So Good They Can't Ignore You

One of the students asks Steele if he had started his PhD program “hoping you’d one day change the world.” “No,” Steele responds, “I just wanted options.”

than six

Conclusion #1: Career Passions Are Rare

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

This young generation has “high expectations for work,” explains psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on the mindset of the modern postgrad. “They expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,]… a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]… and something that provides a satisfying fit with their assessment of their talents.”

At the time, I had recently started a blog called Study Hacks,

I disagree. The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follo

“Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.

become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, “so good that they can’t ignore you.”

“On the Surprising Science of Motivation,” author Daniel Pink,