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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Most of us have been told to follow our passions. Author Bill Gurley spent six years researching the people who built extraordinary careers and has come to believe we may be fixating on the wrong thing.
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You see, passion doesn't invoke work. You could be passionate about the Cincinnati Reds and sit in a chair for three and a half hours drinking beer.
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In this talk, Bill shares what that research uncovered, making his case through the stories of people who found what they were meant to do, often because someone in their life asked the right question at the right moment. He shares the story of Uncle Richard, a man who sat down to dinner with his nephew Danny and said exactly the thing that needed to be said. That one conversation changed the course of everything that followed, and it's the kind of moment Bill believes most of us are capable of creating for others.
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Maybe all the world really needs is many, many more. Uncle Richards, and I hope there's a bunch of you out there in the audience today and stick around.
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After the talk, we caught up with ted's head of media and curation, Helen Walters, who shared a few more thoughts about Bill's idea and what it was like to work with him behind the scenes. That's all coming up right after a short break.
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I'm going to start with a story. A good story, a true story. In 1983, my friend Danny was 25 years old. A few years earlier, he had graduated from Trinity College with a poli sci degree. Bounced around for a while, but fell into a really cool job in sales. He sold those doohickeys. They attached to clothes in the department store so you can't steal them. He was good at it. He was making a lot of money. But as a poli sci student, he'd always planned to take the next step, law school. So the night before the LSAT is out for dinner with his Uncle Richard, a place called Elio's on the Upper east side. And Uncle Richard can tell something's not right. Danny, what's eating you? Ah, I have to take the LSAT tomorrow and I don't really want to, uncle Richard probed. So why are you? I'll get back to Danny and Uncle Richard in a minute. But let me tell you why I'm here. I spent the past six years studying what drives career excellence. A co writer, a researcher, and I combed through over 100 biographies. We talked to some of the leading academicians in the field, looked at their research, and we even did our own survey with Wharton. We turned that into a book. What did we find? There were many common traits, but one thing stood out above everything else. Continuous and obsessive learning. They were all lifetime students. They knew the history of their field. They understand the nuance of their field, the thing that separates great from good. They know the edge of their field. That's where innovation lies. And they studied throughout their entire career, beginning, middle, and end. I'd like to think they thought about their craft as an artisan with an artisan mindset. And I've come to believe these artisans exist in every field. Here's a fun example. In 2015, at the annual chess competition in Iceland, they did something fun. They held a history trivia contest. Guess who won? Magnus Carlsen, the world champion. See, he's not just great at chess. He knew the history. But if you study Magnus Carlsen, you know this to be true. It's very low likelihood that he got to a place in his career where he says, oh, boy, to be even better at chess, I need to study the history. I'm going to go do it. It was a different mechanism, and this is my key point, the key takeaway, right here at the beginning. Obsessive and continuous learning is not an input, it's an output. It's not the cause, it's the effect. What's the cause? What drives someone to learn for a lifetime? In 2024, Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, gave the commencement speech at Duke University. And after making fun, which he's good at, making fun of, the phrase follow your passion, he come up with a different word, a better word, a more precise word. He said, you should follow your fascination. I really love this distinction. You see, passion doesn't invoke work. You could be passionate about the Cincinnati Reds and sit in a chair for three and a half hours drinking beer, but fascination comes with the mechanism. When you're fascinated, you study automagically. By the way, I know that's not a real word. Back to Danny. Uncle Richard kept pressing Danny, all you've ever thought about and talked about your whole life is food and restaurants. Why don't you open a restaurant? Danny listened. He took the LSAT the next morning, but he never enrolled in law school. Instead, he enrolled in a $300 restaurant management course that he found in a magazine. He would then take a 90% pay cut to get his foot in the door at a local restaurant where he could rotate through the different jobs. And then he planned a trip through Europe, a learning trip where he would stodge in many different countries, many different cuisines. Stodge is a fancy French word that means work for free. He then went back to New York. He had to study some more location buildings. Then in 1985, a full year after that momentous dinner, Danny opened Union Square Cafe. Union Square Cafe would be recognized by Zagat magazine as New York's favorite restaurant eight times. And Danny would go on to launch over a dozen high end restaurants in New York, including eleven Madison, Gramercy Tavern, the Modern for you younger folks out there. He would then after that, found and launch Shake shack, which has 400 locations worldwide and a $4 billion market cap. Every time Danny started a new concept, he'd do a year of learning and study before he'd launch. When I talked to him last fall, he was just back from Europe on another learning tour. Over 40 years later, still in his DNA, Uncle Richard did something, really did two things really amazing that night. First, he saved the world from another lawyer. But second, and more importantly, he unleashed Danny's career around this amazing fascination that he had. One dinner, one comment and a bit flip from 0 to 1 and the rest is history. It feels magical. I think a lot of magical things happen when you combine fascination with a career. First, obviously, you're more fulfilled and you're more happy. Second, the learning comes for free. What do I mean by that? Zero conscious effort. When you're learning about something you don't like, it saps your energy. You get tired, you need a break. When you learn about something you're fascinated by, you get energy. You want to smile. That contrast is massive. And it's why Danny knew exactly what to do. And it's precisely why Magnus Carlson knew the history. The third thing that happens when you combine career with fascination is people notice. If you're enthusiastic and have extra knowledge, you're going to do better in every dimension of your career. You're going to crush it in interviews, you're going to get promoted, you're going to attract mentors. And maybe most importantly, opportunity comes at you. Oh, I hear you're interested in starting a documentary. You have to talk to Sally. She's obsessed by them. Those introductions happen all the time. The last thing that happens is the fascinated people leave big footprints. Uncle Richard didn't just help Danny. Think of the thousands and thousands of people that have worked in and learned in Danny's restaurants. Think about the millions of customers that have felt his hospitality and think about the restaurant owners and small business owners that have read his book Setting the Table. It's really, really a massive impact. So how many people make it to this magical place? In 2023, Gallup did a poll where they asked what percentage of people are thriving and engaged in their job. Only 23% said yes. A full 59% they put in this category they called quiet quitters. They said they were ambivalent about their job, emotionally disconnected. In our own survey, we asked people, are you in your dream job and do you want a do over? And only 20% said yes, I'm in my dream job and I don't need a do over. So maybe it's as low as 1 in 5. 20%. Why isn't it better? I think there are a few issues. First, I think the path to and through college is broken. I think it's because schools are so damn hard to get into. In sixth grade, we begin what Jonathan Haidt has termed the resume arms race. We do Mandarin lessons, lacrosse lessons, cello lessons, volunteering, and that's just by Tuesday. The kids feel pressure and the parents feel pressure and I think we know something's wrong there. Second, we've moved the decision goal post. When I was young, the they wouldn't allow you to declare a major until the end of your sophomore year of college. Today at many schools you have to apply to the major when you fill out the application. We made the life decision from 20 years to 17 years old. Have you ever asked a 17 year old what they want to do the rest of their life? They really don't know. They really don't know. The the last thing is several well intentioned parents and advisors, and I want to repeat well intentioned, have pushed kids towards the safe. Medicine, legal, finance, comp sci. But what if the safe jobs aren't safe anymore? Along comes AI you know all those formulas and algorithms you learned in school that helped you take the test? They're all in the model. If you're not advancing your learning after you leave college, they're catching up. And I don't think it's the jobs we love that are under threat. It's the ones people were ambivalent about already. The 59%, the quiet quitters. But maybe, maybe what's really under threat is the static mindset. What about the artisans, the fascinated artisans? Mark Cuban said something the other day. He said there's two types of people in the world. Those that use LLMs to learn faster than ever and those that use LLMs to skip learning altogether. The reality is, for these fascinated artisans, AI is a jetpack. They learn faster, they soar higher. So how do we get more people in this lane? I fear the institutions aren't set up for it. They're set up for high volume mass manufacturing, not bespoke, individualized, customized fascination, discovery. But if they can't, who will? I'm gonna close with two short stories that might point us in the right direction. My wife and I relocated to Austin four years ago and we've had a chance to meet this very famous actor that lives there. You may know the one. All right, all right, all right. You got it. When Matthew was young, he was really good at winning arguments. And his whole family told him, you should be a lawyer. And he decided, that's a great idea. He headed off to college. During his sophomore year, he fell in with some friends at the film school, really loved it, wanted to switch. But he was fearful of his stern father's reaction. He eventually set up a call, walked through the logic, long pause, and his father says, don't half ass it. Matthew said it was the last thing he expected him to say and the best thing he could have possibly said. And with those three simple words, oh, wait, I think half ass is hyphenated. With those four simple words, he unleashed another artisan, an Oscar winning one, and also saved us from another lawyer. A few months ago, I got an email from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while. His name's Doug. He had seen me talking about these topics on a podcast and he wanted to share a family story. His son Jackson's a senior at Wake Forest, Finance track. But in all his spare time, he loves to study basketball analytics. On a recent trip, he would wake up at 7am, go to the coffee shop and do his basketball studying. Before the family activities last summer, he did an internship in basketball, not finance. His father told me that he'd been on his own journey, a parental journey, from awareness to acceptance, to enthusiasm to full support. And as he went through those stages, he could see Jackson's confidence grow. I have a hunch Jackson's going to have a great career. So if it's not up to the institution, maybe it's up to us, the individuals, parents, counselors, friends, family. It doesn't take much. A comment, a nudge, holding up a mirror so they can see maybe what they already knew. Matthew's dad gave him a green light. Danny had Uncle Richard, and they had incredible careers based around their fascination. Maybe all the world really needs is many, many More Uncle Richards. And I hope there's a bunch of you out there in the audience today. Thank.
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That was Bill Gurley at TED 2026. We've been experimenting with something different on the show. We're calling it Curator's Corner. Throughout the year, you'll hear from ted's curators, the people who actually find and work with the speakers you hear on the show. They'll share more about the idea you just heard and the behind the scenes of how the talk came to life. And now here's Helen Walters, TED's head of media and Curation, to share more about the process of creating this talk, the moment when Bill proved her wrong and why she's so glad he did, and how this has completely changed the way she thinks about mentorship.
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Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to Bill's talk. I'm Helen. I'm head of Media and curation here at ted. And that means that sometimes I get to work with speakers on their talks for the conference. You may know me from my conversations with Ian Bremmer. So Bill is this super storied vc, right, who could talk about himself. He could talk about his investments, he could talk about the companies that he's supporting. Like, there's so many things that he could talk about. And actually, what was interesting about the idea that he ended up speaking about was that it wasn't about him at all. And in fact, he was really reluctant to put himself in the talk in any way. Like, we really fought about that quite a lot. But what I liked about the talk was that it was both advice for parents and for adults and advice for people starting out. So there was kind of a dual nature of the talk that I thought was interesting. And frankly, the job market, the world in which we work at the moment, feels so tenuous, it feels so fragile. Hearing from someone who is so thoughtful about how to thrive in this moment felt really important for Ted 2026 and for where we were in the world and for what we're talking about. And a big theme of the conference this year was like, how are we going to thrive in an age of AI? Now, AI isn't really front and center in Bill's talk, but it's certainly there. And I think it's certainly something that we're all thinking about is what's going to happen to jobs in the future and how are we going to thrive. But what I really, really liked about the talk was that it wasn't about capitalism so much as humanity. When he talks about chasing curiosity, not passion, I Loved that. Because everybody talks about, follow your passion, follow your passion. It resonates. And also I think it leaves people really cold sometimes where they're like, I don't know, I don't know what I'm passionate about. But curiosity really is innate in everybody. And I think everybody relates to the concept of curiosity. I'm the mom of an 11 year old, and so it helped me to reframe the way that we talk about things in this house. Now, obviously, he is not thinking about his career, he's not thinking about his first job, but he is thinking about school, and he is thinking about how he goes about his life and about his daily habits and how he engages with things. And so the idea of really championing curiosity, even from an early age was a beautiful wake up call in so many. Anyways, what I thought was really unexpected about this talk was the Uncle Richard piece. And so Uncle Richard really plays a pretty important role in the talk. And there were moments when I honestly tried to kill Uncle Richard, metaphorically speaking, of course, but I kind of didn't get it for a while. And Bill was really adamant that Uncle Richard was the key. He was the key to the talk. It was a talk about how as a society, we can all support the people in our lives to channel their curiosity, to chase their curiosity, and to actually build a life of purpose. So Uncle Richard, despite my best attempts to get rid of him, actually made me then think about, well, who am I an Uncle Richard or an Aunt Richard for and who am I supporting and how am I helping other people in my life? And that was really unexpected. I didn't think that I would get that from a talk by avc. The much easier path through this talk was just to be about how to be a better parent, about how to help your child to channel their curiosity. And, you know, that's really neat. Tie it up with a bow and send it off into the world. And how delightful. And Bill really, he really fought with me and I really was indignant about it. I actually really welcome it when someone is just like, well, you're completely wrong. And then we had a good fight about it. And then at the end of it, he was completely right and I was completely wrong. And I'm very happy to have been so. And especially in this age, in this moment when we're kind of everybody is having to rethink work and how we operate in the world. Like, everybody needs that person to just both listen, challenge, push, and help us all do better. It's not just as a mentor. You know, that's another kind of framing that often we think of with this kind of thing. But I don't know, there's something really beautiful about the idea of being an Uncle Richard in this world. I really hope that that resonates for everybody. And now in your own context, whatever that is, and however different that is, Bill's life as a vc, which, you know, most of us have very different lives, but we can all be an Uncle Richard, and I think that that's really pretty glorious.
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If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit Ted.comCurationGuidelines and that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner and Tansika Sangarnival. Additional support from Daniela Balarazo, Christopher Faizi, Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Greene, and Lainey Lott. Learn more@podcasts.ted.com I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by the world's leading ESIM brand, Airalo. When I travel, I don't want to just see a new place. I want to engage with it. It's often the small, unexpected moments that stay with us. The cafe you stumble into, the conversation you didn't plan for, the turn that leads somewhere surprising. Airalo makes it easier to stay connected to those moments. You can activate your ESIM and get online the moment you land. No swapping SIM cards, no searching for WI fi, and no hidden fees. With unlimited data and reliable coverage through top local carriers, you can explore freely and use your phone the way you do at home. It's a simple way to stay connected so you can experience more of wherever you're traveling. To get unlimited data this summer@airalo.com that's A I R A L O.
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Date: June 9, 2026
Host: Elise Hu
Speaker: Bill Gurley
Guest Curator: Helen Walters
This episode centers on Bill Gurley’s deeply-researched insight into building a fulfilling and impactful career—not by “following your passion,” but by identifying and pursuing your true fascination. Gurley draws on years of research, personal stories, and compelling examples to highlight why continuous learning, curiosity, and the active support of mentors or loved ones are critical to career excellence. The episode also features a post-talk reflection with TED’s Helen Walters, adding layers on curation, mentorship, and how these ideas resonated in the larger context.
“You see, passion doesn't invoke work. You could be passionate about the Cincinnati Reds and sit in a chair for three and a half hours drinking beer.”
“Uncle Richard did something, really did two things really amazing that night. First, he saved the world from another lawyer. But second, and more importantly, he unleashed Danny’s career around this amazing fascination that he had.”
“Obsessive and continuous learning is not an input, it's an output. It's not the cause, it's the effect. What's the cause? What drives someone to learn for a lifetime? Fascination.”
“Fascination comes with the mechanism. When you’re fascinated, you study automagically.”
Benefits of Aligning Career with Fascination:
Quote on Effortless Learning [08:00]:
“When you learn about something you’re fascinated by, you get energy. You want to smile. That contrast is massive.”
“So maybe it’s as low as 1 in 5. 20%. Why isn’t it better?”
Early Specialization is Problematic:
“Have you ever asked a 17-year-old what they want to do the rest of their life? They really don’t know. They really don’t know.”
Culture of “Safe” Careers:
“There’s two types of people in the world. Those that use LLMs to learn faster than ever and those that use LLMs to skip learning altogether.”
Role of Mentors and “Uncle Richards”
“With those four simple words, he unleashed another artisan, an Oscar-winning one, and also saved us from another lawyer.”
Jackson’s Story [15:30]:
“If it’s not up to the institution, maybe it’s up to us—the individuals, parents, counselors, friends, family.”
“Maybe all the world really needs is many, many more Uncle Richards. And I hope there’s a bunch of you out there in the audience today.”
Helen Walters [17:24]:
Humanity, Not Capitalism [18:22]:
Fighting for “Uncle Richard” [19:25]:
"Uncle Richard was the key...a talk about how as a society, we can all support the people in our lives to channel their curiosity..."
Universal Application [21:44]:
“We can all be an Uncle Richard, and I think that that's really pretty glorious.”
Passion vs. Fascination:
Obsessive Learning as Output:
The Mentor’s Power:
Curiosity Over Passion:
Universal Relevance:
Bill Gurley’s talk is personal, insightful, and gently challenging—inviting listeners to rethink entrenched career advice. Through compelling stories and solid data, he urges the audience to center their careers around their deepest fascinations, not fleeting passions, and highlights the transformative power of timely encouragement. Helen Walters’ follow-up offers an authentic, behind-the-scenes perspective, underscoring the emotional and practical value of “being an Uncle Richard” in any context. Both segments maintain a witty, reflective, and encouraging tone, aiming to empower listeners—young or old, parent or student—to be advocates for genuine curiosity and lifelong learning in themselves and others.