You'll Never Find Your Passion (According to Science)

People think you stumble on your passion, and then you follow it to the promised land. The science says something different, and it may be the reason why you've not found your thing. It's all Zen: quiet essays on the unsettling truths underneath an ordinary life. New one every week. Stay a while. 0:00 Introduction 0:30 A different take 0:50 Three words that did this to you 1:55 What five studies actually found 3:13 Why the difficulty feels like proof 4:22 Go look in your own closet 5:09 What it was always made of Every claim is sourced below. SOURCES 1. The two "implicit theories of interest" — that some people believe interests are found/fixed and others that they're developed — and the finding that fixed-theory believers lose interest once a new topic gets difficult (across five studies): O'Keefe, P. A., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2018). Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It? Psychological Science, 29(10), 1653–1664. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618780643 2. That "find your passion" can be counterproductive advice, and that passion is typically developed through sustained engagement rather than discovered fully formed: Stanford Report (2018), "Why 'find your passion' may be bad advice." https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/06/find-passion-may-bad-advice