So eight years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life.

I had a friend tell me,

"Don't worry about how much you like the work you're doing now.

It's all about just building your resume."

And I'd just come back from living in Spain for a while,

and I'd joined this Fortune 500 company. I thought, "This is fantastic.

I'm going to have big impact on the world."

I had all these ideas. And within about two months,

I noticed at about 10am every morning I had this strange urge

to want to slam my head through the monitor of my computer.

I don't know if anyone's ever felt that.

And I noticed pretty soon after that that all the competitors in our space

had already automated my job role.

And this is right about when I got this sage advice to build up my resume.

Well, as I'm trying to figure out

what two-story window I'm going to jump out of and change things up,

I read some altogether different advice from Warren Buffett, and he said,

"Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age."

(Laughter)

And I heard that, and that was all I needed.

Within two weeks, I was out of there, and I left with one intention:

to find something that I could screw up. That's how tough it was.

I wanted to have some type of impact. It didn't matter what it was.

And I found pretty quickly that I wasn't alone:

it turns out that over 80 percent of the people around

don't enjoy their work.

I'm guessing this room is different,

but that's the average that Deloitte has done with their studies.

So I wanted to find out, what is it that sets these people apart,

the people who do the passionate, world-changing work,

that wake up inspired every day,

and then these people, the other 80 percent

who lead these lives of quiet desperation.

So I started to interview all these people doing this inspiring work,

and I read books and did case studies,

300 books altogether on purpose and career and all this,

totally just self-immersion, really for the selfish reason of --

I wanted to find the work that I couldn't not do,

what that was for me.

But as I was doing this, more and more people started to ask me,

"You're into this career thing.

I don't like my job. Can we sit down for lunch?"

I'd say, "Sure." But I would have to warn them,

because at this point, my quit rate was also 80 percent.

Of the people I'd sit down with for lunch, 80 percent would quit their job

within two months.

I was proud of this, and it wasn't that I had any special magic.

It was that I would ask one simple question.

It was, "Why are you doing the work that you're doing?"

And so often their answer would be,

"Well, because somebody told me I'm supposed to."

And I realized that so many people around us

are climbing their way up this ladder that someone tells them to climb,

and it ends up being leaned up against the wrong wall,

or no wall at all.

The more time I spent around these people and saw this problem,

I thought, what if we could create a community,

a place where people could feel like they belonged

and that it was OK to do things differently,

to take the road less traveled, where that was encouraged,

and inspire people to change?

And that later became what I now call Live Your Legend,

which I'll explain in a little bit.

But as I've made these discoveries, I noticed a framework

of really three simple things

that all these different passionate world-changers have in common,

whether you're a Steve Jobs or if you're just, you know,

the person that has the bakery down the street.

But you're doing work that embodies who you are.

I want to share those three with you, so we can use them as a lens

for the rest of today and hopefully the rest of our life.

The first part of this three-step passionate work framework

is becoming a self-expert and understanding yourself,

because if you don't know what you're looking for,

you're never going to find it.

And the thing is that no one is going to do this for us.

There's no major in university on passion and purpose and career.

I don't know how that's not a required double major,

but don't even get me started on that.

I mean, you spend more time picking out a dorm room TV set

than you do you picking your major and your area of study.

But the point is, it's on us to figure that out,

and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this.

And so the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are.

What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what,

whether we're paid or we're not paid, the things that people thank us for?

And the Strengths Finder 2.0 is a book and also an online tool.

I highly recommend it for sorting out what it is that you're naturally good at.

And next, what's our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions?

Do we care about the people, our family, health,

or is it achievement, success, all this stuff?

We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions,

so we know what our soul is made of,

so that we don't go selling it to some cause we don't give a shit about.

And then the next step is our experiences.

All of us have these experiences. We learn things every day, every minute

about what we love, what we hate,

what we're good at, what we're terrible at.

And if we don't spend time paying attention to that

and assimilating that learning

and applying it to the rest of our lives, it's all for nothing.

Every day, every week, every month of every year

I spend some time just reflecting on what went right,

what went wrong, and what do I want to repeat,

what can I apply more to my life.

And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today,

who inspire you, who are doing things where you say

"Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him."

Why are you saying that? Open up a journal.

Write down what it is about them that inspires you.

It's not going to be everything about their life,

but whatever it is, take note on that,

so over time we'll have this repository of things

that we can use to apply to our life and have a more passionate existence

and make a better impact.

Because when we start to put these things together,

we can then define what success actually means to us,

and without these different parts of the compass, it's impossible.

We end up in the situation -- we have that scripted life

that everybody seems to be living going up this ladder to nowhere.

It's kind of like in Wall Street 2, if anybody saw that,

the peon employee asks the big Wall Street banker CEO,

"What's your number? Everyone's got a number,

where if they make this money, they'll leave it all."

He says, "Oh, it's simple. More."

And he just smiles.

And it's the sad state of most of the people

that haven't spent time understanding what matters for them,

who keep reaching for something that doesn't mean anything to us,

but we're doing it because everyone said we're supposed to.

But once we have this framework together,

we can start to identify the things that make us come alive.

You know, before this, a passion could come and hit you in the face,

or maybe in your possible line of work, you might throw it away

because you don't have a way of identifying it.

But once you do, you can see something that's congruent with my strengths,

my values, who I am as a person,

so I'm going to grab ahold of this, I'm going to do something with it,

and I'm going to pursue it and try to make an impact with it.

And Live Your Legend and the movement we've built

wouldn't exist if I didn't have this compass to identify,

"Wow, this is something I want to pursue and make a difference with."

If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it,

but once we have this framework, this compass,

then we can move on to what's next -- and that's not me up there --

doing the impossible and pushing our limits.

There's two reasons why people don't do things.

One is they tell themselves they can't do them,

or people around them tell them they can't do them.

Either way, we start to believe it.

Either we give up, or we never start in the first place.

The things is, everyone was impossible until somebody did it.

Every invention, every new thing in the world,

people thought were crazy at first.

Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, it was a physical impossibility

to break the four-minute mile in a foot race

until Roger Bannister stood up and did it.

And then what happened?

Two months later, 16 people broke the four-minute mile.

The things that we have in our head that we think are impossible

are often just milestones waiting to be accomplished

if we can push those limits a bit.

And I think this starts with probably your physical body and fitness

more than anything, because we can control that.

If you don't think you can run a mile,

you show yourself you can run a mile or two,

or a marathon, or lose five pounds, or whatever it is,

you realize that confidence compounds

and can be transferred into the rest of your world.

And I've actually gotten into the habit of this a little bit with my friends.

We have this little group. We go on physical adventures,

and recently, I found myself in a kind of precarious spot.

I'm terrified of deep, dark, blue water.

I don't know if anyone's ever had that same fear

ever since they watched Jaws 1, 2, 3 and 4 like six times

when I was a kid.

But anything above here, if it's murky, I can already feel it right now.

I swear there's something in there.

Even if it's Lake Tahoe, it's fresh water, totally unfounded fear,

ridiculous, but it's there.

Anyway, three years ago I find myself on this tugboat

right down here in the San Francisco Bay.

It's a rainy, stormy, windy day, and people are getting sick on the boat,

and I'm sitting there wearing a wetsuit, and I'm looking out the window

in pure terror thinking I'm about to swim to my death.

I'm going to try to swim across the Golden Gate.

And my guess is some people in this room might have done that before.

I'm sitting there, and my buddy Jonathan, who had talked me into it,

he comes up to me and he could see the state I was in.

And he says, "Scott, hey man, what's the worst that could happen?

You're wearing a wetsuit. You're not going to sink.

And If you can't make it, just hop on one of the 20 kayaks.

Plus, if there's a shark attack, why are they going to pick you

over the 80 people in the water?" So thanks, that helps.

He's like, "But really, just have fun with this. Good luck."

And he dives in, swims off. OK.

Turns out, the pep talk totally worked, and I felt this total feeling of calm,

and I think it was because Jonathan was 13 years old.

(Laughter)

And of the 80 people swimming that day,

65 of them were between the ages of nine and 13.

Think how you would have approached your world differently

if at nine years old you found out you could swim a mile and a half

in 56-degree water from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

What would you have said yes to?

What would you have not given up on? What would you have tried?

As I'm finishing this swim, I get to Aquatic Park,

and I'm getting out of the water

and of course half the kids are already finished,

so they're cheering me on and they're all excited.

And I got total popsicle head, if anyone's ever swam in the Bay,

and I'm trying to just thaw my face out, and I'm watching people finish.

And I see this one kid, something didn't look right.

And he's just flailing like this.

And he's barely able to sip some air before he slams his head back down.

And I notice other parents were watching too,

and I swear they were thinking the same thing I was:

this is why you don't let nine-year-olds swim from Alcatraz.

This was not fatigue.

All of a sudden, two parents run up and grab him,

and they put him on their shoulders, and they're dragging him like this,

totally limp.

And then all of a sudden they walk a few more feet

and they plop him down in his wheelchair.

And he puts his fists up in the most insane show of victory I've ever seen.

I can still feel the warmth and the energy on this guy

when he made this accomplishment.

I had seen him earlier that day in his wheelchair.

I just had no idea he was going to swim.

I mean, where is he going to be in 20 years?

How many people told him he couldn't do that, that he would die if tried that?

You prove people wrong, you prove yourself wrong,

that you can make little incremental pushes

of what you believe is possible.

You don't have to be the fastest marathoner in the world,

just your own impossibilities, to accomplish those,

and it starts with little bitty steps.

And the best way to do this

is to surround yourself with passionate people.

The fastest things to do things you don't think can be done