Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

by Benjamin P. Hardy

In the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, author Cal Newport argues that rather than trying to find your passion, you should instead develop rare and valuable skills. Find a need and begin filling it. Once you’ve developed skills and begin seeing success, passion comes as an organic by-product, or an indirect effect. As he writes, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.” Newport’s perspectives on passion dovetail exactly with the research on motivation. Like passion, motivation isn’t something to be discovered, but to be created through proactive and forward action. Both passion and motivation are effects, not causes. As Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist, said, “You more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” As stated previously, confidence is the same way. You can’t have it first; it must come as a by-product of chosen and goal-consistent action.