More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 30 - November 10, 2019
Yet throughout our research and reporting, we couldn’t help but realize that focusing on performance practices alone misses a crucial point. All the greats shared something else in common: An unrelenting drive. An eternal hunger. An inability to be satiated. Passion.
And though we’re glad we chose to write this book when we did, we’d be remiss not to acknowledge that this urge to keep pushing and pushing also has a dark side, one that extends beyond just reasonable doubts. Passion often comes at the expense of time and energy spent on family, friends, and other activities, including the simple joys of life. Too much passion, especially without equally strong self-awareness (a topic we’ll explore later on), can completely uproot your life and lead to burnout.
Consider just a few of the negative paths that passion can lead you down: You become a slave to external results and validation.
You become blind to everything but your passion.
You burn out.
You lose joy.
There is, of course, a different—and far better—kind of passion. It emerges when you become wrapped up in an activity primarily for the joy of doing the activity itself. When you experience success with humility and failure with temperate resolve. When your goal becomes your path and your path becomes your goal. When your passion is fueled by deep purpose and is in harmony with the rest of your life.
if you don’t proactively prevent passion from veering off course, it’s likely to do so, oftentimes without you even realizing it. Put differently, passion is fragile, and it must be handled with care.
If you do proactively manage your passion, however, living with passion leads to improved health, happiness, and overall life-satisfaction. In other words, there is both good passion and bad passion. And what direction your passion takes is largely up to you.
The sensation of being wholly consumed by an activity, idea, or person is familiar to anyone who has had even just a brief dance with passion. Whether you become passionate about someone or something, the reaction is much the same. Your world narrows and the only thing that seems to matter is the object or activity of desire.
This overwhelming feeling of attachment is birthed deep in our brain, where it’s fueled by a powerful neurochemical called dopamine. Dopamine excites and arouses us, focusing our attention on whatever it is we are working toward.
We don’t get hooked on the feeling associated with achievement, we get hooked on the feeling associated with the chase. There’s a biological basis for this ceaseless yearning. Unlike other feel-good neurochemicals that are released after you’ve accomplished a goal, the far more potent dopamine is released prior, during the pursuit.
We’re not wired to simply be content. We’re wired to keep pushing.
Emerging science suggests that individuals with ADHD tendencies might be less sensitive to dopamine, meaning they need even more of the neurochemical to feel content.
“persistence,” one of his four major temperament styles, is closely associated with an insensitivity to dopamine.
The more someone repeats an activity—especially ones that yield positive feedback, be it winning gold medals, achieving promotions, or luring in romantic partners—the more they crave dopamine.
Over time, and in a process similar to other addictive substances, our brains become less sensitive to dopamine, meaning we need more of it to feel good. This craving, if you will, leads us back to the pursuit, which triggers the release of yet more dopamine. And so a cycle of longing, and one that is inherently resistant to contentment, persists. It’s worth reiterating that this cycle is a natural one. It results from our evolutionary programming, which pushes us to become addicted to the pursuit of rewards, not the achievement of them.
The line between what we consider a destructive addiction and a productive passion is a fine one, if such a line exists at all.
There is a biological reason why the wonderful feeling of passion cannot coexist with the wonderful feeling of contentment. Passion builds on itself: the more we push, the more we get hooked on the feeling of pushing.
after struggling with less healthy addictions—a common theme in passionate individuals—he became one of the best endurance athletes on the planet,
Might Roll’s story have broader implications? Professor Alan St Clair Gibson, PhD, MD, of the University of Essex in the UK, thinks so. Gibson specializes in integrative neuroscience. He’s devoted much of his life to thinking about the intersection of mind and body. Gibson believes that passion may be rooted at least partially in something that Sigmund Freud long ago called ego fragility. In order to block out damaging events from one’s past, Gibson says, people repress bad memories and experiences, relegating them deep into the subconscious. But these emotions can only stay bottled up for so
...more
Out of this body of work came the increasingly popular phrase “talent needs trauma.”10 “Trauma,” of course, lies in the eyes of the beholder. The death of a parent or imprisonment of a sibling certainly registers as trauma, but so, too, might being bullied in grade school or never being invited to hang out with the “cool kids.” Anything that someone experiences as disruptive, as fracturing their sense of self, could work to precipitate future passion and drive. “Trauma from times past,” says Gibson, “creates an inner-mongrel which refuses to give up until the ‘prize’ is won.”
Though this isn’t always the case, some kind of perceived past trauma is common among passionate individuals, and not only for the biological reasons we discussed earlier in this chapter. In addition to triggering a cycle of dopamine dependence and the ensuing feeling of ceaseless yearning, the relentless pursuit of an objective can also serve as an escape. Throwing ourselves wholly into a passion shrinks our world, overshadowing whatever inner struggles we may be facing and making us feel comfortable and in control. Our obsessions become a refuge. Places where we can fill the voids created by
...more
It’s not surprising that so many great athletes, creatives, and entrepreneurs, following their retirement, struggle with substance abuse and gambling addiction. If we don’t move on from our passions thoughtfully (a topic we’ll discuss later on), the same underlying biology and psychology that give rise to excellent pursuits can also give rise to harmful ones. Passion and addiction are close cousins.
“When starving, when in love, and when parenting, being able to persist despite negative consequences—the essence of addictive behavior—is not a bug, but a feature, as programmers say. It can be the difference between life and death, between success and failure,” writes psychology and neuroscience journalist Maia Szalavitz in her book Unbroken Brain. “However, when brain pathways intended to promote [positive attributes] are diverted into addiction, their blessings become curses. Love and addiction are alterations of the same brain circuits.”17
The rest of this book is about how to find something worthy of getting hooked on, and what happens when you do; and in particular, how you can develop the good kind of passion and harness and channel it in positive directions.
The notion that enduring love need not always manifest as an immediate and powerful attraction traces itself all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed love as a practice of continually learning about and growing closer to one’s partner—more a process of cultivation than an instant connection. Instead of being preoccupied with searching for the perfect match, for centuries, people worked to develop intimate bonds over time. But with the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century—a period that prized emotional feeling over cognitive thinking—the prevailing attitude toward love began
...more
it should not be surprising that when it comes to finding a passion, much like with love, the prevailing wisdom is that we ought to search for the perfect fit.
In the small but growing world of passion research, this is called a “fit mind-set” of passion, and it very much parallels the destiny belief system of love.
People with fit mind-sets for passion are also more likely to give up on new pursuits at the first sign of challenge or disappointment, shrugging their shoulders and thinking, I guess this isn’t for me. Furthermore, studies show that individuals with fit mind-sets actually expect their passions to dwindle over time, setting themselves up for midlife crises once their initial enthusiasm for an activity has diminished.
A better approach to finding your passion is to lower the bar from perfect to interesting, then give yourself permission to pursue your interests with an open mind.
Take a moment to reflect on your mind-set around passion. Do you hold a “fit mind-set”?
You’re less likely to find a lasting passion because you bounce from one not-quite-perfect endeavor to the next.
Select “interesting” over “perfect.” Having an open mind and playfully exploring your interests is better than trying to find something that immediately feels perfect. “Interest” is really just another way of saying that something captures your attention. When you come across an activity or idea that subtly pulls you toward it, you are faced with a choice: Do you grant yourself permission to lean in and further explore? Or do you let it go, ignoring it and writing it off as a momentary blip of intrigue? If you choose to ignore, you send a strong message—and one that quickly gets encoded in
...more
Unfortunately, far too often when a feeling of intrigue or curiosity arises, we simply let it go. In some cases, we tell ourselves we’re too busy, quickly becoming distracted by our smartphones or the next item on our to-do list. Other times, we tell ourselves that wherever an initial spark of intrigue is leading must not be for us because it conflicts with our perceived identity; a form of resistance that we call “I couldn’t possibly do this” syndrome. Common examples of “I couldn’t possibly do this” syndrome include: “I went to and paid for business school, why should I be concerned with
...more
In the early 1970s, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed a concept called self-determination theory that forever changed how the scientific community viewed motivation. Deci and Ryan found that, contrary to common wisdom (both then and, to a large extent, now), one’s drive to pursue activities is not predominantly reliant on external rewards like money, fame, or recognition. Rather, enduring motivation comes from satisfying three basic needs: competency, autonomy, and relatedness.
Competency is about having a sense of control over the outcome of your efforts and the ability to make progress over time. If you don’t believe that your efforts will be rewarded with improvement, why put forth any effort to begin with?
If you put in the work, you want to get something out of it.
Autonomy, also sometimes referred to as authenticity, is about acting in harmony with your innermost being. It means you’re connecting what you do with who you are. Your work should reflect your core values and beliefs; you should express some part of your innermost self in your activity.
When you are exploring new interests, ask yourself if they reflect your core values. Perhaps they allow you to express creativity and freedom, or to grow wisdom and strength.
Relatedness: The final component of self-determination theory is one that binds us to others: the need to feel connected to and/or like you are a part of something larger.
This doesn’t always mean that the best jobs and activities are those performed in groups, but it does mean that you’re more likely to stick with something that makes you feel like you are a part of something greater. There are many ways to achieve this: Are you working with others? Does your work touch others? Is your work a continuation of what others have done before you? Is your work setting the stage for others to build upon? Does your work make you part of a community, be it a physical or intellectual one? Whatever form the connection takes, that connection is critical.
If an activity meets these needs, you’re exponentially more likely to enjoy it and stick with it. Satisfying these three needs is almost always required for enduring passion to take hold.
Once you’ve begun to cultivate an emerging passion, it’s only a matter of time before you’re liable to ask yourself some simple yet significant questions: How can I spend more of my time and energy pursuing this new passion? How can I make it a bigger part of my life?
Yet “choosing must” isn’t always possible, or wise. Not everyone has the risk tolerance, practical ability, or financial security to make such a choice, to suddenly quit their job or upend other areas of their life to wholly pursue an emerging passion. And yet it turns out that’s actually OK. It might even be advantageous. Because the best route to making your passion a bigger part of your life is often not to choose must over should, but rather to choose must and should.
If you want to do something entrepreneurial—in essence, attempting to monetize a passion—are you better off keeping or quitting your day job? After interviewing thousands of entrepreneurs, they found that those who kept their day job while pursuing a personal venture on the side—or what the researchers called “hybrid entrepreneurship”—were 33 percent less likely to fail than those who quit their jobs altogether.9 As the Harvard Business Review put it, “Going all-in on your start-up might not be the best idea.”
When you go all in, you move from a place of wanting to succeed to needing to succeed.
Such a strategy brings two major benefits: First, you are more likely to take bigger risks with higher payoffs when you know that failure won’t ruin you.
Second, even if you initially come up short, you’ll still be OK (thanks to maintaining your stable gig) and thus you can continue using different strategies to try to make your passion a bigger part of your life.
The best route to making your passion a bigger part of your life is to do so gradually.
