The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life

by Brad Stulberg

Pursuing your passion incrementally gets you pretty far—ironically, at least according to the research out of Harvard, farther than if you’d gone all in from the outset.

There’s an old Buddhist saying that faith is the confidence born out of realizing the fruits of practice. “It is like the confidence a farmer has in his way of growing crops,” writes the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. “This kind of faith is not blind. It is not some belief in a set of ideas or dogmas.”15 This is the kind of faith that is required to quit your job, or move across the country, or go back to school to fully pursue your passion.

Though success in pursuing a passion full-on is never guaranteed, its probability increases when you can respond to the following prompts—key pieces of evidence, if you will—in the affirmative: I’ve done the work that is necessary to put myself in a position to thrive. I’ve tested my current skills multiple times and know they are sufficient to at least stay afloat (financially, physically, emotionally) when I jump in. I have the desire and work ethic to continue developing my skills. I’ve reflected on the sacrifices I’ll need to further pursue my passion, and I’m OK making them. I have a plan of action, including mentors, the support of family and friends, and specific progression markers or milestones to shoot for. I’m also willing to adapt my plan if need be. I may feel a little jittery, but the thought of going all in on my passion does not make me anxious. It makes me excited. I want to do this, and I’m committed to everything this encompasses.

While countless stories end with how to find your passion, in reality, that’s just the beginning. The harder part is learning how to live with it in a productive and sustainable manner.

These are all telltale examples of what University of Quebec psychology professor Robert Vallerand calls obsessive passion. While nearly all passions can lead to feelings of obsession, Vallerand’s obsessive passion refers to those that become motivated by achievement, results, and external rewards more so than by internal satisfaction. It’s when someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself. Obsessive passion can quickly hijack a joyful and righteous pursuit and turn it into a dark one. One of the foremost reasons for this is that someone who is obsessively passionate ties their self-worth to things outside their control. This often ends up creating high levels of distress.

Years before Skilling’s and Holmes’s falls from grace, the late psychologist and humanist thinker Erich Fromm wrote, “Human freedom is restricted to the extent to which we are bound to our own egos. By being bound to our egos we stand in our own way…If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, then who am I?”10 Fusing a large part of your identity with any external result is a dangerous game.

Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more. More money. More fame. More medals. More followers.

Modern behavioral science has a phrase to describe this never-ending cycle of searching for satisfaction and self-worth founded in something that lies outside of our control: hedonic adaptation.

Researchers have found that regardless of the field, individuals who display obsessive passion are more likely to engage in unethical behavior and are at a higher risk for anxiety, depression, and burnout. Their relationship with their passion is likely to erode, and their overall life satisfaction is poor.

when Olympians were asked if they would take a drug that guaranteed them a gold medal but would kill them in five years, half of them said yes.

In order to understand the power fear holds over us, it is once again instructive to reflect on our deep past.

Each and every hunt was not only an opportunity to obtain meat for nourishment, but also an opportunity to be maimed by predators and other aggressive beasts. Back then, failure generally meant death. As a result, we evolved to avoid failure with the same innately programmed intensity that we evolved to crave the chase.

It’s why our species is still around today, why the inflammatory basketball coach Bobby Knight’s teams won championships, and why tyrant bosses often get impressive results out of their employees (for a time, anyway). But passion that is rooted in fear comes at quite a cost. And rarely, if ever, is it sustainable.

In another study, David Conroy, a professor at the College of Health and Human Performance at Penn State, specifically examined athletes like Moceanu who were motivated by fear.19 He discovered five common drivers: Fear of shame and embarrassment. Fear of losing a positive self-image. Fear of an uncertain future. Fear of important others losing interest. Fear of upsetting important others.

“When fear dies, you begin to live.”

When we shed fear, it’s not that we become complacent. If anything, we become even more inclined to push the envelope, take chances, and express our authentic selves. We go from playing “not to lose” to playing to win. In psychology, this is referred to as the difference between a prevention and promotion mind-set.

Under a promotion mind-set, however, we stop taking the safe route, or the route someone else wants us to take, or the route we think someone else wants us to take. Instead, we become willing to take constructive risks because we aren’t afraid of failing. In doing so, we open ourselves up to breakthroughs. Shedding fear requires “having confidence in your knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as a belief in your ability to succeed and a constant hunger for improvement and growth,” according to Ashley Merryman, a talent development researcher. Still, Merryman acknowledges that it’s hard to go for it, especially as we get closer to our goal, something she calls the “goal looms closer effect,” or “when you’ve come so far that you just don’t want to mess up now.” If you start to fall into this trap, feeling hesitation and fear creep in, ask yourself exactly what it is that you fear. If the answer is messing up or losing, remember that the best way to avoid those outcomes is by playing to win.

Psychologist Stan Beecham, who counsels numerous elite athletes and high-ranking executives, also believes that our relationship with fear is utterly critical to what we will accomplish in our lives: “It’s all about fear. If you kill fear, you win. If you kill fear, you have your best year ever. If you kill fear, you train like a mad man. If you kill fear, you go to college for free. If you kill fear, you stand on the podium, you get paid, you have strangers walk up to you and call you by name. When fear dies, you begin to live.”

When you sit down to write, you should sit down to write, not to sell books. When you show up to work, you should show up to make a meaningful contribution, not to get promoted or earn bonuses. When you train and compete, you should do so to get better, to master your body, not to win awards or improve in the rankings. When you love—be it a partner or a child—you should do so out of nurturing a special relationship between you and the object of your affection, not because you fear losing them or because you want to chronicle your relationship on social media for all your “friends” to see. In other words, your passion should not come from the outside. It should come from within. This is harmonious passion, a far more desirable type of passion; the type that you want in your life. Harmonious passion is the best kind of passion. It is associated with enhanced long-term performance, vitality, health, and overall life satisfaction.

In music, harmony occurs when a combination of tones is played simultaneously and in perfect accord. It’s a sound that is nearly impossible to describe, yet immediately recognizable. You know it not only because you hear it, but also because you feel it. Everything clicks. There is complete concordance. Imagine if the same feeling you experience in the presence of musical harmony could be elicited by thinking about or, better yet, engaging in your passion.

Enter harmonious passion a feeling that emerges when you are wrapped up in something primarily for the joy of the activity, when your engagement is not merely a means to an end but rather an end in itself.* Harmonious passion manifests mainly from activities that are freely chosen without contingencies; when you do something because you enjoy it, not because it offers potential rewards, and not to avoid negative repercussions.

The great paradox, however, is that although external achievement is never a primary goal of harmonious passion, when you become completely immersed in what you’re doing for the joy of the activity itself, it is often a by-product. Those who focus most on success are least likely to achieve it. Those who focus least on success, and focus on the process of engaging in their craft instead, are most likely to achieve it.

Much like a beautiful harmonious sound, harmonious passion doesn’t just magically arise. Rather, it requires deliberate work and practice.

Mastery is a mind-set and also a path. It leads to continual improvement and development. It values acute (in the moment) and chronic (over a lifetime) engagement but devalues most of the transient stuff in between (point-in-time successes or failures).

Individuals who are on the path of mastery not only accomplish great things, but do so in a healthy and sustainable manner. They exude a Zen-like aura, are resistant to burnout, and produce work that is of a special kind of quality—a quality that is born out of love. And yet perhaps their greatest accomplishment is an even more cherished one: continual growth and development, a fulfilling life.

1. Mastery Mind-Set: Drive from Within Individuals on the path of mastery are driven from within. Their primary motivation isn’t external measures of success or fear, and it’s certainly not satisfying others or conforming to a certain peer group or social norms. Rather, their motivation originates from an internal desire to improve and engage in an activity for its own sake.

The mastery mind-set acknowledges that external motivators—be it Olympic medals, book sales, art commissions, or venture capital funding—will influence your motivation. At the same time, however, the mastery mind-set ensures that the influence of such external motivators takes a backseat. This doesn’t happen unthinkingly. It requires deliberate choices and actions to keep such external motivators from staking too great a claim in your psyche and inconspicuously turning your passion into passio. Perhaps the simplest and most effective of these actions is showing up and doing the work, every damn day. Don’t judge yourself against others. Judge yourself against prior versions of yourself and the effort you are exerting in the present moment. This is about as healthy a form of competition as there is.

Sure, it’s only human to get a jolt of excitement after a big win or to feel disappointment after a tough loss. Enjoy the success or grieve the defeat, but within twenty-four hours, return to your craft, get back to work.

Doing the work has a special way of putting both success and failure in their respective places. After a massive achievement or a devastating failure, getting back to work serves as an embodied reminder that external results aren’t why you are in this.

In addition to the physical act of getting back to work, another powerful way to maintain drive from within lies in your psyche; in particular, internalizing the mastery mind-set as a core value. Core values are guiding principles that help dictate your behaviors. They serve as unwavering guides, influencing how you think, feel, and act. Core values are not just beliefs you pay lip service to but those that you truly strive to embody. Research shows that reflecting on your core values helps to ensure that you live in accordance with them.

when you reflect on your core values, you literally change your brain in a productive manner. Perhaps even more meaningful is that these effects weren’t just confined to the brain. The study participants who reflected on their core values went on to overcome challenges in real life.3 The implications of this research are fairly straightforward. After a great achievement or a harrowing failure, ask yourself if your response—both what you are feeling on the inside and how you express it on the outside—is aligned with a core value of mastery. Doing so prevents the powerful emotions that accompany both success and failure from hijacking the motivational centers of your brain and refocuses you on the mastery mind-set. Brief as it may be, this kind of reflection stops emotional inertia—and the obsessive passion it can lead to—in its tracks.

Drive from within does not occur on its own. Without rapidly coming back to your work and committing to mastery as a core value, external motivators are likely to creep into and eventually dominate your psyche. Do not let this happen.

Proactively nurture your intrinsic motivation.

When you start to feel yourself getting overly emotional about failures, successes, or external validation, pause and reflect on what you like most about your work. Remind yourself that drive that comes from within is healthier and more sustainable than drive that comes from external sources.

2. Mastery Mind-Set: Focus on the Process

We’re not sharing Martinez’s story to say that you should never set and strive for big goals. Goals are like steering mechanisms, North Stars to shoot for, and when used in this manner they are very productive. But as you’ve learned by now, too much focus on a specific goal, and especially one that is outside your full control (like winning a race), almost always does more harm than good.

Focusing on the process also means breaking down goals into their component parts and concentrating on those parts. It’s an incredible focusing mechanism that keeps you in the here and now, even during the pursuit of distant goals or in the face of setbacks or failure.

First, set a goal—but remember, it should serve more as a direction than a destination. Next, figure out the steps that are required to make progress toward that goal and that are within your control. Then (mostly) forget about the goal, and focus on nailing the steps instead. Focusing on the process creates daily opportunities for little victories. These little victories serve as waypoints on the path of mastery, helping to sustain your motivation over the long haul.

Process spurs progress, and progress, on a deep neurochemical level, primes us to persist.

3. Mastery Mind-Set: Don’t Worry About Being the Best—Worry About Being the Best at Getting Better

When your utmost goal is simply to get better, all failures and successes are temporary because you will forever improve, given more time and more practice.

This isn’t to say there won’t be rough patches, disappointments, and triumphs along the way. But rather than serving as endpoints, concrete achievements and failures become more like information—markers of progress and exposures of weakness—that you can use to improve yourself and your process on a longer path. You don’t define yourself by any single moment in time; you define yourself by an entire body of work in service of ongoing growth and development.

For many of the most passionate people, getting better is about becoming stronger, kinder, and wiser.

4. Mastery Mind-Set: Embrace Acute Failure for Chronic Gains

Studies show that students who fear failure shut down and quit whatever it is they were working on when the going gets tough.11 Students who embody more of a mastery orientation, however, continue to forge ahead, looking for alternative solutions. Shedding your fear of failure starts with working to disconnect your sense of self and ego from the external product of your work.

Shedding your fear of failure doesn’t mean you should actively seek out failure. But it does free you to pursue bold challenges, to push the envelope. When you do, one of two things will happen: You’ll either break through, or you’ll fail. Both outcomes are integral to ongoing advancement down mastery’s path.

There’s an old Eastern proverb that says, “The master has failed more times than the student has even tried.”

5. Mastery Mind-Set: Patience A few simple truths: The path of mastery is almost always very hard and requires lots of time and unyielding commitment. Any long-term progression contains inevitable periods of boredom. We are hardwired to seek novelty and stimulation, which is why “quick fixes” and “hacks” can be so appealing—even though they rarely, if ever, work. Advancing on the path of mastery, getting the most out of yourself and sustaining passion for a lifetime, requires patience.

One recent study showed that people would rather shock themselves electrically than sit alone without a mobile device for even just a few minutes.12

“To learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau.”