#47 don't follow your Passion
|
“Do what you love” sounds great - until you realize you don’t really know what that is. Especially in your 20s. And by 30, chances are it will have changed. Here’s what I’ve learned from experience and from people wiser than me: Don’t follow your passion. Build it. Passion comes after skill. You don’t get good at something because you’re passionate - you become passionate because you got good at it. This is especially true for developers. In the beginning, learning is hard and frustrating. But over time, passion grows with mastery. Ask better questions. Instead of “What do I love?” ask, “What do I pick up faster than others?” That’s your edge. Liking something doesn’t mean you’re naturally good at it. “Find work that feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.” - Naval Ravikant For me, that’s thinking, brainstorming, and talking about ideas. Writing helps me sharpen those skills. I’d gladly do it after a long day of work. That’s a good sign. Getting the cause and effect backwards. What you love now probably won’t be what you love at 40. Passion shifts. But skill compounds. Work on what people already pay for. Don’t just chase dreams - solve real problems. Society signals what it values through what it pays for. Your best ideas live at the intersection of what you're good at with what the world needs. Jobs once said: "Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do…. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Figure out what you want. Ignore the opinions of others. Do so much volume that it would be unreasonable to not be successful. |
Sunday Scoops
Business & Tech in 5 minutes or less.
Anthropic dropped Claude Opus 4.7 this week, this model is built for long-running coding tasks, multi-file refactors and complex debugging sessions. From my early testing the model is quite different to what we are used too and it tends to ask lots of followup questions similar to what we've seen with GPT 5.4 and in comparison to Opus 4.6 we see fewer tool errors, and crucially the model now verifies its own outputs before reporting back. Cursor’s CEO called it “a meaningful jump in...
👋 The thing about AI right now is that most people are using it the same way they used Google in 2005. They type a question. They get an answer. They move on. That’s fine. But it’s leaving most of the value on the table. This week, I’m running a series called Get AI Native in 2026. Not a course and definitely not theory. Every issue, I’ll walk you through one or two things you can actually set up this week that will change how you work. Step by step. This issue is about two tools that...
After three years of hype, AI is finally meeting reality. The gap between a cool demo and a working business is closing fast. LLMs are writing production code, robots are landing on doorsteps, and autonomous taxis are actually turning a profit. We have moved from “what if” to “what is.” Here is the current state of the frontier: from the infrastructure of open source to the rise of physical world agents, and the inevitable shift toward AGI and monetization. the models Most people still...