Passion is not found, it is worked for

[jrineakter]

“Follow your passion.” We have often come across this motivational mantra, a sort of mandate from new businesses that promises to achieve all the goals we have set for ourselves in life (work). Follow your passion and it will guide you to success and fulfillment. Are you sure?

In an article published by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic magazine's Medium blog, the writer tries to burst the bubble of passionate dreamers. She does so by resorting to the teachings of Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, who often asks in her seminars: "How many of you expect to find your passion?"

Almost everyone raises their hand, and almost everyone is wrong in their approach. “It usually doesn’t happen that way,” says the professor, who also disagrees with the following platitude: “Find something you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”

According to Paul O'Keefe, a psychology professor at Yale, “this means that if you do something that resembles work, it means you don't like it ,” and he offers the example of a student who hopped from lab to lab until she found a research topic that she was passionate about. “She followed this idea that if she wasn't completely overwhelmed by excitement when she walked into the lab, then it wasn't interesting because it wasn't her passion.”

For this reason, O'Keefe joined forces with two Stanford researchers to conduct a study that suggests it's time to change the way we pursue our interests. Because passions are venezuela number data not found under a table or hidden in a bush, but rather are worked on and developed.

In their research, the authors establish the difference between the two mentalities. One is the 'fixed interest theory', according to which a person's essential interests are there from birth, waiting to be discovered. The other is the 'growth theory', according to which interests are seeds that are planted and cultivated over time.

To assess how these different mindsets influence the pursuit of different subjects, the researchers conducted a series of studies on college students, a social group often advised to find their passion and build a career around it.

Students began by answering a survey that would classify them as “techy” (interested in science or math) and “fuzzy” (interested in the arts or humanities). They then completed a survey to determine whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that a person’s interests do not change over time. They then read an article that did not match their interests: the more they supported a “fixed” theory of interests, the less interested they were in the article that did not match their stated identity.

The authors then repeated the procedure in reverse order, having subjects read either the fixed-interest theory or the growth theory first. Again, those who learned that interests are fixed over a person's lifetime were less enthralled by an article that did not match their interests .