I’ve written about the importance of having a passion and purpose in life, whether for your health, your productivity or general wellbeing.  Finding it is often far from easy however, and new research from Stanford University suggests that being told to find it can actually inhibit your attempts to do so.

The study suggests that exhortations to find our passion often make not only finding it easy, but also living it.  This makes it difficult to sustain interest when we encounter the inevitable obstacles that get in the way of truly living our dream.  What’s more, it can also limit out vision by suckering us into believing that passions are found fully formed rather than one of many interests we may have.

The researchers examined the issue through the fixed/growth mindsets popularized by Carol Dweck.  What impact does our mindset have on how we perceive interests?  Are they fixed qualities that are inherently there, waiting to be discovered, or ones that take time and effort to develop?

How passions develop

The researchers conducted five experiments on nearly 500 volunteers.  In one experiment, volunteers were from either tech disciplines or humanities.  The study found that those students with a fixed mindset were less open to interests outside of their subject area.

It’s a problem that the researchers believe could not only be problematic in helping us find and develop our interests, but also in developing innovations that often involve recombining ideas from various fields.

“Many advances in sciences and business happen when people bring different fields together, when people see novel connections between fields that maybe hadn’t been seen before,” they explain.  “If you are overly narrow and committed to one area, that could prevent you from developing interests and expertise that you need to do that bridging work.”

A fixed mindset also appeared to inhibit people in other ways.  In another experiment, volunteers were shown an engaging video about the origin of the universe, followed by a difficult scientific article on the topic.  The researchers noticed that enthusiasm dropped across the board, but most significantly in those with a fixed mindset.  In other words, they believe such a mindset can result in discouragement when things get tough.

“Difficulty may have signaled that it was not their interest after all,” the researchers say. “Taken together, those endorsing a growth theory may have more realistic beliefs about the pursuit of interests, which may help them sustain engagement as material becomes more complex and challenging.”

A more productive approach might be to look at passions as something that can be developed rather than fall into our laps.

“If you look at something and think, ‘that seems interesting, that could be an area I could make a contribution in,’ you then invest yourself in it,” they explain. “You take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment.”