Confucius once said,
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Science totally supports this wisdom. Decades of research showed that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs and perform better when they do something that fits their interests.
So here you go – the first step towards a happy and successful life is figuring out what do you love. Your passion. The main question is HOW?
Discovering vs Developing Your Passion
There are plenty of resources on the internet telling you that you have to find your passion. They spread the idea that passions and interests are pre-formed (fixed if you like) and you must simply discover them. Easy, huh?
But do you know that there is a whole bunch of scientists who actually study people’s interests and passions? Interested what they say about it?
Recent research from Stanford University shows that the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited. But guess what? It is a misleading idea causing people to narrow their focus and neglect other areas. As the authors say, “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.” Not a right perspective if you are serious about living a successful and happy life.
The researchers suggest that “develop your passion” is more fitting advice:
“If you look at something and think, ‘that seems interesting, that could be an area I could make a contribution in,’ you then invest yourself in it,” said one of the researchers G.M. Walton. “You take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment.”
Angela Duckworth in her excellent book Grit (check out the notes) supports this idea:
Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
Developing a “compass passion”
Let’s admit we would all have “firework passions” – something which would interest us for a short period and then fade away with time. To turn our passion into real achievement, we need to figure out what is our true passion which would guide us like a compass over the long run.
The point is that to discover our true compass passion, we need to understand the whole mechanism behind it firstly:
- Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Research shows that most people begin to gravitate toward certain interests and away from others around middle school. So this is when we start discovering our general likes and dislikes.
- Interests are triggered and developed by the interaction with the outside world. You need to experiment by trying different things – that’s the only way to discover which interests will stick and which will not.
- Passion develops when your attention towards a particular interest is re-triggered continuously over a long period of time. Interesting conversation with a friend, a book, an article, a talk, a project – anything will do
- Interests thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters: parents, teachers, coaches, friends. They provide ongoing stimulation and information which is necessary to actually like something more and more.
- And obviously, interests have to be intrinsic.
Developing our passion could be a messy process, but it would have a tremendously positive effect on your life. And on your child’s life as well – the first step is to be a good role model, isn’t it?
Next time we’ll talk about how parents can support children in developing their interests, passions and a life purpose. Fascinating stuff 🙂
Loads of love,
Irina & Dawid
