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 soul 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
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