What passion is — and what it isn’t
An interview with researcher Jon Jachimowicz, Harvard Business School
People who are passionate about a topic or activity are compelling. How did they get there? And how can we become more passionate ourselves? In my last article, I introduced two ways to approach these questions: passion as something that hits you in the moment and passion as something that develops and grows.
To dig deeper into this fascinating topic, I invited Jon Jachimowicz from Harvard Business School, who researches the dynamic nature of passion and meaningful work.
At only 32, Jon’s career path is impressive. Born and raised in Cologne, Germany, he decided to move abroad after high school (Gymnasium). He went to the U.K., where he received an M.A. from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge (England). He then moved across the Atlantic, where he pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia Business School in New York. Today, he is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in Cambridge (M.A.), where he teaches a Leadership and Organizational Behavior course and has his own lab. He was listed as a Poets & Quants 40 under 40 honoree and on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
Jon is not only a passionate researcher and teacher — as becomes apparent the minute you start talking with him — but also a passionate Salsa dancer.
This is part 1 of my interview with Jon. Part 2 follows in a separate installment.
Annette Schaefer: Most people probably know what it feels like to be passionate about an activity or topic. But as a scientist, how do you define passion?
Jon Jachimowicz: The way I define passion boils down to three things. First, passion is an intense emotional experience that can be positive but also negative. The fact that it can be quite painful and the ambivalence that we might feel about it is an essential part of it. Second, passion is geared towards something that we care about. While we often say that we’re passionate about a specific activity, for me, it is also about what the activity stands for. In what way does it fulfill a higher level of value? And third, when you’re passionate about something you care about, you’re also motivated to engage in the activities that make you passionate. Passion comes with a motivational drive. For example, if you are passionate about basketball, you feel compelled to watch it, play it, or read about it. If you are not, it may not really be a passion.
Many people regard passion as something that is easy, fun, and exciting. But this is not how the pursuit of passion works.
AS: The focus today is on how passion develops. But you have also done research on how people think that passion develops. What did you find?
JJ: Many people regard passion as something that is easy, fun, and exciting. It’s a common expectation because it’s how passion is often presented to us. Take graduation speeches, for example, where we elevate successful people onto the pedestal and look at what we can learn from them. I love these speeches as cultural artifacts. But these accomplished people often tell us that passion is fun and exciting and that this is a good marker to assess if you are on the right track. So we take away the advice that we should pursue fun and exciting things. But this is not how the pursuit of passion works.
AS: How does developing passion work?
JJ: In reality, finding out and pursuing what you’re passionate about is much more about finding out who you are and what you care about. It’s about developing a sense of self. It’s about understanding the values you hold dear and the priorities these values hold for you. There are many things that I care about in life, but what is central and what’s more peripheral to me? Secondly, developing passion also requires a deep understanding of how to live out these values. What specific things are under my purview every single day that I can do to advance my values? Both these things — understanding yourself and understanding meaningful activities — can be pretty difficult.
AS: You also speak of the dynamic nature of passion. What do you mean by that?
JJ: There is this lay belief that we hold in society that either I have a passion or I don’t. In my view, it’s quite detrimental because it implies that when I have a passion, I will be passionate every single day. But this is not how life works. One problem is that the tasks people do day by day vary, and they feel more or less passionate about them. A dedicated basketball player might have to do weight training which she dislikes, so she might not feel very passionate on weight room days. In addition, daily life places varying demands on people. If childcare doesn’t happen today because of Covid and I must keep an eye on my child while working, I can’t expect to marshal the same emotional resources towards my job as usual. My research shows that because of these reasons, passion fluctuates quite a bit.
AS: How do you study this?
JJ: We collect data multiple times a day from the same individuals over the course of days and weeks in a method called “experience sampling”. This way, you get a good understanding of what a person’s life looks like. And we find considerable variations in passion from day to day., and even within days. There are also variations between people on any given day; some people experience passion more frequently or more intensely than others. The interesting question then is what makes one day so much more passionate than another, which leads to more questions. What can I do as an individual to make my days more passionate? But also, is it realistic that every day is a high-passion day; would that actually be sustainable?
AS: In the psychological literature, you find this idea of crystallizing experiences, the idea that people, especially those that are very talented, often can point to a pivotal moment in their development when they met somebody or had a defining experience that set them on a path to their life’s passion. How does the idea of an epiphany relate to the notion that passion is something that develops over time and fluctuates? These approaches almost seem to contradict each other.
JJ: I don’t think they necessarily do. The way I understand the literature about crystallizing experiences is that there are moments in people’s lives that help them know who they are and what they care about. It can be very positive experiences like winning a competition or seeing that you’re making a difference in the life of somebody. And it can be tragic circumstances like the death of a loved one. These moments reveal an important part of yourself that reflects who you are. So they allow you to develop a better self-narrative, a better story about yourself. And that’s a vital resource for the pursuit of passion because it allows you to start thinking about how you might enact this part of yourself and find a career or other activities that will enable you to live out your values. So I don’t think these ideas are necessarily conflicting. But I do believe they can appear disconnected or even conflicting because their time perspective is different.
In hindsight, we’re imposing order on chaos and telling a story that sounds cleaner than it actually was. So we tell the story as a beautiful linear path while it had ups and downs when we lived through it.
AS: How so?
JJ: Often, when we have these significant moments, it’s pretty difficult for us to understand the meaning we derive from them. The full importance of these moments is not necessarily apparent when they happen, but the epiphany only comes in hindsight. Paraphrasing, Soren Kierkegaard said: Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards. When we look back, everything makes sense, but things can feel very uncertain in the moment. A related problem is that, in hindsight, we’re imposing order on chaos and telling a story that sounds cleaner than it actually was. So we tell the story as a beautiful linear path while it had ups and downs when we lived through it. So I think part of the disconnect comes from the fact that our experiences in the moment are much more turbulent than what we tell about them later. And then the final problem is that the stories we tell can change and with them the meaning we imbue on experiences.
AS: Can you give an example?
JJ: I’ll give you a personal example. When I started grad school, I was very focused on research. So when I told people a story about my life, I would talk about moments in my life where I realized, wow, I really like reading and thinking and writing. And then, five years later, when I advanced to a faculty position, my research experiences were still meaningful, and I would still tell these stories. But now, I also told stories about teaching experiences because teaching was now an important part of my life. And guess what? I came up with moments in my past where I had fantastic teaching experiences, which became part of my self-narrative about why I’m uniquely suited for a faculty position.
AS: So, while your past experiences haven’t changed, how you’ve told the story about yourself has changed.
JJ: Exactly. And in the future, my story will change again and continue to change. So the bottom line is that we can look at our experiences from a number of different angles and rewrite our narrative accordingly. It is an essential part of fostering passion throughout life. But it is not so easy to do.
AS: Thank you, Jon. We will discuss the challenges of fostering passion and the steps one can take to pull it off in my next installment. See you all then!
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This interview was originally published in my Substack newsletter Onward .
