Chapter 6
INTEREST
Follow your passion
is a popular theme of commencement speeches. I’ve sat through my fair share,
both as a student and professor. I’d wager that at least half of all speakers, maybe more, underscore
the importance of doing something you love.
For instance, Will Shortz, long-time editor of the
New York Times
crossword puzzle, told students
at Indiana University: “My advice for you is, figure out what you enjoy doing most in life, and then try
to do it full-time. Life is short. Follow your passion.”
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
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