Jerry Seinfeld on why chasing your "passion" is embarrassing, and what to do instead:
Seinfeld pushes back against the popular advice to find your one great passion in life.
In his view, it's not just unnecessary, it's a little ridiculous.
"Let go of this idea that you have to find this one great thing that is my passion. My great passion with your shirt torn open and your heaving pec muscles. It's embarrassing."
Instead of chasing something dramatic, he offers a quieter alternative:
"Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion. It's not so sweaty."
He explains why the heavy-breathing version of passion is actually counterproductive:
"Just be willing to do your work as hard as you can with the ability you have. We don't need the heavy breathing and the outstretched arm from your passion. It makes co-workers uncomfortable in the cubicle next to you."
Then Seinfeld offers what he calls his three real keys to life, no jokes:
"Number one, bust your ass. Number two, pay attention. Number three, fall in love."
@JerrySeinfeld elaborates on the first one:
"You obviously already know whatever you're doing, I don't care if it's your job, your hobby, a relationship, getting a reservation at M Sushi, make an effort. Just pure stupid… effort."
And here's the part worth sitting with:
"Effort always yields a positive value even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. This is a rule of life. Just swing the bat and pray is not a bad approach to a lot of things."
In 2019, MIT professor Patrick Winston gave a legendary 1-hour lecture called “How to Speak.”
It has 18M+ views for a reason.
His frameworks:
• Your ideas are like your children
• The 5-minute rule for job talks
• Why jokes fail at the start
15 lessons on communication:
Level of adulting
1. Watching everything subtitles
2. Being excited about going to bed
3. Unnecessary noise annoys you
4. Feel the benefits of water while drinking it
5. You turn down the music to see better while driving
6. Excited when buy something new for your place
Credit where it's due: Accenture booked $5.9 billion in AI projects last year. Nearly double the year before.
This joke only works if Accenture is a code shop (It's not). Accenture pulls in $70 billion a year. Half of that ($34.6B) is managed services, where they run entire business operations for other companies: payroll, HR, supply chains, security, compliance, all of it, across 120 countries. The consulting half is mostly strategy and organizational overhauls for 9,000 clients, not writing code.
The irony: every time a company wants to deploy AI tools internally, they call Accenture. Someone has to figure out which workflows to automate, retrain thousands of people, restructure processes, migrate data, and bolt AI into enterprise systems built decades ago. That's exactly what Accenture sells.
And it's working. Accenture's AI revenue tripled to $2.7 billion in fiscal 2025. They've run 11,000 AI projects across 1,300 clients since 2023, totaling $11.5 billion in AI bookings. Last quarter, they booked another $2.2 billion in AI work alone, with AI revenue up 120% year over year. Total quarterly bookings hit a record $20.9 billion, with 33 clients each signing $100M+ deals in a single quarter.
They did cut about 11,000 employees who couldn't be retrained for AI. But they grew their AI workforce from 40,000 to 77,000 in two years and trained 550,000 employees on gen AI basics. Their CEO said AI is now so embedded in everything they do, they're going to stop reporting it as a separate number.
The real risk to Accenture is that AI makes its own consultants so productive that clients stop paying for hours and start paying for outcomes. Revenue per employee sits at ~$89K/year, suggesting that much of their workforce performs the kind of process execution and staff augmentation that AI genuinely compresses. Their stock is down 33% from its 52-week high, even after beating earnings, because Wall Street sees the same math.
A 24-year-old with Claude Code can ship an app over a weekend. Accenture charges Fortune 500 companies to rewire how they operate across 52 countries. Those are different jobs. AI tools are making Accenture's phone ring more right now, but the margin pressure from those same tools is the real story to watch.
Former Goldman Sachs executive Raoul Pal: knowledge is now worth zero.
He's half right.
AI didn't make knowledge worthless. It made access to knowledge worthless.
The scarcity shifted. From "who knows" to "who can think."
Doctors and lawyers aren't paid for memorizing facts—they're paid for judgment under uncertainty. For knowing which fact applies when. For deciding when the rules don't fit.
AI has infinite knowledge. It has zero wisdom.
Knowledge is free. Taste is expensive.
I used to brag about working 18 hours a day, and I was wrong. When I was building my first companies, I thought exhaustion was a badge of honor. In reality, it was unhealthy and unproductive. Burned out founders make bad decisions, and bad decisions destroy companies. Today, I work harder than ever, just smarter. I sleep properly, I train every day, I protect my diet, and I guard my focus. I don’t make million-dollar decisions after 1 p.m. because sharp judgment beats brute force every time.
Productivity beats hours. Longevity beats ego. Discipline beats chaos. If you’re building a company and running on fumes, you’re not a hero, you’re a liability. I don’t invest in exhausted founders. I invest in sharp, healthy, focused leaders who can win for decades, not just survive a year. That’s the new standard.