Follow your passion is a popular theme of commencement speeches.
“My advice for you is, figure out what you enjoy doing most in life, and then try to do it full-time. Life is short. Follow your passion.” — Will Shortz,
Jeff Bezos, the story of leaving a high salary, high-status Manhattan finance job to start Amazon: “After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion.” He has also said, “Whatever it is that you want to do, you’ll find in life that if you’re not passionate about what it is you’re working on, you won’t be able to stick with it.”
“What drives you on?” and “If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?”
One thing that comes up time and time again is: I love what I do. People couch it differently. Quite often, they say just that: I love what I do. But they also say things like I’m so lucky, I get up every morning looking forward to work, I can’t wait to get into the studio, I can’t wait to get on with the next project. These people are doing things not because they have or to or because it’s financially lucrative?
But it seems worth considering the possibility that it’s best to choose practicality over passion.
Just how ridiculous is it to advise young people to go out and do what they love? Within the last decade or so, scientists who study interests have arrived at a definitive answer.
First, research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests. This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that aggregated data from almost a hundred different studies that collectively included working adults in just about every conceivable profession. For instance, people who enjoy thinking about abstract ideas are not happy managing the minutiae of logistically complicated projects; they’d rather be solving math problems. And people who really enjoy interacting with people are not happy when their job is to work alone at a computer all day: they’re much better off in jobs like sales or teaching. What’s more, people whose jobs match their personal interests are, in general, happier with their lives as a whole.
Second people perform better at work when what they do interests them. This is the conclusion of another meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past sixty years. Employees whose intrinsic personal interests fit with their occupations do their jobs better, are more helpful to their coworkers, and stay at their jobs better, are more helpful to their coworkers, and stay at their jobs longer. College students whose personal interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out.
So it seems that very few people end up loving what they do for a living.
Nobody is interested in everything, and everyone is interested in something. So matching your job to what captures your attention and imagination is a good idea, It may not guarantee happiness and success, but it sure helps the odds.
Olympic gold medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines told, “When I was a kid, I loved sports. When I got to high school, I went out for football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis, in that order, before I went swimming. I kept plugging away. I figured I’d just keep going from one spot to the next until I found something that I could really fall in love with at first sight. “The day I tried out for the swim team, I went to the school library to check out track and field because I kind of had a feeling I was going to get cut, I figure I’d try out for track and field next.”
As a teenager, James Beard Award-winning chef Marc Vetri was as interested in music as he was in cooking. After college, he moved to Los Angeles, “I went to a music school out here for a year, and I worked nights in restaurants to make money. Later when I was in a band, I worked mornings in restaurants so I could do the music thing at night. Then it was like. “Well, I’m making money in the restaurants, and I’m really starting to like it, and I’m not making anything in music.’ And then I had an opportunity to go to Italy, and that was it.” It’s hard for me to picture my favorite chef playing the guitar instead of making pasta, but when I asked what he thought about ht road not taken, he said, “Well, music and cooking — they’re both creative industries. I’m glad I went this way, but I think I could have been a musician instead.”
“Feeling interest in Everything, No Career Direction”
A passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development and then a lifetime of deepening.
- First of all, childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
- Second, interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interaction with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. You can’t simply will yourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos has observed, “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.” In other words, when you just start to get interested in something, you may not even realize that’s what’s happening. The emotion of boredom is always self-conscious — you know it when you feel it — but when your attention is attracted to a new activity or experience, you may have very little reflective appreciation of what’s happening to you. This means that, at the start of a new endeavor, asking yourself nervously every few days whether you’ve found your passion is premature.
- Third, what follows the initial discovery of interest is a much lengthier and increasingly proactive period of interest development. Crucially, the initial triggering of a new interest must be followed by subsequent encounters that retrigger your attention — again and again, and again.
- Finally, interest thrives when there is a crew of encouraging supporters, including parents, teachers, coaches, and peers.
NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins told that it was watching space shuttle launches on television in high school that initially inspired his lifelong interest in space travel. But it wasn’t just one launch that hooked him. It was several shown in succession over a period of years, Soon enough, he started digging for more information on NASA, and “one piece of information led to another and another.”
Ask yourself a few simple questions: What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do I enjoy spending my time? And, in contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable?
If you find it hard to answer these questions, try recalling your teen years, the stage of life at which vocational interests commonly sprout.
As soon as you have even a general direction in mind, you must trigger your nascent interests. Do this by going out into the world and doing something. To young graduates wringing their hands over what to do, I say, Experiment! Try! You’ll certainly learn more than if you don’t
As this early stage of exploration, here are a few relevant rules of thumb taken from Will Shortz’s easy “How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”:
Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there. However ill-defines your interests, there are some things you know you’d hate doing for a living, and some things that seem more promising than others. That’s a start.
Don’t be afraid to guess. Like it or not, there’s a certain amount of trial and error inherent in the process of interest discovery. Unlike the answers to crossword puzzles, there isn’t just one thing you can do that might develop into a passion. There are many. You don’t have to find the “right” one, or even the “best” one — just a direction that feels good. It can also be difficult to know if something will be a good fit until you try it for a while.
Don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out. At some point, you may choose to write your top-level gaol in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil.
Remember that interest must be triggered again and again and again. Find ways to make that happen. And have patience. The development of interests takes time. Keep asking questions, and let the answer to those questions lead you to more questions. Continue to dig. Seek out other people who share your interests. Sidle up to an encouraging mentor. Whatever your age, over time your role as a learner will become a more active and informed one. Over a period of years, your knowledge and expertise will grow, and along with it your confidence and curiosity to know more.
Finally, if you’ve been doing something you like for a few years and still wouldn’t quite call it a passion, see if you can deepen your interests. Since novelty is what your brain craves, you’ll be tempted to move on to something new, and that could be what makes the most sense. However, if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. “The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn.”
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