Two approaches to passion you should know about
Spark of light versus sprouting seed
In the movie Julie & Julia, a 30-something Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is dining at a fancy Parisian restaurant with her diplomat husband Paul. The feisty American feasts on a sole meunière in a lemon-butter sauce — and is entranced. She has never eaten something as good. “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me,” Child wrote later. “I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.” This dinner was the pivotal moment, it seems, that set her on the trajectory to become the iconic chef who was so extraordinarily successful with her French cookbook and her show on TV.
How do people become passionate about a topic or an activity? This is a question I have been thinking and reading about a lot. There seem to be two different angles to look at it:
- Number one: There is a pivotal moment, a spark of insight that leads somebody to suddenly realize: ‘This is what I am meant to do.’
- Number two: Interests develop slowly — like a growing seed that must be nurtured to become a full-grown plant.
Let’s look at what psychologists say about the two different approaches. Dean Keith Simonton, professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who has researched the lives of outstanding people, highlights the importance of so-called crystallizing experiences. He refers to a concept developed by Joseph Walters and Howard Gardner (Harvard University) back in 1984. “The basic idea is that people who haven’t found their passion will flounder around until they have some special experience, like an epiphany, that shows them where their actual interests and talents lie,” Simonton explained to me in an interview. “They are then quickly propelled into a new and lasting direction of development.”
Creative people in particular can often describe such a defining experience, that showed them what they want to do in the future. In his book The Genius Checklist, Simonton gives two examples from music: Herbie Hancock, who started out in classical piano before discovering his true love, jazz, and Anton Bruckner, who began as a church composer before discovering, at the age of almost 40, the wonders of symphonic music composed in a grand Wagnerian style.
But crystallizing experiences seem to be important in other fields, too. In her doctoral thesis and subsequent work, Polish researcher Maja Wenderlin, looked at the life and scientific careers of 38 gifted mathematicians, from outstanding doctoral students and winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad to distinguished professors.
Some of them knew intuitively from an early age what they wanted to devote their lives to, what would fulfill them and bring them happiness, she writes. Many others, though, were geared towards mathematics by encounters with people, things, or events. These ‘milestones,’ as Wenderlin calls them, could be competitions that made an individual aware of their special capabilities which caused a sense of uniqueness and agency. Or the future mathematician met an authority in the field who acknowledged and emphasized the unique characteristics of the individual. These milestones, however, were only recognized as such from a later perspective. In fact, Walters and Gardner emphasize that at the moment when the crystallizing experience takes place people cannot realize that it will determine their entire life. Identifying a crystalizing moment only comes in hindsight through introspection.
Julia Child’s eye-opening sole meunière dinner seems like such a crystalizing experience, too. But is that really true? Psychologist Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania has her doubts.
Duckworth who has studied thousands of people who showed extraordinary grit — from marines to Olympians — underlines that passion does not come overnight. She didn’t start out like that, though. In her book Grit. The Power of Passion and Perseverance she reveals that when she began her studies she expected sparkling epiphanies, cinematic moments like Child’s encounter with the divine sole. “But, in fact, most grit paragons I’ve interviewed told me they spent years exploring several different interests, and the one that eventually came to occupy all of their waking (and some sleeping) thoughts wasn’t recognizably their life’s destiny on first acquaintance.”
She mentions the Olympic gold medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines who, in high school, went out for football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis, before he settled on swimming. Swimming stuck, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, as Duckworth reports. The day Gaines tried out for the swim team, he went to the school library to check out information about track and field because he expected to get cut from the team and figured he would take a shot at track and field next.
And when Award-winning chef Marc Vetri was a teenager, Duckworth writes, he was as interested in music as he was in cooking. After college, he went to music school and worked nights in restaurants. He eventually turned to cooking because he was making money working in the restaurants while not making any playing in his band. He was glad he went into cooking, he told Duckworth but thought with different choices could have been a musician instead.
“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,” Duckworth concludes. “Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives.”
These are more than just anecdotes. Research into the dynamic nature of passion shows that for many people interest is something that develops over time. A passion can fluctuate and must be nurtured to take hold and become an essential element of one’s life.
“As for Julia Child, that ethereal morsel of sole meunière was indeed a revelation,” Duckworth writes. “But her epiphany was that classical French cuisine was divine, not that she would become a chef, cookbook author, and, eventually, the woman who would teach America to make coq au vin in their very own kitchens.” Indeed, Julia’s autobiography reveals that this memorable meal was followed by a succession of interest-stimulating experiences: numerous delicious meals in the restaurants of Paris; conversations with produce, meat, and fish vendors in the city’s open-air markets; hours of cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu under the demanding Chef Bugnard; the friendship with two French women who invited her to write a French cookbook for Americans together.
So, clearly in Child’s romance with French food, that first bite of sole was just the first kiss, Duckworth writes. Child would not object. “Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook,” Child later told her sister-in-law. “To think it has taken me forty years to find my true passion (cat and husband excepted).” Mon Dieu!
Here you have it. Passion as something that hits you in the moment and passion as something that develops and grows. But do these two perspectives not contradict each other, you might wonder. Or is there a way to fit them together? And what does it all mean for us ordinary people, who are not gifted mathematicians, iconic chefs, or famous musicians but still want to live a life of interest and passion?
These are great questions that are worth exploring. So, I invited Assistant professor Jon Jachimowitz from Harvard Business School, who studies the dynamic nature of passion, to give us his take on it. It was an exciting interview; he certainly opened my eyes! You can read it in my next post. Don’t miss it!
If you enjoyed this piece, please make sure to follow my profile, so you don’t miss any of my upcoming articles.
