About working with passionate people

If you want to start a company, hire passionate people. If you are not starting one, be very picky about who you choose to work with and make sure they care about what they do as much as you do.

I love working with passionate people because they care about the outcome. They care less about whose idea it was, who gets credit, or whether they were right or wrong. They just want to get to the best answer and make whatever they are working on better.

They are also internally motivated. You don't need to constantly tell them what to do, how to do it, or give them a pep talk to get them going. They already care enough to figure things out on their own. That usually makes them incredibly curious. They ask a lot of questions. They go down rabbit holes. They keep looking into things long after most people would have stopped caring. They want to understand why something works, why it doesn't, and whether there is a better way to do it.

Passion turns people into experts. I don't think it works the other way around. I have a hard time believing you can become truly great at something without being passionate about it. At some point, becoming great requires spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about the same problems, asking more questions, noticing small things, and wanting to understand things at a much deeper level.

The best people I have worked with get obsessed with problems. They can sit with something difficult for a long time because they care enough to figure it out. When you are passionate about something, time almost stops mattering. You can spend hours on a problem without realizing how much time passed because you just want to solve it.

The most impactful products around us came from that kind of obsession. Someone cared about a problem enough to keep thinking about it for years. They kept improving it, questioning it, and finding things everyone else missed.

Passionate people also make the people around them better. It is the same way running with faster runners eventually makes you a faster runner. Spend enough time around people who care deeply about their work and you naturally start pushing yourself more too.

Passion is contagious, it spreads. Their curiosity makes you more curious. Their standards raise yours. The whole team gets better because everyone is surrounded by people who care.

That is probably my favorite part about working with passionate people. Work becomes a lot more fun when everyone around you gives a damn.