The Delusion of Passion: Why Millennials Struggle to Find Success

The Delusion of Passion:

Why Millennials Struggle to Find Success

By

David Anderson and Mark Nathan

Copyright © 2016 by Millennial Strong, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-9971330-1-1

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holder except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact: sales@millennialstrong.com

Editor: James C. Hart

Content Editor: Meredith Nathan Cover Design: Mark Nathan

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to our wives, who inspire us to become more everyday.

Their love, respect and commitment is truly humbling.

Table of Contents

About the Authors

Prologue

Introduction for David Anderson — by Mark Nathan

Introduction for Mark Nathan — by David Anderson

What Happens When You Start With Bad Info

Part I- The Delusions of Passion

Delusion #1- Where There Is Passion, There Is No Pain

Delusion #2- Where There Is Passion, There Are No Problems

Delusion #3- Passion Precedes Total Commitment

Delusion #4- You Must Be Passionate About the Process

Delusion #5- Living Passionately Is All About You

Part I Review

Part II- Creating a Life of Passion

Create Your Life- Resolve and Refuse

Create Your Life- Develop Daily Habits

Create Your Life- Surround Yourself With Amazing People

Create Your Life- Add Value to People

Create Your Life- Kill What’s in Front of You

Conclusion- Game On

About the Authors

David Anderson

Born in 1985, David is currently the CEO of KEEP GLOBAL North America and previously the co-founder of School Loan 411, a student- loan advisory firm. He was inducted as a Global Shaper with The World Economic Forum and is the Senior Advisor to the Honorary Consul to the country of Moldova. David worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs in New York City and investment management at J.P. Morgan in Chicago. He also worked as an aide at the White House from 2011 to 2012. He is a proud graduate of Chicago State University, where he graduated with Honors, and Harvard University’s Explorations Program. He resides with his wife Kristin and young daughter in the Bronzeville neighborhood.

Mark Nathan

Born in 1982, Mark is the child of Burmese and Filipino immigrants. He paid his way through college as an actor and started his life as an entrepreneur, launching a film festival at age twenty-one. Mark has built a number of different businesses, and became financially free at twenty-seven years old. Mark has been invited to speak globally about goal-setting, personal development, team-building, financial freedom and creating culture. Mark is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is a proud Chicagoan. He and his wife Meredith live in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago.

Prologue

David Anderson & Mark Nathan

Perhaps some of this sounds familiar:

- I will yell at you if you haven’t seen my favorite movie.

- If I need to learn how to do something, I’ll check YouTube.

- I’ll buy something for a good cause.

- At least twenty-five percent of the pictures I take on my phone are selfies.

- I’ve contributed to my friends’ projects/causes on Kickstarter or GoFundMe for a number of reasons, but most importantly, because my friends are awesome.

- Playing a video game with downtime is just as good as seeing a movie.

- I’ve worn a wristband to raise awareness, or left a wristband on for weeks after an event.

- I take pictures of my food.

- I have binge-watched many, many things on Netflix.

- There have been multiple occurrences where I’ve watched more than thirty minutes of YouTube videos involving cats, dogs, song covers and/or people falling down.

- I have an itch to check my phone every time it makes a noise, even if I know it’s not important.

- I know it’s wrong, but I have a general disinterest in any pop culture from before I was born.

- I have spent hours on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram doing absolutely nothing

- I would take a cool experience over some extra cash.

- I’m more impressed by someone with 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube than by someone with an Ivy League education.

- If I leave my phone at home, it’s like I’ve lost an appendage.

- When I post something funny on social media, I check periodically to see who liked or retweeted it.

- When I have very important thoughts (such as, I wonder what Robert Downey, Jr. has been up to?), I will search Wikipedia.

- Even if it’s the same price, I’d rather take an Uber than a cab, because anything I can do on an app is more awesome.

- I’m secretly proud of myself when I come up with a #cleverhashtag.

- I sometimes text people who are in the same room.

If you connected with two-thirds of these statements, then this book is for you — and for our whole generation.

The two of us writing this book are not PhD’s from fancy universities with 20,000 case studies to share with you.

We’re not sociologists pouring through hundreds of surveys to compile research.

We’re just a couple of guys trying to take over the world, and looking for a few more people to share the journey with.

Millennials

Researchers define generations by assigning catchy titles to ranges of birth years:

The Silent Generation: 1925–1945

Baby Boomers: 1946–1964

Generation X: 1964–1979

and so on…

Researchers use birth years to suggest commonalities between these groups, but the defining characteristic isn’t actually your birthday; it’s the way you view and interact with the world around you Growing up in those years meant that you had shared circumstances with your fellow peers that shaped the way you view the world. Similar circumstances produce experiences, which create similar character traits, which produce similar patterns of behavior, which make it easy to use broad generalizations. It’s not an exact science, but generations do tend to see the world in a similar way.

Which is why we know it’s silly to put birth-year ranges on being a Millennial. You’d look for the year you were born and simultaneously reject the idea that someone is trying to get into your head, all the while thinking about a name for our generation that would be way cooler than the one the researchers came up with.

The goal of this book is not to study, label or criticize. Quite the opposite actually. We see nothing but big things for our generation.

Decades from now, we believe that our Millennial

generation will have the

opportunity to be remembered as

The Most Productive Generation in history.

Decades from now, we believe that our Millennial generation will have the opportunity to be remembered as The Most Productive Generation in history. We’ve been handed more technology than anyone could have dreamed of a few generations ago, which streamlines communication and increases our opportunities to learn. Right now, we can talk to someone on the other side of the world by clicking a button, and we can physically see them in less than twenty-four hours. We have an amazing foundation of education and empowerment that has been provided for us by our parents and previous generations. And more than anything else, we have each other.

We have a heart to see each other win.

We have a loyalty to the greater good.

We have passion to do the amazing.

We have a need to accomplish the awesome.

We have an inexplicable desire for world domination.

But for all of these attributes, we’re referred to as the Distracted Generation. We’re viewed by everyone else as entitled, lazy and not living up to our potential. Parents/teachers/bosses say these things with good intentions — it’s a way of letting us know they see a lot of buried talents. But when we hear these statements, it just makes us want to stop listening.

How things were before technology, how hard everyone had to work, how phones and video games are destroying everything natural in the world — these statements are made with the goal to inspire us to want more, but they don’t acknowledge that they’re already preaching to the choir.

Sure, we could be doing more. But we’re not lazy; we’re uninspired. We want to find something worth doing, not just find something to do.

Sure, it seems like we’re easily distracted. But we don’t have ADHD; we’re actually pretty focused. Yes, our phone can be a distraction from what’s right in front of us, but we actually have seven things going on simultaneously…it’s all just happening on one device.

Sure, it seems like we’re indecisive. But we’re really weighing options; we’re trying to figure out how to fit three lifetimes into one.

What we need isn’t a lecture, but rather the right mindset. We’re close, but we might be just a little bit off…

What we need isn’t a lecture, but rather the

right mindset.

1º Off

I (Mark) recently traveled to Australia from Chicago to speak at a conference, and over the course of two weeks, flew to several different cities. The flight itinerary included: Chicago to LA, LA to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, and Melbourne to Adelaide. In order of the length of each flight, it looked like this:

Melbourne to Adelaide: 1 hour and 15 minutes

Sydney to Melbourne: 2 hours

Chicago to LA: 4 hours

LA to Sydney: 14 hours

Obviously, every flight starts with a charted and efficient plan to the final destination. But what if, upon take-off, the plane was 1º off course? Let’s say the autopilot was off, the real pilots didn’t notice, and everyone just assumed their original plan was solid.

On one of the shorter flights to Adelaide or Melbourne, 1º off wouldn’t be a major problem. You’d probably end up in a different part of the city, but it would be nothing more than a small detour that a little extra time couldn’t fix. There would be a delay as you corrected your course, but nothing too dramatic would happen.

On a medium-sized flight, like the four-hour flight from Chicago to LA, if you were 1º off from the start, it would create a much bigger problem. You wouldn’t just end up in a different part of the city; you would find yourself in a different part of the state! There would need to be some significant changes to your plans for arrival!

On a longer trip, like the 14 hours from LA to Sydney, 1º off the charted course would create a catastrophe! You wouldn’t just end up in a different part of the state, you would end up in an entirely different continent (or worse yet, in the middle of the ocean)! After the fourteen-hour flight, you’d find yourself nowhere close to your planned destination and would be a completely different trip altogether.

You had grand intentions with a great plan, but that 1º off put you nowhere close to where you had intended to be.

The 1º off principle is simply this — the further you plan to go, the more damaging 1º off becomes.

That is what’s happening right now to our entire generation. We’re 1º off and we don’t realize it. There are big things we want to accomplish and we want to get there yesterday, but we might be starting just a little off track and not even know it.

The further you want to go in life, the more important it is to get started correctly. The more you want to accomplish, the more you need to check your course along the way. Our generation has no shortage of big things we want to accomplish, but that 1º off could make a pretty big difference if we want to succeed in accomplishing those big things!

The further you want to go in life,

the more important it is to get started correctly.

1º Off: Wanting More vs. Wanting the Most

If we move this 1º off principle from fiction into real life, you’ll see how far off course someone can get and not even know!

Let’s take the phrase, I want more out of life. It’s a pretty common sentiment that I think most can agree with. It sounds inspiring…like something successful people would say. Telling people that you want more out of life is a simple way to let people know you’re looking to do more and that you have the desire for bigger things.

The problem is that the phrase is vague. I want more out of life — what does that mean? How do I get more out of life?

Wanting more out of life sounds like something you can achieve with a couple of promotions at your job or earning a little more money this year. Maybe wanting more means you’ll be happy when you finally learn to play the guitar or bench-press 250 pounds? Perhaps wanting more is an itch that can be scratched with an extra vacation or a slightly nicer place to live?

What if we adjusted that phrase just one degree in a different direction? Instead of wanting more out of life, what if we wanted THE MOST out of life? Wanting THE MOST out of life is a mindset: it’s understanding that your life is a journey, a constant exploration of who you are and