Grit(31)

What would have happened if Julia—who once dreamed of becoming a novelist and, as a child, possessed, as she put it, “zero interest in the stove”—had returned home to California after that fateful bite of perfectly cooked fish? We can’t know for sure, but clearly in Julia’s romance with French food, that first bite of sole was just the first kiss. “Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook,” she later told her sister-in-law. “To think it has taken me forty years to find my true passion (cat and husband excepted).”

So, while we might envy those who love what they do for a living, we shouldn’t assume that they started from a different place than the rest of us. Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. Commencement speakers may say about their vocation, “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” but, in fact, there was a time earlier in life when they could.



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A few months ago, I read a post on Reddit titled “Fleeting Interest in Everything, No Career Direction”:

I’m in my early thirties and have no idea what to do with myself, career-wise. All my life I’ve been one of those people who has been told how smart I am/how much potential I have. I’m interested in so much stuff that I’m paralyzed to try anything. It seems like every job requires a specialized certificate or designation that requires long-term time and financial investment—before you can even try the job, which is a bit of a drag.

I have a lot of sympathy for the thirty-something who wrote this post. As a college professor, I also have a lot of sympathy for the twenty-somethings who come to me for career advice.

My colleague Barry Schwartz has been dispensing counsel to anxious young adults for much longer than I have. He’s been teaching psychology at Swarthmore College for forty-five years.

Barry thinks that what prevents a lot of young people from developing a serious career interest is unrealistic expectations. “It’s really the same problem a lot of young people have finding a romantic partner,” he said. “They want somebody who’s really attractive and smart and kind and empathetic and thoughtful and funny. Try telling a twenty-one-year-old that you can’t find a person who is absolutely the best in every way. They don’t listen. They’re holding out for perfection.”

“What about your wonderful wife, Myrna?” I asked.

“Oh, she is wonderful. More wonderful than I am, certainly. But is she perfect? Is she the only person I could have made a happy life with? Am I the only man in the world with whom she could have made a wonderful marriage? I don’t think so.”

A related problem, Barry says, is the mythology that falling in love with a career should be sudden and swift: “There are a lot of things where the subtleties and exhilarations come with sticking with it for a while, getting elbow-deep into something. A lot of things seem uninteresting and superficial until you start doing them and, after a while, you realize that there are so many facets you didn’t know at the start, and you never can fully solve the problem, or fully understand it, or what have you. Well, that requires that you stick with it.”

After a pause, Barry said, “Actually, finding a mate is the perfect analogy. Meeting a potential match—not the one-and-only perfect match, but a promising one—is only the very beginning.”



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There’s a lot we don’t know about the psychology of interest. I wish we knew, for example, why some of us (including me) find cooking a fascinating subject, while many others couldn’t care less. Why is Marc Vetri attracted to creative endeavors, and why does Rowdy Gaines like sports? Aside from the rather vague explanation that interests are, like everything else about us, partly heritable and partly a function of life experience, I can’t tell you. But scientific research on the evolution of interests has yielded some important insights. My sense is that, unfortunately, these basic facts aren’t commonly understood.

What most of us think of when we think of passion is a sudden, all-at-once discovery—that first bite of sole meunière bringing with it the certainty of the years you’ll spend in the kitchen . . . slipping into the water at your first swim meet and getting out with the foreknowledge that you’ll one day be an Olympian . . . getting to the end of The Catcher in the Rye and realizing you’re destined to be a writer. But a first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is exactly that—just the opening scene in a much longer, less dramatic narrative.

To the thirty-something on Reddit with a “fleeting interest in everything” and “no career direction,” here’s what science has to say: passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

Let me explain.

First of all, childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school. This is certainly the pattern I’ve seen in my interview research, and it’s also what journalist Hester Lacey has found in her interviews with the “mega successful.” Keep in mind, however, that a seventh grader—even a future paragon of grit—is unlikely to have a fully articulated passion at that age. A seventh grader is just beginning to figure out her general likes and dislikes.