To find what you're obsessed with, look to your childhood interests and never dismiss them as childish—entrepreneurs who follow the through-line of their youthful passions often build the most successful businesses.
The key to finding your obsession is examining childhood interests—Dan Brown's father gave him treasure hunts at Christmas which became his Da Vinci Code career, and Exploding Kittens creator Elan Lee still plays with LEGO and board games as an adult, showing how lifelong passions become world-class businesses. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 · My First Million · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 27:26
The first is look into your childhood. So if you read about people who suggest how to do this, a lot of the times they say look into your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time. Rather it's your free time as an adult, but as adults our free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments. And you know, you fill your free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think about what you should do. You just simply think about what you want to do. And so, when you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes and these different phases, and then you grow out of them. But they often have like similarities. So, you know, I got obsessed with one video game. But then I would grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it, but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And I got obsessed with business, and now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same through line, right?
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:26
27:25I and I could argue otherwise, but I'm just saying generally speaking for the average person, have you thought about how to find something that you're obsessed with? Or even can you become obsessed? >> I do think it's everyone is capable of it, but very few people ever do it. I think there's two two interesting things I can say about this. The first is look into your childhood.
27:46>> Yeah, that's what Robert Greene says. Yeah, so if you read about people who suggest how to do this, a lot of the times they say look into your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time. Rather it's your free time as an adult, but as adults our free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments. And you know, you fill your
28:02free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think about what you should do. You just simply think about what you want to do. And so, when you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes and these different phases, and then you grow out of them. But they often have like similarities. So, you know, I got
28:18obsessed with one video game. But then I would grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it, but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And I got obsessed with business, and now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same through line, right? Of It's sort of
28:35this game. There's points, whether the points are called stars or points or money or ROI, whatever it is, right? Like, IRR, it's it's a different scoreboard, but it's the same idea. And there's a competitive competitors, there's strategy, and it's hard to win, but it's fun to win, and like you got to trial and error and try to figure it out. So like I like strategy games, and
28:54I've always liked strategy games. I always It's very easy for me to get obsessed with a strategy game. >> Are you like a board game guy? >> Yeah, like I'm a I love board games. I love I love social strategy games. I love watching Survivor. I love playing card games where you got to lie, and you got to do, you know, you got to sort of bluff. Well, that's poker, but there's
29:11also other social card games like that. You know, so so you start to notice patterns, and you got to think back. So there's a great story of Dan Brown. You know Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, which is like one of the best-selling mystery thriller books ever, and like Demons and Angels. He's got a He's got a bunch of books like this. So this guy's