For years, I've stood in front of students, educators, and leaders and said with full confidence:

Follow your passion. Do what you love. Follow what makes you come alive.

It sounded right. It felt inspiring. And I meant every word of it.

And I was dead wrong to say it

Not a little off. Not slightly misguided.

Wrong in a way that I think has quietly sent a lot of good people chasing something that doesn't exist — and left them wondering why they couldn't find it.

Let me tell you what changed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Jungle Keeper: What It Takes to Change the World by Paul Rosolie — a conservationist who left home at eighteen and spent the next two decades living and working deep in the Amazon rainforest.

Not visiting it. Not studying it from a university office. Living in it.

He got to know the animals up close and personally. He worked to protect over 300,000 acres for posterity. He built a life most people would call extraordinary, and a few people would call insane.

Now that Rosolie has gained some level of fame — podcasts, television, a book — he says people ask him constantly how they can get his job.

His answer was telling:

You can't get my job, he says, because I had to suffer my way into it.

He wasn't being dramatic. He was being precise.

He'd been chased by uncontacted tribes with spears seven feet long. Contracted dengue fever. Been pierced by a stingray. Eaten monkey brains. Swum with piranhas. Endured decades of exhaustion, isolation, and physical pain that most of us will never come close to.

And that is why, when wide-eyed “passion followers” ask him how to get such a cool and important job as his, he can say with grueling honesty”

You can't get my job, without also accepting everything I went through to get here.

He didn't say, "Find what you're passionate about and the path will open up."

He said the path was made of suffering — and that the suffering was inseparable from the destination.

**You can watch a full podcast on Rosolie’s work to save the Amazon jungle here. I HIGHLY recommend it:

Around the same time, I heard Alex Hormozi — entrepreneur, investor, someone who has studied human motivation and performance more rigorously than most — say something about passion that cut right through the comfortable version I'd been telling people:

Following your passion is terrible advice because it gets cause and effect backwards.

He argues that we don't become passionate about things before we get good at them. We become passionate after. Passion is often the reward for doing the hard work, not the prerequisite for starting it. "Follow your passion" skips the hard part and suggests the feeling comes first.

But here's where Hormozi really lands the punch:

“Most people think following your passion means doing something you love. But that's not true.

It means loving the outcome enough that you were willing to endure suffering in order to achieve it.”

Loving the outcome enough to endure the suffering.

Not tolerating the hard parts. Not pushing through the difficult seasons.

Enduring — which implies something much longer, much more honest, much more costly.

The word passion comes from the Latin passio = “to suffer. To endure”

Even though I’ve used it to advise folk to follow their dreams, the reality is that the word was never about enjoyment.

It was always about what you were willing to stay for.

Which means every time I told someone to "follow their passion," I was actually telling them something far harder than it sounded.

I was telling them: find the thing you are willing to suffer for and stay there, even (and especially) when it costs you.

At Odyssey Leadership Academy, I teach a course called Service Leadership.

This year, we've been working through what I'm calling the Cost of Ikigai — a deliberate reframe of that famous Venn diagram about purpose and meaning that you've probably seen floating around the internet.

Everyone talks about the power of ikigai. Very few people talk about what it costs.

So instead of asking students, What are you passionate about? — which invites a performance, a guessing game, a rehearsed answer — I now ask them something different:

For what are you willing to suffer?

It's the question Paul Rosolie had to answer while being hunted by jaguars and on death’s door with jungle fever. It's the question every person who has ever built something meaningful has had to answer — usually not in a classroom, usually in a moment of exhaustion or doubt or near-collapse.

Is this worth it?

Am I willing to stay?

The answer to those questions is your real passion.

Not the list you made when you were seventeen. Not the answer you give at dinner parties. The thing you kept choosing when you could have walked away.

The Cost I Didn't See Coming

When I left a stable, respected career in education to start Odyssey Leadership Academy — leaving behind the salary, the trajectory, the institutional security — I believed in what I was building. I had vision. I had conviction. I had what I would have called passion.

What I did not have was an accurate picture of what it would cost.

The long nights. The early mornings. The hard conversations that left me empty. The relationships that didn't survive the strain. The broken seasons and battered parts of my soul that this work tore open.

If someone had handed me an honest invoice before I started — here is what this will actually cost you — I'm not sure I would have signed.

I say that not as a warning. I say it as testimony.

Because here's the other thing I've come to believe — the thing I think is equally true, maybe more true:

Passion is what makes suffering holy.

I don't mean needless suffering. I don't mean suffering for its own sake, or martyrdom dressed up as purpose.

I mean the suffering that comes with pursuing something you love, something you believe in, something that makes the world — even a small corner of it — more whole.

That kind of suffering is different. It has direction. It has meaning.

Martin Luther King said it this way: If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

I hope your passion doesn't cost you your life. I hope mine doesn't cost me mine. But I understand now, in a way I couldn't have a decade ago, what King was pointing toward.

To follow a real passion — a true purpose, a deep calling — is to accept that it may ask more of you than you expected. More than you budgeted. More than you thought you had.

And somehow, if it's the right thing — it's still worth it.

A few newsletters back, I wrote a piece claiming that educators are pierced in specific ways such that their hearts break open in service for others

What these two pieces point to is this irrevocable truth:

Education is always passion work

It always involves more cost than we realize

It always forces us to question whether we have what it takes

It always leaves us raw and vulnerable to our deepest frailties and vulnerabilities

When I say educators are pierced in specific ways, I mean something particular.

I mean the veteran teacher who has given thirty years to students who will never know her name again — and who keeps showing up anyway, because something in her cannot do otherwise.

I mean the assistant principal who sat with a student in crisis at 10pm on a Tuesday, long after the contract said the day was done, because the student needed someone and he was someone.

I mean the new teacher in her second year who cried in her car for twenty minutes before walking into the building — not because she wants to quit, but because she cares so much and has so little left to give and still cannot bring herself to give less.

I mean the principal who absorbed another round of criticism from all directions — parents, district, staff, community — and went home and lay awake and still got up the next morning and chose this.

These are not people who failed to protect themselves. These are people who understood, at some level beneath language, that the work requires a kind of openness that inevitably means getting hurt.

That's what it means to be pierced. Not wounded carelessly. Opened intentionally — by the work, by the students, by the sacred and impossible nature of what it means to tend to the formation of human beings.

I want to be very careful here, because I think there's a version of this idea that does real damage.

The version that says: You're an educator, so suffering is your lot. Endure it quietly. Your exhaustion is noble. Your depletion is devotion.

That version is NOT what I'm saying.

In fact, that version has been used — consciously and unconsciously — to exploit the passion of educators for decades. To underpay them. To overload them. To ask them to absorb what broken systems should be fixing. To treat their willingness to give as permission to keep taking.

The suffering that comes with passion work is not the same as the suffering that comes from being mistreated.

One is the cost of love. The other is the cost of injustice.

We need to know the difference. And we need to fight — loudly and without apology — against the latter.

But we also need to stop being surprised by the former.

Because here is what I believe to be true, and what I think the best educators already know in their bones:

Some of this weight is not a problem to be solved. It is the shape of the work.

The sleepless nights before a hard conversation. The grief of losing a student — to the streets, to addiction, to a system that failed them before they ever reached your classroom. The ache of caring about outcomes you cannot control for human beings whose futures are not yours to determine.

That is not dysfunction. That is not burnout in disguise.

That is what it feels like to do sacred work.

Passion Work Has Always Looked Like This

Paul Rosolie gave decades to the Amazon — chased by jaguars, hunted by uncontacted tribes, living off the land, eating monkey brains, slowly eaten alive by a life most people would find unendurable — because the forest was worth it to him. Because he loved the outcome more than he feared the cost. Because saving it became his passion

Martin Luther King was told, repeatedly, to slow down. To protect himself. To find a safer path toward the same destination. He couldn't. Not because he was reckless, but because the work had pierced him at a depth that made a safer path impossible.

I don't think educators need to be martyrs. I don't think you need to destroy yourself to prove your devotion.

But I do think most of the educators I know and admire share something with Rosolie and King — they are people who were found by this work, not people who simply chose it off a list of career options. Something in the work recognized something in them and called it forward. And that call has not gotten easier with time.

It has gotten more costly. And they have stayed anyway.

That is passion in the original sense. Not the feeling. Not the enthusiasm of September.

The staying. The returning. The choosing, again, to remain open again and again and again because somewhere in that openness something holy is taking root

If you are reading this and you are tired — if the weight of this work has you questioning whether you have anything left, whether this is sustainable, whether the cost is simply too high — I want you to hear two things simultaneously, and I want you to hold both of them without collapsing one into the other.

The first: you were not built to be depleted. Your exhaustion is information. It is asking something of you — for rest, for support, for boundaries, for a season of replenishment before you can give again. Please listen to it. Please take it seriously. The work needs you whole far more than it needs you heroically empty.

The second: the weight you are carrying is not a sign you chose wrong. The heaviness of this work, when it is the heaviness of love and investment and genuine care, is not evidence that you are in the wrong place. It is evidence that you are in it for real. That you are not performing presence — you are actually here, actually with these students, actually in this with everything you have.

You are doing passion work. In the old sense. In the truest sense.

You are among the pierced ones.

And from what I have seen, the pierced ones change the world — quietly, persistently, one student and one school and one relentless act of care at a time.

That's not nothing.

That's everything.

Until next time, blessings on the journey

Scott

Real leadership doesn't happen in isolation

It happens in relationship

You became a school leader to make a difference—to create environments where students thrive, teachers grow, and communities flourish.

But the daily reality of leadership can feel overwhelming, isolating, and far from the vision that called you to this work.

Change is coming and you want to lead your learning community with intention, clarity, and care

What if you had a community of peers and expert guidance to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and joy?

That’s precisely what the Flourishing School Leaders Cohort is all about!

It’s a ragtag group of school leaders just like you leaning into inspiration, community, collaboration, purpose, and hope

This month, we are looking at ways to reduce leader burnout to keep you flourishing in the work for a long time to come

Join us and get all the previous sessions free and 12 months of rich, authentic, supportive, inspiring community!!!

Check it out!