The 3 Rare Requirements that Make Passionate Work Possible (& the Surprising Future of Live Your Legend)

“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

- Jane Addams

*Important Note: I’d love your thoughts on the question at the end of this post. It will dictate a lot of the future of Live Your Legend. Can’t wait to hear from you!

Now let’s dive in…

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In eight days Live Your Legend will turn 1.

In some ways it’s hard to believe it’s already been a year. In others it feels like it’s been a lifetime (after all I did write my first online article in 2006, which is like a billion Internet years).

But in thinking back on the past year, especially in the context of spending three weeks exploring Turkey, and then another three days surrounded by greatness at the World Domination Summit, a few realizations have hit me.

But let’s start with the basics.

Whether you’re new here or have been around for a while, it’s important to know why we do what we do…

Why Live Your Legend Exists

At Live Your Legend we believe that it’s not only possible, but crucial, that everyone spends their time doing the work that makes them come alive.

80% of the people around us don’t enjoy their work. Our current environment encourages complacency. It keeps us from doing what matters.

This is a tragedy.

That’s why I started working on this stuff so long ago, and why I first set out to create this community at Live Your Legend. For all of us who believe differently, to have a place to come and belong. To get support and to give it. To inspire each other. To participate in the ideas and practices that make loving your work actually possible.

If we can get this right, we can change the world. And indeed, thanks to all of you, we already are. But there’s so much more this community is capable of (I’ll get to that in a minute).

That’s what I want to talk about today – Taking things to a new level.

A Rare Approach to a Common Problem

There are a ton of websites out talking about pursuing your dreams, loving your work, quitting you job, finding and following your passion and doing the best with this one life. I hate to say it’s starting to sound like a broken record, but it kind of is – and that’s a good thing!

I imagine hundreds more get launched daily or weekly. Some of these sites are fantastically useful. Many of them are not.

But at Live Your Legend we take a very different approach.

First off, we measure our success based on impact and engagement, not on revenue, subscriber growth or any other easily quantifiable metric. This site is only successful if it creates meaningful change for our community. That is the only goal. That's why I do my best to respond to every email and comment that comes in (even if it sometimes takes a while) - simply put, I want to help.

If we get this right, I believe all the numbers will work out just fine.

So while we do our best to infuse inspiration into every post, what guides our work and our writing is one question: Will this content be directly useful, practical and actionable? That’s why you may notice that while the average blog post on the web might be a few hundred words, the ones here are often a few thousands. We write less often, but have a diehard focus on insane usefulness, not fluff.

This dedication is also why you’ll see us pour our heart into creating five or 10-page workbooks, as well as the Should I Quit Test, to further that goal. We offer these 100% for free to all who decide to join our community. They are all a part of the Passionate Work Tool Kit. As long as you keep finding value in this stuff, we’ll keep creating it.

The rule is simple: if it’s not going to allow you to take action, it doesn’t get published.

But that’s just the start.

At Live Your Legend we take a holistic approach to doing work you love. It is not just about finding a new job or career or starting a business. Doing work you love is a way of life, and that’s how we approach it.

In all my reading, research and client work, there are three components that are requirements for passionate work:

Knowing Yourself & Self-Experimentation
Doing the Impossible
Surrounding Yourself with Passionate People
It is impossible to do work you love, without thoroughly embracing these three concepts. This is how we’ve approached it since the beginning, yet it took three weeks on the other side of the world to actually distill it down. Another reason why I travel…

Everything we write, create and do, somehow comes back to these three pillars.

That’s the core of what makes our community different.

So let’s break this down a little bit (as well as talk about some big things to come)…

The Passionate Work Framework: 3 Fundamental Pillars to Doing Work You Love



1. Knowing Yourself & Self-Experimentation

You must know who you are, what you’re good at, what values you hold highest, what you enjoy doing and what you absolutely hate. This comes from massive introspection (journaling, reading, self-guided education, asking the right questions) and constant experimentation. This is not something you learn in a book. You extract it from your life experiences. The more experiences the better. When it doubt, keep learning and experimenting.

Last year I spent hundreds of hours creating a course principally dedicated to this pillar (it covers the others as well, but not in as much depth). The course is Live Off Your Passion. Last year we were honored to see it win the #1 Personal Development Product of 2011 (thanks to so many of you!), and I still firmly believe that it is hands down the most comprehensive and directly useful course of its kind on the web. This is our flagship course and is designed to provide you the path for finding your passion and building a career around it. So far it’s done that for hundreds upon hundreds of our community members – have a look at some of their stories via the links below.

If you haven’t checked it out recently, I suggest you do. You can read all the course details here. And as always, you’re welcome to try it risk-free.

What’s to come:

Live Off Your Passion is just the beginning. In the years to come I will be building this into a much more robust (and expensive) interactive course with live in-person components. I can’t wait!

2. Doing the Impossible

Most people don’t believe it’s possible to have a passionate career. In fact society trains us that a lot of unbelievably fulfilling things can’t be done. So we have to brainwash ourselves otherwise. Because when we do things we didn’t think we could do, it puts our thinking on a whole new level. The best place I’ve found to start is with your physical body – with exercise and nutrition.

One, because it’s totally in your control (no matter what happens in a day, you can always decide to get out on that run or choose that salad over the fries – no one can take that from you). And two, because overcoming our own perceived physical impossibilities gives us confidence that is directly transferrable to the rest of our life – be it business, relationships or whatever. If you got yourself to lose 50 pounds in six months, then who’s to say you couldn’t double your business’s sales next year?

Showing yourself you can do things you used to write off as impossible, has a confidence compounding effect on our life like no other. That’s why I do things like swim from Alcatraz with a group of 12-year-olds, run ultra-marathons and sign up for events like The Goruck Challenge. It’s also why fitness is my #1 priority and why our official partner charity is impossible2Possible, a youth charity that takes teens on insane physical and educational adventures around the world to show what they’re actually capable of (a portion of all LYL’s income goes to their cause).

We can be more of who we are when we put ourselves first. We must train ourselves that most limits are mental. We do that by turning them into milestones. Whether it’s finishing that first mile, writing that first chapter or making that first call – we must stack up proof that we can do what we used to tell ourselves we couldn’t. Then limits disappear.

What’s to come:

While I’d love to have a separate site and business dedicated to building and pushing your mental and physical body, I just don’t have the time right now (although something tells me it will be a future project). But for now there are other people building amazing things in the space of health and fitness that I can direct you all to.

One of them is my good friend Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. I recently contributed to a Simple Fitness Habits course he’s creating that I’m excited to announce to you guys in the next few weeks or so. I look forward to it helping you make your impossible your new normal. Keep an eye out.

3. Surrounding Yourself with Passionate People

The fastest way to do the impossible is to start hanging around people already doing it. Simple as that. The peolpe around you change everything. There is no bigger life hack. That is why creating genuine connections is such a huge part of our message.

The best thing about this is, just like doing seemingly impossible physical challenges, whom you surround yourself with is totally in your control. I swear if there were only one single piece of advice I could give to someone looking to find and do work they love, it would be find new friends. The fastest way to change your results is to change your environment. That’s it. The people next to you have a much bigger impact than most realize. If you’re not inspired by them then do something about it.

What’s to come:

I’m creating a course on this right now (which I’ll be officially announcing soon) called How to Connect with Anyone that will take us through the crucial steps of creating genuine relationships with the passionate people who can change our world. This course has been a long time coming and I can’t wait to share it! My talk last week at WDS got me especially fired up for it.

How to Connect with Anyone, combined with Live Off Your Passion, are going to take our impact here to a totally new level.

Also, in the coming weeks and months I plan to create a lot more opportunities for our community to connect with each other, including some rather memorable live events in San Francisco (as well as perhaps elsewhere), and another fun idea I’ll mention next week.



The Community Makes Everything Possible

So that’s the framework, but none of this means anything without our community. The people around us change everything, and you are those people.

This is where I want to make the biggest change/enhancement/improvement this year and in the years that follow.

Live Your Legend measures success based on impact. That means the more community interaction, the more cross-inspiration and the more connecting we can do with one another, the more we can be successful – And the more those around us (and ourselves) can believe this vision of living off our passion can be possible.

Up until today, the spotlight has been mainly on my work, and then you get to digest it and comment on your experience, whether on the site, via email, Twitter, etc. This is a good start for change, but it’s too one-sided for me.

I want the spotlight to be on all of you and how we can inspire each other to operate on new levels.

A dedicated and important member of our community, Paul,  said it perfectly when he commented on our World Domination Summit recap post last week:

I wanted to tell you that it is posts like these that are my own personal World Domination Summit. It is you and your materials that show me that there are others like me here, and inspire me to keep pushing to discover my true self and my true calling. For those of us who are still on the path of finding our passions, of finding our true selves, thank you so much for bringing the lessons you learned to us. I know without a doubt it is things like this that will get me to my tipping point to have that ah-hah moment, and I sincerely thank you for it. – Paul

Here was my response:

Wow Paul. Thank you for this. More than anything, my biggest goal with Live Your Legend is to provide a community where all of us who believe what we do, about doing work that matters and putting our dent in the world, have a place to come and belong. To inspire and be inspired. To raise our own standards and those of everyone around us to do things that make the difference. You are a huge part of that. It goes both ways! -Scott

This is the most rewarding comment I think I’ve ever received. Because it embodies our most fundamental reason for doing what we do here.

But Paul should not have been thanking me (although I certainly appreciate the note). He should have been thanking all of you. And perhaps without knowing it, he was.

Because without you, there is nothing.

But with you all, crazy things are possible.

And because of you, that’s exactly what’s happening.

I could not be more grateful.

So here’s where you come in

Tightening the bond and interaction of our community, and getting you all much more involved, is priority #1 for me right now, but I don’t exactly know how to do it…

I’ve always let your ideas and suggestion guide my creativity, and I need your help.

What ideas do you have for enhancing the impact of our community on all of us? What would you like to see to allow you to get more deeply involved in the movement, both in the interest of helping yourself and in helping those around us?

I have one idea I’m really excited about that I’ll be announcing next week (as well as giving away a free coaching package to add a little fun, so keep an eye out).

But I really want to hear from you.

Know yourself, do the impossible and surround yourself with passionate people. That’s the formula – our unavoidable framework. That’s what it all comes back to at Live Your Legend. But none of it works without the people. They can move mountains or they can chain you to your basement floor.

You all have shown me more peaks than you realize, and I can’t believe we’re just getting started.

So how can we bring this community to a new level?

Share a thought in the comments and keep an eye out for a fun announcement next week.

And in case I don’t say it enough, thank you for making all this possible.

It means more than you realize.

There are big things to come,

-Scott

P.S. If you’re reading this in email please click here to share your idea (or just reply to this email)

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