Instead of ‘finding your passion,’ try developing it

June 29, 2018 11:10 PM

The belief that interests arrive fully formed and must simply be “found” can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields and give up when they encounter challenges, according to a new Stanford study.
posted by Vesihiisi (13 comments total)

‘Finding your passion’ is marketable. Developing it takes time and effort that consumer society would rather you spent on buying new stuff. Wherever I see the word passion, I substitute the phrase ‘acceptance of working for free for someone else's financial benefit’ and I feel much better.
posted by scruss at 5:40 AM on June 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

As a youngster, I was introduced to a programmable calculator. I found it fascinating and I have been a programmer all of my life. I can't imagine doing anything else. So I think there's at least a kernel of truth to the idea that people (perhaps only some people) have inherent knacks that, once found, can drive one's passion.
posted by SPrintF at 6:00 AM on June 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

My brother is an exasperatingly good musician. He can more or less pick up any instrument and make it musical with a moment's awkwardness, and can step into any campfire jam with an ease and comfort I find terribly irritating, though I'll readily admit that is a dreadfully predictable irritation borne out of jealously more than anything else.

I am also a good musician and stage performer, but I am terrible at anything involving instruments and the pacing and detail of the conventional means of producing notes. I would listen to Kate Bush on near-infinite repeat and think I want to make at least one song in my life that is as good as one of hers and, when I thought that passion was something I could use to push me in that direction, I would try and try and try to write a single song that was good at all, let alone a fraction as good as the songs that lifted me into states of ecstatic celebration of being.

I will never write that song. No amount of passion will take me there. I have a twenty-year box set of my early failures in that department, passion notwithstanding.

I did, as it happens, start making art that is, at times, fantastic art, but it's because I abandoned my passion in favor of a question: What are my capabilities?

What if I take the thing that gives me joy and try to reproduce that sensation with the tools I actually have?

I think, sometimes, as I'm writing and working out musical ideas and narratives for my spoken-word storytelling pieces, of the artworks that have made me feel a certain way, and transmuted them in a curious process that I've cultivated for years in which getting myself wired on a feeling while working in another medium just works, somehow.

I want to compose, like those composers who have inspired me, but I am vastly better when I improvise. I want to script out and structure my words in ornate, architectural forms, but I am better off the cuff, and my scripted output is stiff and stilted and doesn't sound like me at all. I want to follow a concise, predictable pathway through a narrative, but I am not that writer. I run out of red and use blue. I run out of blue and use the sound of my electric razor's magnetic field agitating the pickups on an old guitar. I run out of that and leave a silence, just long enough, like the pause that makes the joke all the better.

Maybe my passion is finding myself flopping like a fish washed too far up the beach and flolloping back into the water again, but I think I just cultivated a love and respect for taking what comes to hand and making it work out of grim necessity, through thirty years of failing and failing and failing until a cycle of practice, failure, and sideways thinking made the difficult into the nearly effortless.

I will never share a stage with Kate Bush, jointly crooning a song we wrote together.

What I came up with instead, though—well, I am nowhere near who I wanted to be, and that's just fine.
posted by sonascope at 6:41 AM on June 30, 2018 [40 favorites]

Well, now I sorta feel worse about not finding anything interesting.
posted by aramaic at 7:14 AM on June 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

I don't think that the article is saying that talent isn't real - just that people believe that "talent" is this magical thing that makes things easy, and jump to the conclusion that they're not talented when things aren't. And that "talent" is more able to be developed than many of us think.

I mean, I'll use a personal example.

I jumped around schools a lot, and my math education was a mess. On top of that, while I wasn't bad at math, I wasn't great at it either. I wasn't the kid you would go to for help - I was the kid that looked for help but ended up getting A's if I did that extra work. I had to take remedial algebra my first year of college. The experience was "meh."

But then I took trig because it fit well with my schedule. And then I took calculus I. And then I took calculus II. And then I took calculus III. And then I took probability theory. I ended up with a math degree. I developed an interest in it through the work.

If I believed that being talented at math was an inborn thing I probably would never have done it. By the end of my degree I was a lot more talented because I'd acquired a way of thinking that made mathematical concepts easier.

Not that I think talent is totally nonexistent. I wasn't an exceptional student, just a good one, and I decided not to go into graduate school for mathematics partly because I didn't think I'd cut it. And I have fr.iends who always struggled in math, despite extra tutoring and effort. Since I believe they tried just as hard as me, I'm only left with the explanation that they're just not as good at it for some reason - whether that's inborn aptitude, or something that occurred early in their childhoods.

But I also strongly encourage people not to give up with math and to try to have a positive attitude even if it's difficult, because people often become discouraged and decide it's not for them way too soon. Especially women, since there's this huge weight of stereotypes on us.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:57 AM on June 30, 2018 [17 favorites]

How to get a hobby through the Sunk Cost fallacy.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:34 AM on June 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

aramaic -- I sometimes feel similar. It is not easy for me to get immersed in an activity. I am actually jealous of the way my boyfriend can spend a couple hours enthusiastically playing a video game after a stressful day at work, while I often end up browsing the internet mindlessly and feeling bad because nothing else interests me.

If anyone has solved this problem please chime in, but I found that getting really interested in other people's work -- in my case, some open source libraries that I thought were really cool -- eventually inspired me to try something similar, and now I have a few side projects that I actively look forward to working on when I get home every day.

I feel like the narrative of "passion" is very individualistic and self-centered, where for me, the interest gradually grew out of appreciating other people's output who were at a much higher level than myself, and studying it, before trying to produce anything of my own.
posted by loquacious crouton at 9:51 AM on June 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

So, I make a lot of stuff. Jewelry, embroidery, handsewing, papercraft-- lots and lots of different crafts. The skills I use are pretty transferable from craft to craft-- hand-eye coordination, fine motor skill, patience for fiddly little details. I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I like to think I'm at the high end of journeyman in some of those disciplines. I earn about $800/mo in Etsy sales, so probably I'm doing something right.

But there are crafts I don't do, or enjoy. Because when I tried them, and hit a roadblock or couldn't solve a problem, the project became so frustrating that I no longer enjoyed it. When I hit similar challenges with the crafts I still do, even early on, I still enjoyed the process of working through the problem. Even when it was frustrating.

Which part of that is "talent," though?
posted by nonasuch at 9:53 AM on June 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

Which part of that is "talent," though?

I sometimes wonder if talent isn't at least as much about desire and compulsion/obsession as it is anything latent, bred in the bone.

I was ten years old when my particular passion hooked me, strong and hard. And beautiful it goes without saying, because what's a passion if not a dream? And it's never completely diminished, not even close really. So my problem has never been finding the thing, it's been manifesting it. Because my passion ain't easy at all. Complex, multifaceted and, until at least my fortieth birthday (about which time the means of production digitized), f***ing expensive.

So what did I do in those intervening thirty years when the passion continued to pull, but however hard I chased it, it seemed to keep pulling further and further from my reach, let alone my grasp? At some point, I realized it was like a vast mountain peak where just getting to the foothills was a monumental journey, and once there, there was still more than one way to the top. Quick and dangerous (I fell off more than once) vs laborious and comparatively safe, but so slow that (again more than once) the mission ran out of gas -- back to base camp.

Anyway. Long story short. I'm now getting close to sixty, and still at it when I've got the time and energy, but no longer really ruing how long and hard and painful and frustrating the climb has been. Because, I've drunk the wine I've drunk, seen the things I've seen, met the people I've met, heard the music I've heard, read the books I've read, have the community I have. And more to the point, I have the skills and insights and craft related instincts and finesse that could only have evolved out of half a century's focus and resilience. So yeah, I am where I am, it's been a long strange trip (and it ain't over yet), and I really wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you, passion.
posted by philip-random at 11:05 AM on June 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

It’s not “find” that’s the problem, it’s “passion.” Even if you encourage people to “develop their passion,” you’re still implying that with enough work and soul-searching they will find an area that interests them profoundly and deeply. And when the word “passion” gets into career talk, it gets worse. The vast majority of paying jobs probably don’t inspire passion in anyone, but the work has to be done anyway.

I want things in my life to be interesting enough, challenging enough, and accessible enough. I don’t need them to consume me, and if we’re talking about work, I want to be able to put it aside at the end of the workday. I spent way too long worrying about passion and being on the wrong path before I figured this out.
posted by Metroid Baby at 1:20 PM on June 30, 2018 [15 favorites]

There's a feedback loop. The better I get at something, the more I like it. The more I like it, the more I do it and get better at it. And for some things (but not others) the more I find out, the more I want to know.

Few of these things were obvious in the beginning. So this article makes sense to me. It's possible you might get a "thunderbolt" and fall in love with a subject or activity, but more likely, you have to work at a bunch of things and see where you get. Like falling in love with people.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:25 PM on June 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

I'm reminded of a post somewhere on Mefi a while back in which someone said, essentially, that no one anywhere ever actually liked doing dishes and/or laundry, and I took exception because I fucking love both of those things. A huge blue bag full of laundry to be washed, hung out to dry, and folded or a sink made mountainous with the leavings of a big dinner party just give me a certain giddy feeling, and while it's not a passion that the world will ever relish, I trained myself to take those activities as a sort of curious material rendition of tonglen meditation as a reaction to hating those activities.

See, I live alone, have done for a long time and, until very recently, assumed that I would do so for a long time still, and I started to look at the things in my life which I found boring or unconstructive, or just plain disliked, and I was just digging into zen and taoism at the time and the sort of ritualized, monastic ways of how monks would deal with those things in their own quiet places. I started to slow down while doing laundry, thinking of the items as coherent things in the world, with a materiality and a lifespan and a degree to which maintenance and care factor into their existence and usefulness. I bought an old wringer washing machine, carefully restored it for use, and would set up for laundry practice with the delicacy of someone performing thousand-year-old tea ceremonies. I'd haul out my laundry and hang everything up with the same attention, fade into my other chores, and return to bask in the scent of line-dried laundry and the meticulous pursuit of perfectly folded textiles in neat piles of color and pattern—chaos turned into order for another week.

Dishes were much the same. I'm told it's strange to enjoy doing dishes, and to be certain, I wasn't a fan for a long, long stretch of my life, but now I'm the most popular person at the end of a party, not least because I keep an example of my chosen dishmop in the trunk of my vehicle for when I'm out and about and dishes need doing.

No one, I think, has an innate, undiscovered passion for dishes, laundry, removing labels from things, or carefully dismantling cardboard things for recycling, but one can cultivate a pleasure in something that once just seemed like an irritating obligation. In the middle of a new career path, I'm doing it again, finding all the little rituals of dismantling complexity and transmuting to-do lists into done lists. Was I born with a secret inkling that one day I'd find surprising satisfaction in extracting job applications from a website, deconstructing their data into metrics my employer can use, and managing the process of selecting and scheduling applicants? I'd have suspect otherwise, and in the latter case, I jumped to a new career track as another was petering out, so it's borne out of that necessity, but it doesn't diminish the potential for satisfaction.

I still hate taking showers, though, and no amount of mental preparation or intellectual cultivation seems to help me find a way to prefer that over the sybaritic experience of slouching in a tub for hours with a book, so even intention is sometimes not enough. Those I suffer through as someone on a schedule, but life occasions a tolerance for pain.
posted by sonascope at 8:22 PM on June 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

Sonascope: lets be friends. Not only are you awesome but my house is piles of laundry.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:35 PM on July 1, 2018 [6 favorites]