(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

I originally wrote this piece in March 2020 but never got around to publishing it. I added the postscript today and decided to publish it.

I’ve been thinking about the whole “follow your passion” advice again for the last few weeks.

Since this topic has surfaced to my consciousness again, I’ll write my thoughts here, and try to make some sense of it. I would really like to be more informed about this particular topic, so please don’t shy away in letting me know any insights that you have or if you know any books/papers where I might gain more knowledge about this

This is a topic about which my views have oscillated a lot over the past few years. For most of my school life, I had believed that you must follow your “passion” (which already exists) at any cost. Of course, I had a dream and I believed following it was my passion. I wanted to be the Prime Minister of India.

Yep.

I had very pleasant imaginary rundowns of me becoming the Prime Minister; eradicating poverty, increasing India’s GDP growth rate to 20% (yeah yeah I know what kinda 5th grader thinks about the GDP? but bear with me here I was/am a nerd) and of course bashing the fuck out of our favorite punching bag neighbor Pakistan. Eventually, I would have a standoff with China where I would have to make tough decisions going nuclear but would eventually emerge victoriously. Saddled in between in this fantasy were your typical daily soap scenarios like me not marrying the love of my life because “my duty is for my country”, “My opponents are ruthless, I can’t put you in the path of hurt” and “you can’t be my weakness”. You get my gist.

But reality has a cruel way of crushing your dreams. Oh reality, you bitch. Let me have my soft comfy fantasy and dream away my life. Why do I have to wake up?

My dream didn’t go away instantly. As reality soaked in, I slowly substituted each piece of my rainbow-colored-sparkles-shooting dream boat with cold, hard, brown wooden planks. Don’t know about the theseus dude but my ship had definitely changed. As my dream changed, so did my views about dreams and “passion”. I think it was around my 12th grade that I started to believe that there’s no such thing as a “passion”, you just like the things that you’re good at, so you have to focus on becoming good at something and you’ll be passionate about it by default. The reason for this was perhaps cognitive dissonance. I had never really cared a lot about the physics, chemistry and mathematics that I was studying for 5+ hours each day. Sure I liked them but mostly I just liked the feeling of being really good at it and competing against others. I just liked the ego boost and flexing creds I got from it. Bitch, I am AIR <whatever>. To any readers who are feeling perplexed about a nerd flexing his academic performance, in the town called Kota (a hub of coaching institutes) nerds are the ones that end up being on top of the social hierarchy rather than the athletes. This trend is present throughout Indian middle class society where parents and teachers are hyper-focused about grades over everything else. There’s not a lot of funding for anything remotely related to sports in India, sadly. Have a look at our Olympics tally. The moolah (and hence social status, screw capitalism amirite) is in the sciences.

Fuck, did I get distracted again? Eh, Blame my meds. When’s my next psychiatrist appointment again? What was the article about? Passion, yes yes. Let’s get serious now.

Awesome, so I’ll start off by introducing what I call the “strong” passion hypothesis (similar to the ideas in “The Alchemist”). In the coming paragraphs I will be using passion and purpose interchangeably (don’t worry I’ll come to the distinction later but for now let’s treat them the same). It goes something like this-

You were born for one purpose and one purpose alone. Follow that and you’ll be happy forever, deviate from that path and you will suffer. You already know what it is. You simply lack the courage to make the jump. You must make the jump or you’ll be hanging on in quiet desperation for the rest of your life.

One can try to examine this hypothesis from a Nature vs Nurture point of view. Since currently the consensus in the scientific seems to be that both contribute to varying degrees (depending on the trait) and have a complex interaction with one another, we can say that being born with a singular purpose seems highly unlikely.

But does it matter?

Viewing from the perspective of an adult, both nature and nurture are out of our control. Most of our “nurture” (in so far as it pertains to your personality) has already happened and we are stuck with our current physical and mental traits, changing each of which requires considerable time and effort, if at all change is possible for that trait. So then if we let go of the “born” with a purpose part of the strong passion hypothesis, is it correct? Has nature and the preceding years of nurture locked us on to a groove? And more importantly is it helpful in making us happy, content and successful?

Not according to Cal Newport. I recently read his book “So good they can’t ignore you” which posited that “follow your passion” is bad career advice and gave an alternative — albeit less glamorous — way of thinking about your career. You should focus on building rare and valuable skills instead of trying to find the right job. These skills will give you negotiating power to get the universally desirable attributes which are present in all satisfying jobs: control, a sense of purpose and flexibility among others. He calls the passion hypothesis harmful because if you believe in it you might end up spending your entire life hopping from one job to another, because it didn’t “feel” like your passion and might end up having no valuable experience and no skills. Gaining rare and valuable skills — which are the key to a good career — takes time and effort and it will certainly not happen if you keep changing the direction of effort very frequently. Furthermore, all the while you’ll just keep feeling stuck and down because you’ll be working on something that “isn’t your passion”, a misery that is almost entirely artificially constructed. For further discussion let’s call this “passion is built” hypothesis.

I see a very clear parallel to romantic relationships here. There’s the “True Love” hypothesis. You have true love waiting for you out there. If you find true love everything will be easy and you’ll be happy forever (and conversely if you’re not happy with someone it’s not true love). You have to find your true love, your “one” and once you find them, do everything in your power to keep them. Likewise, to counter this there’s another school of thought that says love is something you build (mutually with your partner) through your actions over time. Focus on being a good partner, focus on improving yourself. All desirable partners are the same: loving, affectionate, compassionate, trusting, understanding, empathetic and so on. Focus on building these attributes in yourself and focus on self-actualizing as a person and these attributes will make you attractive to more people out of which you can find the right one. If a relationship is hard, focus on your own problems that are making it so, instead of simply hopping from one partner to another looking for the “one”.

Huh. Anyway let’s let go of the parallel problem in romantic relationships for now, before I open a can of worms that I can’t close. Let’s get back to the “Finding your passion” vs “Passion is built” debate again.

At first glance, “Passion is built” seems like a very rational and mature approach. Don’t know about you, but I certainly feel that had I stuck to a single thing I would have been in a much better position than I am now. All the hopping didn’t do me any good and even after all of it, I still don’t know what my “passion” is or what I should base my career on. Not just my career, had I stuck to a single hobby or activity, I would have become very skillful at it and would have the satisfaction of enjoying something I was really good at.

But buyer beware, regret has a way of making you “feel” old and more sober, making “passion is built” seem like a mature perspective. Why did you leave the things you used to do? Was it because you were simply bored or was it because you hated every minute of it? Were there moments when you loved it? Were you getting anything out of it? These are questions one must think about before buying into the “passion is built” hypothesis completely. Maybe it was the right decision to quit, maybe things didn’t work out because they were never going to. Before you go into full regret mode of thinking “I should’ve just worked harder” think about what you felt when you were actually going through the experience NOT how you feel about it now. Could you have put in more effort in that state? Could you have mustered up the motivation to work on it? If the answer is no, maybe it was the right decision to quit.

More than anything I think where the “Passion is built” hypothesis lets you down is that it doesn’t account for motivation. When you give the advice “build rare and valuable skills instead of trying to find the right job” there’s a silent assumption being made.i.e the assumption is that the intention to build such skills directly implies that you will actually build them. It skips over a very huge chunk of the story of actually going about building such skills. Developing such skills is definitely not easy; if it was, many people would end up having them and hence by definition they would not be rare and by basic economics they wouldn’t be valuable. Now how does one go about acquiring such rare and valuable skills? The answer is deliberate practice (or at least what the research in social psychology tells us). Deliberate practice is a form of practice which is goal-oriented, effortful and has clear feedback. It requires you to focus on something that you’re not currently good at (your weaknesses), get out of the auto-pilot and make conscious effort at the task at hand with full attention. Needless to say, it is not a very pleasant experience and so most of us don’t end up engaging in it on a regular basis. It’s very hard for me to imagine that one could simply will oneself to do it, without any pre-existing motivation. Sure the motivation might not be about building the skill itself; it could be stepping stone to something else, (If my primary motivation is to become very rich, it could translate into the motivation to be an expert in the stock market) but there must be a strong motivation present. A vague idea of “having a great career” is not enough to make me install linux from scratch in order to gain a deep understanding of operating systems or spend hours trying to learn a song by ear in order to improve my listening skills or deriving an important statistical result independently in order to understand neural networks better. Huh. Humse na ho payega.

In conclusion, I feel that both approaches come from different places and have their own pros and cons (Sorry to go all Aristotelian golden mean on you after such a long post!). Personally, I feel that one’s long term goal cannot be something that one just doesn’t care about at all. In the long term, motivation and your feelings matter, you just can’t make yourself do something you hate for decades without significantly damaging your mental health and well being. However, one can be calculated and agile when deciding and executing goals in the shorter term. If your long term goal is clear and you are motivated to achieve it eventually, you might be able to will yourself into pursuing seemingly hard medium and short term goals, where the rational approach might lead to better results.

P.S. Of course, the question of how one chooses a long term goal still remains open. Here, I would probably suggest taking an inventory of your values, using some version of the valued living questionnaire used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which might lead you to set a long term vision to live in accordance with those values. I don’t have a more concrete answer here yet or in knowing what you really value, except simply furthering the relationship analogy: “When you know, you know”.