Jeff Bezos told Princeton graduates 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.”
And it’s not just on hot June days in our cap and gown that we get this advice. I hear the same thing—over and over again, nearly verbatim—from the grit paragons I interview.
So does Hester Lacey.
Hester is a British journalist who has been interviewing achievers of the caliber of Shortz and Bezos—one per week—since 2011. Her column appears weekly in the Financial Times. Whether they’re fashion designers (Nicole Farhi), authors (Salman Rushdie), musicians (Lang Lang), comedians (Michael Palin), chocolatiers (Chantal Coady), or bartenders (Colin Field), Hester asks the same questions, including: “What drives you on?” and “If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?”
I asked Hester what she’s learned from talking to more than two hundred “mega successful” people, as she described them during our conversation.
“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 to or because it’s financially lucrative. . . .”
* * *
Follow your passion was not the message I heard growing up.
Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving “in the real world” were far more important than any young person living a “sheltered life” such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of “finding something I loved” could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment. I was reminded that certain jobs, like being a doctor, were both high-income and high-status, and that these things would matter more to me in the long run than I might appreciate in the moment.
As you might have guessed, the individual proffering this advice was my dad.
“So, why’d you become a chemist?” I once asked.
“Because my father told me to,” he answered without a hint of resentment. “When I was a boy, history was my favorite subject.” He then explained that he’d enjoyed math and science, too, but there was really no choice when it came to what he’d study in college. The family business was textiles, and my grandfather dispatched each of his sons to study trades relevant to one stage or another of textile production. “Our business needed a chemist, not a historian.”
As it turned out, the Communist Revolution in China brought a premature end to the family textile business. Not long after he settled here in the United States, my dad went to work for DuPont. Thirty-five years later, he retired as the highest-ranking scientist in the company.
Given how absorbed my dad was in his work—often lost in reverie about some scientific or management problem—and how successful he was over the arc of his career, 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 longer. College students whose personal interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out.
It’s certainly true that you can’t get a job just doing anything you enjoy. It’s tough to make a living playing Minecraft, no matter how good you get at it. And there are a lot of people in the world whose circumstances preclude the luxury of choosing among a broad array of occupational options. Like it or not, there are very real constraints in the choices we can make about how we earn a living.
Nevertheless, as William James foretold a century ago, these new scientific findings affirm commencement speech wisdom: the “casting vote” for how well we can expect to do in any endeavor is “desire and passion, the strength of [our] interest. . . .”
* * *
In a 2014 Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of adults said they were not engaged at work, a good portion of whom were “actively disengaged.”
The picture is even bleaker abroad. In a survey of 141 nations, Gallup found that every country but Canada has even higher numbers of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged” workers than the United States. Worldwide, only 13 percent of adults call themselves “engaged” at work.
So it seems that very few people end up loving what they do for a living.
It’s difficult to reconcile the straightforward directives offered in inspirational speeches with epidemic levels of indifference toward work. When it comes to lining up our occupations with what we enjoy, how come so many of us miss the mark? And does my dad’s success offer a counterexample to the passion argument? What should we make of the fact that, by the time I came along, my father’s work really was his passion? Should we stop telling people to follow your passion and, instead, tell them to follow our orders?
I don’t think so.
In fact, I see Will Shortz and Jeff Bezos as terrific inspirations for what work can be. While it’s naive to think that any of us could love every minute of what we do, I believe the thousands of data points in those meta-analyses, which confirm the commonsense intuition that interest matters. 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.
That said, I don’t think most young people need encouragement to follow their passion. Most would do exactly that—in a heartbeat—if only they had a passion in the first place. If I’m ever invited to give a commencement speech, I’ll begin with the advice to foster a passion. And then I’ll spend the rest of my time trying to change young minds about how that actually happens.
* * *
When I first started interviewing grit paragons, I assumed they’d all have stories about the singular moment when, suddenly, they’d discovered their God-given passion. In my mind’s eye, this was a filmable event, with dramatic lighting and a soundtrack of rousing orchestral music commensurate with its monumental, life-changing import.
In the opening scene of Julie & Julia, a younger Julia Child than any of us watched on television is dining in a fancy French restaurant with her husband, Paul. Julia takes one bite of her sole meunière—beautifully seared and perfectly deboned by the waiter moments before and now napped in a sauce of Normandy butter, lemon, and parsley. She swoons. She’s never experienced anything like this before. She always liked to eat, but she never knew food could be this good.
“The whole experience was an opening up of the so
ul and spirit for me,” Julia said many years later. “I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.”
Such cinematic moments were what I expected from my grit paragons. And I think this is also what young graduates—roasting in their caps and gowns, the hard edge of the folding chair biting into their thighs—imagine it must be like to discover your life’s passion. One moment, you have no idea what to do with your time on earth. And the next, it’s all clear—you know exactly who you were meant to be.
But, in fact, most grit paragons I’ve interviewed told me they spent years exploring several different interests, and the one that eventually came to occupy all of their waking (and some sleeping) thoughts wasn’t recognizably their life’s destiny on first acquaintance.
Olympic gold medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines, for example, told me: “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 for swimming. I kept plugging away. I figured I’d just keep going from one sport to the next until I found something that I could really fall in love with.” Swimming stuck, but it wasn’t exactly love 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 figured 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 there 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 the 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.”
As for Julia Child, that ethereal morsel of sole meunière was indeed a revelation. But her epiphany was that classical French cuisine was divine, not that she would become a chef, cookbook author, and, eventually, the woman who would teach America to make coq au vin in their very own kitchens. Indeed, Julia’s autobiography reveals that this memorable meal was followed by a succession of interest-stimulating experiences. An incomplete list would include countless delicious meals in the bistros of Paris; conversations and friendships with friendly fishmongers, butchers, and produce vendors in the city’s open-air markets; encounters with two encyclopedic French cookbooks—the first loaned to her by her French tutor and the second a gift from her ever-supportive husband, Paul; hours of cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu under the tutelage of the marvelously enthusiastic yet demanding Chef Bugnard; and the acquaintance of two Parisian women who had the idea of writing a cookbook for Americans.
What would have happened if Julia—who once dreamed of becoming a novelist and, as a child, possessed, as she put it, “zero interest in the stove”—had returned home to California after that fateful bite of perfectly cooked fish? We can’t know for sure, but clearly in Julia’s romance with French food, that first bite of sole was just the first kiss. “Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook,” she later told her sister-in-law. “To think it has taken me forty years to find my true passion (cat and husband excepted).”
So, while we might envy those who love what they do for a living, we shouldn’t assume that they started from a different place than the rest of us. Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. Commencement speakers may say about their vocation, “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” but, in fact, there was a time earlier in life when they could.
* * *
A few months ago, I read a post on Reddit titled “Fleeting Interest in Everything, No Career Direction”:
I’m in my early thirties and have no idea what to do with myself, career-wise. All my life I’ve been one of those people who has been told how smart I am/how much potential I have. I’m interested in so much stuff that I’m paralyzed to try anything. It seems like every job requires a specialized certificate or designation that requires long-term time and financial investment—before you can even try the job, which is a bit of a drag.
I have a lot of sympathy for the thirty-something who wrote this post. As a college professor, I also have a lot of sympathy for the twenty-somethings who come to me for career advice.
My colleague Barry Schwartz has been dispensing counsel to anxious young adults for much longer than I have. He’s been teaching psychology at Swarthmore College for forty-five years.
Barry thinks that what prevents a lot of young people from developing a serious career interest is unrealistic expectations. “It’s really the same problem a lot of young people have finding a romantic partner,” he said. “They want somebody who’s really attractive and smart and kind and empathetic and thoughtful and funny. Try telling a twenty-one-year-old that you can’t find a person who is absolutely the best in every way. They don’t listen. They’re holding out for perfection.”
“What about your wonderful wife, Myrna?” I asked.
“Oh, she is wonderful. More wonderful than I am, certainly. But is she perfect? Is she the only person I could have made a happy life with? Am I the only man in the world with whom she could have made a wonderful marriage? I don’t think so.”
A related problem, Barry says, is the mythology that falling in love with a career should be sudden and swift: “There are a lot of things where the subtleties and exhilarations come with sticking with it for a while, getting elbow-deep into something. A lot of things seem uninteresting and superficial until you start doing them and, after a while, you realize that there are so many facets you didn’t know at the start, and you never can fully solve the problem, or fully understand it, or what have you. Well, that requires that you stick with it.”
After a pause, Barry said, “Actually, finding a mate is the perfect analogy. Meeting a potential match—not the one-and-only perfect match, but a promising one—is only the very beginning.”
* * *
There’s a lot we don’t know about the psychology of interest. I wish we knew, for example, why some of us (including me) find cooking a fascinating subject, while many others couldn’t care less. Why is Marc Vetri attracted to creative endeavors, and why does Rowdy Gaines like sports? Aside from the rather vague explanation that interests are, like everything else about us, partly heritable and partly a function of life experience, I can’t tell you. But scientific research on the evolution of interests has yielded some important insights. My sense is that, unfortunately, these basic facts aren’t commonly understood.
What most of us think of when we think of passion is a sudden, all-at-once discovery—that first bite of sole meunière bringing with it the certainty of the years you’ll spend in the kitchen . . . slipping into the water at your first swim meet and getting out with the foreknowledge that you’ll one day be an Olympian . . . getting to the end of The Catcher in the Rye and realizing you’re destined to be a writer. But a first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is exactly that—just the opening scene in a much longer, less dramatic narrative.
To the thirty-something on Reddit with a “fleeting interest in everything” and “no career direction,” here’s what science has to say: passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
Let me explain.
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 scho
ol. This is certainly the pattern I’ve seen in my interview research, and it’s also what journalist Hester Lacey has found in her interviews with the “mega successful.” Keep in mind, however, that a seventh grader—even a future paragon of grit—is unlikely to have a fully articulated passion at that age. A seventh grader is just beginning to figure out her general likes and dislikes.
Second, interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions 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.” Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.
Paradoxically, the initial discovery of an interest often goes unnoticed by the discoverer. 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 an 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.
For instance, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins told me 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.”
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