Grit(29)

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 anything you enjoy. It’s tough to make a living playing Minecraft, no matter how good you get at it. And there are a lot of people in the world whose circumstances preclude the luxury of choosing among a broad array of occupational options. Like it or not, there are very real constraints in the choices we can make about how we earn a living.

Nevertheless, as William James foretold a century ago, these new scientific findings affirm commencement speech wisdom: the “casting vote” for how well we can expect to do in any endeavor is “desire and passion, the strength of [our] interest. . . .”