they were

just prodigiously born magnificently, and they just had all this skill.

Mozart's a really good example.

Like, if you know anything about him, the general belief is this, this

incredible child prodigy, and there's no one, no one been-- no one like him.

There's some truth to that.

Like, his sister, Anna, like she got piano lessons first.

She was four years older.

So by the age of eight, she was playing really quite well because, of course,

their father was a court composer.

Like, their father was, was somebody obviously massively

immersed in the music world.

So there's, there's, there's luck, right?

There's you just get born in a certain family and certain things happen.

But they start teaching Mozart at four.

So yeah, he, he got off to an early start.

And also, he was an obsessive personality.

He was just utterly obsessive.

Like, just probably these days, we would have definitely

diagnosed him with something.

But then he goes through this long period of time, but it took-- it actually took

him into his 20s, and he died very young, and it took him all these years to kind

of figure out who he really wanted to be and what he really wanted to do.

But when he finally nailed it, there was this explosive period in

his life of creation of the most extraordinary music in history.

But yeah, there were some factors that made it.

You know, he, he copped a few good breaks, but he was passionate.

And Da Vinci and, and so many others.

I was reading in the book too about this, this, this lady in, uh, in

Miami who was like a sculptor working in steel, and just her application.

Like, she just worked really hard because she loved to do it.

So I, I want you to understand there seems to be this magical relationship,

this is gonna sound so obvious, between being passionate about something, doing

the hard work of apprenticeship and mastering it, and eventual success.

Is it a guaranteed formula?

No.

There's all sorts of challenges and things that can happen in life.

But in general, as a path, it's-- it seems that history tends to prove it's

a pretty safe bet That a-a-and I can promise you, if you're listening to

me going, "That's interesting," you know, maybe, you're thinking about

yourself, maybe you could do something you're a little bit more interested in.

Friends, it's a risk, right?

You gotta bet on yourself.

You have to bet on yourself.

And the minute you do it, it won't be like, you're not gonna get, like, hundreds

of emails and DMs and phone calls like, "We've heard that you've decided to

pursue your passion. Where can we send the money?" It doesn't work like that.

It's, like, hard and setbacks, and you'll get tired, and you'll be,

"Why am I doing this?" And you get disillusioned, but you keep going.

And so my message to so many of the people that I coach or that I mentor is

pursue passion Pursue passion because even if you miss, even if it doesn't

buy you the super yacht in 20 years, you are still gonna have a more engaged,

interesting, you know, passionate life.

So I just see so many young people falling for that massive script of go to school,

be quiet, pay attention, get good grades, go to university or college, get a job.

And I, I don't wanna be flippant about that, but I can promise you that that

was a very effective 20th century script, and it's not really working in the 21st.

I wish it was, because I have teenage kids.

But the world is about to reward entrepreneurs, thinkers, and creatives.

It is, because so much of the grunt work that was being done in the

bureaucratic administrative side is gonna be done by technology.

But the thing that technology finds hard to really master is human

creativity, genuine human creativity, human passion, human energy for things.

So if you bet on you, that's a pretty safe bet.

So if I could just be one voice saying to anybody, "Pursue passion, not

safety." You know, and some people, "But I've got a family and I gotta

do this." Friends, you get one life.

The clock is ticking.

It's ticking, ticking, ticking.

Like, wake up, live passionately, do things you care about,

bless people, come alive.

That is the core of my message, has been for, like, 30 years.

Don't sleepwalk through the, each precious day that you are given.

Okay?

So practically, what does this look like?

Do an audit.

Audit your life.

Just be honest with yourself.

Don't tell me, don't tell anyone else.

Just say, what have you pursued in your life over time?

Passion or safety?

Passion or safety?

Well, you know, I used to like this, but I had to do this, and, um… Okay,

but gosh, if, if you think that you are-- This is, this is gonna be hard.

If you think that you are serving the people you love by doing something

with your life you really don't like, I would like to gently challenge

that because when you come alive, you give permission to everybody

else around you to wake up as well.

You see, God bless him, my father spent his entire life doing

work that he absolutely hated.

It's a complex story.

He, he, his father died in front of him when he was 15 years of age.

They sent him to boarding school.

They brought him back and tried to make him run the family business, and

he hated it, and he spent the rest of his life living out of someone

else's story And he never, uh, uh, to this day, he's been dead a long time.

To this day, I, I'm really not sure what he should have done.

I, I actually think, God bless him, he probably should have been an artist.

I really think he had-- He actually had a very gentle, artistic soul

which got buried so deep doing a life of stuff that he didn't want to do.

I've seen it up close.

I have seen what that does to people, and I haven't done it,

and I don't want you to do it.

And there is this big, expansive, interesting life of possibility on

the other side of safety, if you will just give some tiny bit of thought to

building a life around your passion.

And we won't go into it in here, but it just, of course, if you do this, it'll

unsettle people and everyone think you're crazy and, and, and you'll be unsure.

But what is it what Helen Keller famously said?

"Life is a daring adventure or nothing." Life is a daring adventure or nothing.

Hope that's useful.

I hope I've given someone permission.

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You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow