Passion Is a Commodity. Here’s What Actually Sets You Apart

My best friend and I went on more than 200 double dates with complete strangers from the internet. If you’re doing the math, that is an ungodly number of hours spent feigning deep fascination with rescue chihuahuas and adult kickball leagues.

My buddy Dave and I received hundreds of responses to an ad on Craigslist that linked to a YouTube video asking women to double date us. We documented these excruciatingly awkward encounters and uploaded those, too. To our viewers, the “Double Date Us” saga on YouTube looked like a weekly exercise in self-inflicted torture. Looking back, however, those dates turned out to be the foundational asset of my career.

While we’d dreamt of pursuing comedy professionally, Dave and I knew that “passion” would never be enough. Every aspiring comic at a Tuesday night open mic has passion. Yet when we’d stumbled into a proprietary dataset with the success of our double dates, we knew we had a highly specific, totally unique angle that no one else in the industry possessed. We were not just another comedy duo. We were the guys who survived the internet dating trenches.

That bizarre social experiment became the core material that launched a live show at the People’s Improv Theater, a decade-long, nationwide comedy tour, multiple appearances on The Tonight Showand eventually, our own TV show with NBC. We had leveraged one strange, highly specific experience to unlock the door to an entirely new industry.

The chain reaction of assets

This is not just about getting experience in a certain realm and applying for a job. It’s about taking strange opportunities that set you apart from everyone else and leveraging one unique experience for the next.

Case in point: Comedy touring was a logistical grind — living out of suitcases, navigating delayed flights, and performing in college cafeterias while competing with a sneeze guard for the audience’s attention. Instead of just enduring the friction, I audited it. With hours to kill in unfamiliar cities before evening shows, I started visiting local craft breweries.

At this moment in the early 2010s, the American craft beer scene was exploding. While established beverage journalists were geographically confined to their home bases in New York or Los Angeles, my grueling travel schedule gave me something they didn’t have — subsidized scale. It enabled me to walk into breweries in all 50 states, taste the product directly from the source, and meet brewers face-to-face.