The passion trap: The misguided advice that limits creativity and drives burnout

The flame of passion becomes obvious to those who work closely with passionate people. When employees notice a founders’ passion, they themselves are more enthusiastic and energized at work and have greater clarity about their responsibilities and goals. And this passion pays. Founders who are passionate about developing organizations — who are excited about finding the right people to work for a business, persuading investors, and pushing employees and themselves to grow and improve the company — become more committed to their goals, and this, in turn, boosts venture performance measured in terms of employee and sales growth.

Passion invigorates us and gives us an extra boost of energy when the going gets tough on creative work. This fact is often translated into advice (or a directive!) to find your passion. Such advice seems reasonable; if we aspire to creativity, and passion helps it, then we have to find and follow our passion. Right?

The problem is that the idea of finding our passion implies that it is already there, part of us, although perhaps dormant so that we are not aware of what exactly it might be. Passion is assumed to be akin to a fixed trait. When we aim to discover our passion, we are made to think that this trait will get awakened.

How we think about passion matters, and this view of passion as a trait has rather unhelpful consequences. Researchers at Stanford University found that thinking of passion as something dormant to be found within us tends to narrow our interests. Those who viewed passion as a trait and were passionate about technology and science were not interested in learning about topics in humanities and the arts and thought there were few connections between the two. The same was true of those who viewed passion as a trait and were passionate about the arts and humanities; they were less interested in learning about technology and science and saw them as unrelated to their own interests.

But creativity benefits from broad interests. Indeed, Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences are almost three times as likely as members of the general public to have arts and crafts hobbies, such as visual arts, music, woodworking, glassblowing, or performing arts. The narrowing of interests in those who see passion as a fixed trait ends up limiting creativity.

Those who view passion as a trait also tend to expect they will have unfaltering and boundless motivation for their work. They do not realize that pursuing a passion is not always fun or smooth. Relatedly, when they experience difficulty, their interest is likely to diminish.

Rather than urging people to discover their passion, we should inspire them to develop a passion.

I started my career as a creativity scholar passionate about basic scientific research. Only after I received a grant to create programs that teach creativity and emotion skills and saw their impact did I develop a passion for using the lessons of creativity science to develop people’s capacities to make creativity happen.

Steve Jobs was already passionate about electronics when he dropped out of Reed College after his first semester. Curious after seeing an ad on campus, he decided to take a calligraphy class. He learned about typefaces and about spacing between different combinations of letters. And he became passionate about the historical and aesthetic subtlety he learned. In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, he recalled that at the time he did not foresee any application of this knowledge. Yet, when he and Steve Wozniak started Apple, he poured what he learned into the personal computers they designed. And we have to thank Jobs’s openness to developing new passions for the wealth of fonts available on our computers today.

What this research means is that you do not have to put pressure on yourself, on those you supervise, or on your children to find a passion. Rather, we can develop passions by following our interests and seeing where they lead. Approach them with a “Why not?” attitude.

Curious about AI prompt engineering? Take that webinar. A relative has invited you to go bird watching? Even if you have never thought of doing such a thing before, try it. You are not limited to a single passion in life, and inspiration can come from the most unexpected of places. Unlike what all that “find your passion” advice implies, you can develop various passions at different times in your life. Or you can develop multiple passions simultaneously, as is the case with creative polymaths from Leonardo da Vinci (painter and draughtsman, scientist and engineer) to Benjamin Franklin (diplomat and statesman, writer and printer, scientist and inventor), from Brian May (Queen guitarist and accomplished astrophysicist) to Jaylen Brown (creative basketball player for the Boston Celtics, social justice leader, and education advocate). If you do so, you are not diminishing any particular passion but enriching them all, just as Steve Jobs did in bringing his love of typefaces to Apple.

One final cautionary note about passion: It might seem counterintuitive, but it is possible to have too much passion. Robert Vallerand at the University of Quebec showed that passion can turn into obsession. Such obsessive passion means that the urge for an activity is so strong that people cannot help themselves from doing it, they have difficulty imagining life without the activity, they are emotionally dependent on it, and their mood is based on their ability to do it.

When you become obsessively passionate about something, you can still perform at a high level. But it comes at a price to physical and mental health. The nonstop activity fueled by obsessive passion — after hours, on weekends, during vacations — can lead to greater conflict and burnout, which in the long run hurts the creative performance that it once fueled. There might be times that require a certain level of obsession in creative work, such as when you’re about to launch a product or finish a book or get a project over the finish line. To prevent the dark side of passion from taking over, you will have to balance these times of furious activity with calmer times. Downtime refills the creative well.