You 2.0: The Passion Pill

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” The idea is that pursuing your passion will feel invigorating — almost magical. But passions can easily wane over time. This week, behavioral scientist Jon Jachimowicz looks at how to keep our passions alive, and how to channel old passions into new pursuits.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's a pattern in Hollywood stories about romance and passion. The lovers may face all kinds of obstacles, but the movies end on a high note. The couple kiss as the ball drops on New Year's Eve. They embrace on a beach at sunset. They celebrate at a wedding. The 1967 movie The Graduate does something a bit different. Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, gatecrashes the wedding of his soulmate, Elaine Robinson, played by Catherine Ross. He interrupts the ceremony and shouts "Elaine!" from the balcony of the church.

• 0:40Shankar Vedantam?

  After a moment of hesitation, Elaine shouts back and runs to him, rejecting her bridegroom and her parents' expectations. The two escape the church amidst chaos, with Elaine's family and the wedding guests trying to stop them. The young couple fight off the crowd using a large wooden cross, which Benjamin uses to block the church doors as they make their getaway. Elaine and Benjamin then board a city bus, sitting at the back together. As the bus drives away, they initially laugh, exhilarated by their daring escape. However, and this is where the movie veers from the Hollywood formula, their expressions slowly shift to a more subdued and ambiguous tone.

• 1:24Shankar Vedantam?

  The camera lingers on their faces as Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" plays in the background. Elaine and Benjamin seem to be asking, "What now?" Starting a love affair is one thing. Figuring out how to sustain their love is harder and will demand more skill and maturity. What is true in our personal relationships is also true in our professional lives. There comes a time when the things we once engaged in with pleasure and passion grow boring or unfulfilling. Today on the show, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at the signs of what makes passion fade.

• 2:08Shankar Vedantam?

  We'll focus on our work lives, but some of the lessons apply to our personal relationships, too. What we get wrong about deep engagement and how to keep our passions alive, this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:35Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:58Speaker 01

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• 3:29Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:02Shankar Vedantam?

  It's the oldest aphorism at college commencement ceremonies. Follow your passion. Find something you love, and your future will take care of itself. At Harvard Business School, behavioral scientist Jan Yehimovic studies how our passions change over time and how we can manage them long term. Jan Yehimovic, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me, Shankar.

• 4:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan, as a young man, you wanted to change the world. And I understand this drive was partly connected with your own family's story of migration and loss?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me back up a little bit. So both of my parents grew up in Warsaw, Poland, in the aftermath of World War II. And they were Jewish. In 1968, there was economic stagnation and crises that led to a student protest. In response, the Polish government led an antisemitic campaign.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Jews faced a lot of hostility. My father's mother, so my grandmother on my father's side, she worked at the University of Warsaw. And one day she walked into her office and she tried to open the door to her office with her key. And the key didn't work anymore. She asked the janitor what was going on. And the janitor said that her lock had been changed because she was no longer allowed to be there. And so in response to the discrimination and hostility, the vast majority of Jews ended up leaving Poland, including both of my parents and my extended family. They all left. Both of my parents ultimately settled in Germany. That's where my father ended up getting a job. And that's where they built a new life for us.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  And that's where I was born and raised.

• 5:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan says life was hard for immigrants in Germany. The family struggled and felt isolated. Social mobility was difficult.

• 6:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan found himself wishing the world was a fairer and kinder place.

• 6:07Shankar Vedantam?

  After he graduated high school, he stumbled on a book that seemed to speak to him directly.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  This book was Mountains Beyond Mountains. It was written by Tracy Kidder, who wrote a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer. Paul Farmer famously was a public health advocate who started Partners in Health, started off in Haiti and then scaled the organization all around the world. And the book, at the time, when I was 18, it transformed me. In the book, you see Tracy Kidder writing about Paul. Taking on these challenges that you think are impossible. Like, there's this story in the book of a boy who has a tumor on his face. And the boy lives in Haiti, and there's no one in Haiti that can perform that surgery.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  And the only way to perform that surgery would be to fly that that boy to Boston and and get him surgery there. Paul, at the time, was relatively early in his career, but he had this belief that he could make it happen. He could organize transport somehow for this boy to Boston. He would convince a team of surgeons somehow to take on this surgery, make sure that the boy's recovery works, and then fly him back. And it worked out. Like, that's the crazy thing is he had this belief. And I I walked away from that thinking like, wow, maybe I can do this too. Like, maybe this is what I want to do with my life.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  I want to pursue something that I am passionate about and and take that to the next step.

• 7:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Another lesson in the book was about the power of going all in. You know, no hesitations, no questions, full speed ahead. How did that strike you, Yann?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I mean, when I was 18, I loved it. You know, like, this is what I wanted to hear, that it's OK to to just go all in and that that will be rewarded. Like, to feel like you have that much conviction, that much belief in something, that you're willing to place everything on it. I mean, who doesn't want to feel that way? That's an amazing feeling to have, and I aspire to have that feeling as well.

• 8:33Shankar Vedantam?

  The book tells a story about a patient living in a remote area in Haiti, who was too ill to make the trip to Paul Farmer's clinic. So Paul Farmer goes to the patient. He has to hike four and a half hours each way to the patient. And the book asks why Paul Farmer left a busy clinic to treat one patient. And the doctor says, "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world." That's a powerfully idealistic vision, that no lives are dispensable, Yon.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  It showed me that you can have a deep belief and a deep value about what you think is right. And that, at the end of the day, you have to decide what you think is the right thing to do. And for Paul Farmer, the right thing to do was hiking four to five hours to see one patient, because that patient wouldn't otherwise be able to receive medical care.

• 9:25Shankar Vedantam?

  So Paul Farmer was often asked, if he felt depressed by all the injustice he saw in the world. And he would respond by saying, "There's no better insurance against depression than to actively fight injustice." How did that sentiment strike you, Yon?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  I was so excited about that, because I was feeling the weight of the world's problems on my shoulders. Like, I was seeing the challenges ahead of me, the challenges that I was facing in Germany, the challenges that I was learning about as a young man. And it's hard not to get discouraged. I mean, you know, you look at the news, and the only thing you see is, "This bad thing is happening, and this bad actor has done something." It's really hard to maintain a sense of optimism that, you know, change is possible, and in fact, that like, people can make a difference. And then to hear Paul Farmer say, "If you feel that way, the solution is to do something about it. And once you do something about it, you no longer feel that way."

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I felt really excited. It really enthralled me and it pulled me in. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know what exactly I would do, but I knew, at the time, this is what I wanted to do.

• 10:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan swallowed what he called the passion pill. After college, he went to Columbia University in New York to pursue graduate studies. He wanted to do research that would change public policy and change the world.

• 10:59Shankar Vedantam?

  After two or three years of very hard work, he came up with a paper about the power of social ties in Bangladesh. It showed that meaningful social connections could be an engine of upward mobility, the kind of upward mobility his own immigrant family had yearned for in Germany.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  This paper so very personally meaningful to me. I was so excited about getting it published. It had been a long slog to get to this, like a lot of many, many hours of work. And I was so excited to not only have something to show for my work, but to have something that was so meaningful to me, something that if I think about my family's story and if I think about what I wanted to accomplish with my life, it was so perfectly aligned.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  And I remember getting the acceptance email from the journal. You get like a very short email that says, you know, congratulations, like your paper has been accepted for publication. I was in Butler Library and I was crying. Like I was, I was just so overwhelmed with emotion. And then the immediate thought I had afterwards was now the difference making finally begins. I was waiting for the New York Times to call. I was waiting for the White House to call. I was waiting for policymakers around the world to get excited by this work. And I waited a day, I waited a week, I waited a month and nothing happened. I didn't hear from anybody, not a single interview request or media interview. And I started getting really upset.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  I was like, I did all of this work. I, I proved something, like, why isn't anybody listening? And I remembered I, I went to a senior faculty member in the department, Joel Brokner. And I shared with him how frustrated I was that, you know, I published this paper in this prestigious journal and nothing had changed. And he kind of laughed and he said, yeah, that's, that's what happens. Like, you know, that's very normal for academic research. Sometimes if you build a body of research and you're lucky, somebody might listen, but you can't expect a single paper to change the world. I kind of walked out of there. Really down? You know, I had a hard time making sense of what that meant for me and a hard time making sense of what to do with that information.

• 13:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering what your mental state was at this time, Jan. You had come to New York with these very high expectations. You dread Paul Farmer. You'd wanted to change the world. And you've been through three years of this process that in some ways had ground you down. How were you feeling at this point?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I was feeling really low. I had a hard time to motivate myself to do more. Like, I would stare at my computer screen in my cubicle, and I just would ask myself, what the heck I'm doing? I could see the words on the screen, and I could like read whatever I was supposed to be reading, but it wasn't registering in my mind. It wasn't lighting me up the way that it used to. Like, I remember sitting in that very same spot, looking at the very same monitor like weeks, months, and years earlier, and reading things or working on things, writing things, analyzing data, and feeling so fired up on the inside. And here I was, sitting in the same chair, doing the same things.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  And that feeling wasn't there anymore. Like, it was really discombobulating. Like, I just, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had sacrificed a lot to be there. I'd worked many long hours to do this. But I started questioning like what it's all worth and what it's all for.

• 14:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan's story didn't fit the soaring language of graduation speeches or the sunny promises of inspirational posters. Visionaries tell us that the important thing is to find our passion. Once we identify what we're meant to do, everything is supposed to get easier. But in Jan's experience, this just wasn't so.

• 15:02Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, why pursuing our passions often doesn't work out the way we imagine and what to do about it? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:27Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:01Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:45Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:58Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Follow your dreams. Do what you're passionate about. March to your own drummer. Many people nowadays say they don't just want to work at a job. They want a passion, a calling.

• 17:16Shankar Vedantam?

  At Harvard Business School, behavioral scientist Jan Yehimovic studies what happens in the real world when people pursue their passions. What he has found challenges the conventional narrative we often hear. Jan, having seen how you struggle to maintain enthusiasm for your work, you decided to create a personal passion project. You were living in New York, a place where people come from all over the world to follow their dreams. And you reached out to lots of people you knew and you asked them a simple question. What was this question?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  So I asked everybody that I knew, all my friends and acquaintances. And I said, who's the most passionate person that you know? Can you put me in touch with them? I want to talk to them. And over the next two years, I ended up talking to over 200 people from all walks of life. I talked to athletes, musicians and artists. I talked to entrepreneurs, people in business, from CEOs to entry level. People had all types of backgrounds. And the question that I asked them was, have you ever fallen out of passion? And what's that like? And what did you do since to regain it? Because I wanted advice for me. Like, I was the person that I wanted to treat. I was the patient of my own research.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  And it was just such a learning experience for me that what I ended up hearing again and again ended up changing the trajectory of my career.

• 18:40Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the people you interviewed was a former Canadian tennis player who hit a wall when she was just 23. Tell me her story, Jan.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  So I read this article in the New York Times about Alexandra Wajniak. She had publicly come out that a few years earlier, as she was hitting a career high, she was ranked number 21 in the world. And she then disappeared from the tennis landscape for a few years. And people didn't really know why at the time. But a couple of years later, she came back and she said, look, I was actually experiencing burnout. I was actually having a really hard time to keep going. And I ended up talking to her. And I had asked her, what did you learn in that time period? Like, how do you explain what happened to you when you were 23, when you were, you know, at the top of the world, ranked 21st in the world? She had beat Serena Williams? Like,

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Think about that, like that's just such an accomplishment. And what I what I heard from her was a couple of things. The first thing that I heard is it was really difficult because tennis no longer brought her joy. Like when she was younger and she first entered tennis, there was a different feeling around tennis. But once she became successful, playing a game was no longer about just being good at tennis. Playing the game was now about success, about winning money, about earnings, about competition. You know, she had a reputation to uphold. In Canada, there were a lot of expectations about all that she would be able to accomplish.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  There was a lot to bear on her shoulders and it wasn't what she had signed up for. And it wasn't something that she was adequately prepared for. The other thing is that it ended up becoming a job. Like, you know, it's fine for us to say you should follow what you're passionate about or you should turn your passions into your career. But when you turn something that you're passionate about into a job, now that's a source of income for us, now that's a source of status. Like now that it becomes, what do I do day to day? Like, how do I keep this going?

• 20:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So she was not the only one who told you that she entered the world of tennis with passion, with love, and then in some ways had fallen out of love with tennis, just like you had fallen in some ways out of love with what you were doing. You heard this as a common refrain from many of the people you talked with.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Almost every single person, when I asked them the question, have you ever fallen out of passion? And if yes, like what happened? They had a story locked and loaded. Like they were ready to tell me about a time when they hit emotional rock bottom, when they were close to quitting, where, you know, they had many friends who were doing the same things, who actually ended up quitting. Every single person that I talked to who had experienced this falling out of passion, at the moment it happened, was incredibly confused, disheartened and deeply frustrated.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Like, they didn't know what was going on because from their perspective, they'd done all the right things. They had figured out what it is that they were passionate about. They had then found a career where they could pursue it. And then, like Paula Farmer, they went all in. They did it. And they did it not just for a day or a month, they did it for years. And that wasn't enough. Like, that wasn't enough to stave off this falling out of passion. And because they invested so much of themselves and because it mattered so much to them, when they fell out of passion, it was deeply painful.

• 22:23Shankar Vedantam?

  So you decided that you would start to study passion itself, how it changes, how it fades, what we can do about it. One thing you observed is that just because you're doing something you love, that doesn't mean that your days are going to be easy or enjoyable. In fact, things might be harder. Why is that, Yeh?

• 22:39Speaker 02

  I think there's a number of different challenges that are going on here. The first is that some of the things that we have to do when we pursue our passion, they're not all that glamorous and they're not all that passion evoking, right? Like, when you're doing research, 99% of the time, you spend by yourself looking at a computer screen. You don't really have aha breakthroughs every single day that that fill your cup. The same is true when you're an athlete. Like, it's great when you're out there on the pitch and you get to win a game or be in an amazing position. But often, you're behind the scenes, you're weightlifting, you're stretching, you're honing in on how to make your game better.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  That can be really difficult to maintain, particularly over longer timeframes. There's also a broader challenge when you haven't had a successful outcome in a while. It's really difficult to keep going when you don't feel like you're making a lot of progress. Like, when you're trying to pursue your passion and the only sign that you see in the world is that you're being unsuccessful in doing that, it's difficult to maintain a belief that you are able to do it, particularly when you care so deeply about it.

• 23:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan tells the story of entrepreneur Brooke Boyarsky Pratt. She left a safe and lucrative job to start her own company. It focused on reducing stigma around weight issues, something that was deeply meaningful to her because she had experienced the stigma herself. She was fired up about running her own shop, but also found herself up at all hours of the night.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  It was really difficult for her. She went from working 40 to 50 hours a week to working 90, 100-hour weeks. I should say that at the time, she had just given birth to her first child. So she was expanding her family and it was very emotionally challenging. Like, she was no longer working on a particular narrow set of tasks. She was doing everything in the organization. Every task fell to her because she was the CEO and co-founder. She was building a team. She was raising money. She had to provide proof of concept that this weight-inclusive stuff would work. And it was really weird for her because suddenly she was responsible for everything. Like, what she was doing was no longer whether she was good at her job, but it was a ruling on who she is as a person.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Right? Like, this career that she had chosen was now a reflection of her identity. And add on top of that, like, what is progress here? Like, what does success look like? She's working on this, and, you know, the whole time, she has to ask herself, like, when am I ever going to be happy? Like, when is it really that I feel like I have made a difference? We're really fortunate. We taught this a few months ago in the classroom, and we invited Brooke to come in and do a Q and A with the students. And one of our students asked her, "So now that you've quit your job to pursue your passion, are you happier?" And she kind of stood there, and she was thinking about this for a while. And she said, "You know, most days it doesn't feel that way." And then the follow-up question

• 25:44Speaker 02

  from the same student was, "So do you regret doing this?" And she said, "Absolutely not." Like, she had a clear answer. She knew that it was important to her that she had done this. It was challenging because many of the things she ended up working on weren't all that glamorous. The emotional roller coaster, the ups and downs of success and failure, progress, lack of progress, took a major toll on her. And it was just really hard, like, the amount of work and effort that it took.

• 26:13Shankar Vedantam?

  So you were born and raised in Germany. Your parents are Polish. I understand there are words and concepts in these cultures that speak to this tension that we're discussing here, Jan.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  We all know that Germans have the best words for everything. So I think there's this German word that I think needs to be part of the English vocabulary. So here's my pitch. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft. Linguists will disagree with me, and this is a very liberal interpretation of the word. But the word light from Leidenschaft comes from suffering. And schafft comes from ability. And so a very liberal translation of the word Leidenschaft is the ability to endure hardship. It's a very different way of thinking about passion. It maybe tells you a lot about German culture and why Germany is the way that it is. But it's in stark contrast to the American way of thinking about passion.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  You know, like if you do what you love, you never have to work another day in your life. This idea that if you pursue your passion, it feels magical, it feels easy. And the implication being if it doesn't feel easy, then it cannot be passion. All the research tells us that that's so misleading. The German way of thinking about it, you know, the ability to endure hardship. I think it's an important counterpoint because I think it captures a large part of the experience that we often miss. When you're passionate about something, the day to day can be really challenging. The day to day can make you feel upset, can make you feel bored. It can make you feel like you have to go through all the pain. But you do it anyway. And you do it because you believe in it.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  You believe that there is worth in doing it despite the suffering that you have to go through. In Polish, there is one translation for passion that is called Cierpienie, which literally means suffering. So in Polish, there isn't even any striving. In Polish, you just suffer. That comes from more Christian traditions of the passion of Christ, of really just suffering. So you're suffering not necessarily just because you believe in it, but you're suffering as a form of sacrifice.

• 28:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So many of us believe that the more we love what we do, the better we are going to be at doing it. In other words, we believe there's a linear relationship between passion and performance. You've studied this question, Jan. Is the connection between passion and performance as straightforward as many of us imagine?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  It is and it isn't. So we collected data from over 600 employees. And we asked them what generally their orientation was toward their work, whether work was something that generally they went into because they're passionate about it, or whether work is something that they went into because for them it's a career or it's a job, meaning it's not something that they're passionate about, but it still fulfills an important role in their life. In addition to that, ritually speaking, people who view their work as a passion, they perform better at their job. And the mechanisms are exactly along the lines of what you might expect. They were more invested in their work. They were more willing to work longer hours. And that led them to perform better on average.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  When you look at what happens day to day, what we found was that when people were much more passionate than usual, so when they were feeling particularly fired up, they actually ended up performing worse. What that means is that when they were really, really passionate on any particular day, they were really excited about something, they were also kind of nervous and hesitant. They felt ambivalent. They were worried that they would be unable to live up to the really high expectations that they had. These worries started steering them away from performing well. So what we find in this work is that there is such a thing as too much passion. You can feel too passionate for your work, and that can be really challenging, and it can make you perform worse.

• 30:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Talk about the idea that passions can sometimes cross the line into unhealthy obsessions. You and others have studied this idea, Jan.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So this notion of passion as being harmonious or obsessive was first introduced by Bob Valerant. His idea was that passions can come in one or two different ways, that passion can be something that I have some degree of control over, that I can regulate it to some extent. I can choose whether I engage in something I am passionate about. I can choose when to stop, stop engaging in it, stop thinking about it. Or that my passion becomes obsessive, meaning that my passion ends up controlling me, such that I can't stop how much I'm engaging in something, that my passion just ends up carrying me places.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  You know, you're up late at night obsessing over what it is that you're passionate about. You're not getting enough sleep because of it. And that can be really difficult.

• 31:12Shankar Vedantam?

  There's a tension here, Jan. You mentioned that beautiful German word Leidenschaft, which is in some ways the ability to tolerate hardship, right? That that's what passion is. It's the ability to tolerate hardship, perhaps over long periods of time. And you can see how easily and seamlessly that can slip into someone saying, I can do without sleep, I can do without friends, I can do without taking a break or a vacation, because it's my ability to tolerate hardship. On the one hand, we all know that you can't accomplish anything without being willing to put in, you know, a lot of time and effort. But there is a time when that can seamlessly slip over into something that is deeply unhealthy.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I agree. I think the challenge here is that the line between persevering and obsessing can be really blurry at times, right? Like, what some people would describe as an amazing feat of perseverance, other people would call an obsessive person, right? Like, if I work on something for a really long time, despite the world telling me that I shouldn't be doing this, and I end up being successful, we celebrate that. Look at the fortitude this person had. And so we always are smarter in hindsight, right? Like, that's, I think, the challenge, is that in the moment, we ourselves, you have to learn over time how to calibrate and make these decisions.

• 32:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Pursuing a passion can be more complicated and more difficult than we initially imagine. Discovering what we love is only the first step. The task of keeping ardor alive and balancing our passions with the rest of our lives is much harder. When we come back, better ways to engage and feed our passions. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 33:11Speaker 03

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• 34:39Speaker 05

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• 35:07Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Most people who have been successfully married for a long time will tell you that their relationships have changed dramatically over time. Just because you're in love with the same person for a long time doesn't mean your reasons to be in love are the same reasons you had at the start of the affair. At Harvard Business School, behavioral scientist Jan Yehimovic has found that passion in the workplace works the same way. If you want to remain passionate about what you do, you might need to keep reinventing what you do. Jan, in your survey of passionate people, one story stood out to you, the story of a chef who was deeply passionate about food. Tell me that story, Jan.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  So I met this chef, and I asked him what he's passionate about. And this chef just loved cooking. Like, you could feel his passion was palpable when he sat across from me. And he described this phase in his career that happened about two years ago. He had worked at a high-end kitchen in New York, and for all external markers, had reached all of the success that you can imagine. He was advancing in his career. He was finally in a position where, as a chef who was passionate about food, like, that's where you want to be. But he wasn't feeling that passion anymore. And he had a really hard time making sense of it. He took a more radical step than some of the other people that I talked to. He decided to quit his job and go away for a while.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  So he left New York. He went traveling through Central and Latin America. And two things happened on the trip. The first thing is that he took his camera with him, and he ended up taking a lot of pictures. And he realized that he actually also loves taking pictures. The second thing is when he looked through the pictures that he was taking, what he was taking pictures of was of connection, like, of people, of moments of joy when they were connecting with other people. And so what he started realizing for himself was that Maybe why he liked cooking, or initially why he got into being a chef, was because he was passionate about making food for people, for people to share, for people to connect over,

• 37:19Speaker 02

  for people to see themselves reflected in the food, or have a moment where they feel like this is food that they used to eat, or that's something that brings memories to mind for them, a smell, a taste. And so he ended up coming back from this trip and realizing this high-end restaurant life didn't actually allow him to pursue his passion. That was the common path that people took who are passionate for cooking and passionate about food. But that wasn't the path that would make him happy. And instead, when I ended up talking to him, he was working at, you know, still a nice restaurant, but that restaurant wasn't focused with excellence, wasn't focused on design, didn't have the same push to perfection as the high-end restaurants.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Like, that wasn't the purpose of that restaurant. That wasn't why people were doing what they were doing. That wasn't what he was pushed to do there. Instead, he worked at a restaurant where people cooked and were working because they wanted to provide people with an experience where they could connect over food. You know, the food was almost like the side dish, and the people were the main dish. Whereas if you go to a high-end restaurant, it's all about the food being the main dish and your experience of that food.

• 38:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Would you say that this is generally true of the pursuit of passion in workplace settings, Jan? Which is that for us to maintain our passion, we might need to be open to reinventing what we are passionate about?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  I think it's the most normal thing that we need to embrace. We ourselves change. The environment around us changes. And so if the way that we pursue our passion doesn't change, then over time, there will be a mismatch, right? Because we are changing and the environment is changing, we too have to be flexible in our approach. We need to be cognizant of the ways in which we are changing. And that includes how we pursue our passion.

• 39:10Shankar Vedantam?

  So we talked earlier about how passion is closely linked in our minds to perseverance, our ability to stick to difficult challenges. This seems to be in tension with the idea that we need to be open to changing what we do in order to remain passionate. You write about a woman named Elizabeth Rowe. Tell me her story and how this illustrates this tension, Jan.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think this is one of the core tensions of what it means to be passionate for what you do. You have a deep belief in something. At the same time, you have to be flexible in figuring out whether or not that still works for you, or whether who you are has changed enough for you to warrant a bigger life decision change. So Elizabeth Rowe was the principal flutist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She came into this position in the mid 2000s. And just to highlight, to be a principal flutist at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, that is like being at the top of your game. That's one of the most coveted jobs in the industry. And like she was really at the top, at the tippy top of her career.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  If you're pursuing your passion, if your passion is being a flutist, and you look at Elizabeth Rowe, you look at her and you say, wow, this is a person who's done it. And she's done it for many, many years. At the time, she was about 48 years old. This has been a 40-plus-year pursuit of passion in the making, culminating in this incredible leadership position at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But in the last couple of years, Elizabeth started sensing that maybe being in an orchestra wasn't all that she wanted to do with her life, that maybe there was another chapter that she wanted to explore. And to even have that thought as a principal flutist at the Boston Symphony Orchestra

• 40:59Speaker 02

  is unheard of. Like, these are positions that people don't quit. These positions are available maybe once every five, every 10 years in the industry. This isn't something that people usually do. But she had that thought in her mind. What if I stopped playing music? What else would I be doing with my life? What are parts of me that I think I would like to live out? What are something that I want to be doing if I weren't be doing music?

• 41:31Speaker 02

  And so, hesitantly at first, she started experimenting on the side with coaching. She'd always enjoyed coaching and she started with teaching people who were early in their career, young musicians, and figuring out their challenges. And she'd done this her whole career, but now she started doing a little bit more of this. The COVID pandemic hit, so Elizabeth started asking herself, what if I became a coach for six months? And the Boston Symphony Orchestra came back and she still had this idea in her mind. What if I did this full time? And what if I didn't just do this for young musicians? What if I did this for people all over? Like, I have a lot of skills. I've been leading

• 42:14Speaker 02

  a high-performance, high-stress position for more than 20 years now. I've learned a lot about what it means to perform that I could help people with, that I could teach people what to do. People who are not just musicians, but athletes, and people in leadership positions who are similarly in some way onstage and have to deliver and have to perform, and I could help them do this, and maybe that might affirm a different part of me. And so, in 2022, she took a sabbatical. She took a year off from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and jumped headfirst into becoming a leadership coach. And what she discovered throughout that year of experimenting is that this is what she wanted to do with

• 42:59Speaker 02

  the rest of her life, that being a musician was fun, it had fulfilled her, and it had run its course, and that it was time for the next chapter in her career. And in August 2024, while the Boston Symphony Orchestra was at Tanglewood, which is the big outdoor performance, she gave her very last concert. She was on there, on the stage, playing the flute as part of the orchestra. She soaked it all in, you know, the 3,000 people applauding her. And this was the last time that she would ever stand on a stage like this again. Like, just think about that. This is all that she has known her whole life. This has been her whole identity and yet she talks about this metaphor that has since been really powerful to me.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  She talks about the trapeze instrument in gymnastics. You know, when you're like, you're swinging and you're holding on to one bar. That can be fun, but to proceed, there's a moment where you swing and you have to let go in order to hold on to the next one. But there's this moment between letting go of one thing and holding on to the other thing. When you're in the air and you kind of don't really have a lot of control anymore because you're in motion. And you hope that you're going to catch it. But that's the only way to get there is to let go and to let that in. It takes a huge amount of courage to do that, to let go of something that you are so good at, to be at the top of it. But for her is what was required in order to feel fulfilled.

• 44:29Shankar Vedantam?

  You mentioned the word courage and I want to add the idea of sunk costs. You know, she had spent at this point 40 years preparing and perfecting a career and perfecting her ability to play the flute. To walk away from that feels like, almost like betrayal, like you're giving up a part of yourself. And she must have had doubts, asking, you know, am I being true to the person I was for half my life? You know, to get up and do this other thing, what if I don't like it day after tomorrow?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  She had a lot of doubts and to say that she did this without any doubt would be a misrepresentation. I think that what it means to me to have courage is to say, I think I've made the right decision. Even though I'm not fully sure whether it's going to work out the way that it did. She can't go back to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That door is closed, right? Like, that's just not how this industry works. But that's why this time period of experimentation was so helpful for her. When she was on sabbatical for a year, she didn't play the flute at all. She locked it up, put it in a box, stowed it away in a cupboard. And she wanted to realize, like, would this be something that I miss? And she realized, like, I'm a perfectly capable human being.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  And I am someone, even when I am not a flute player, I have value. The other way that she was able to make this transition is to realize. Yes, there's 40 years of sunk cost of me having learned this instrument, but I've also invested for 40 years on a particular set of skills that can be really helpful to do something else.

• 46:07Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the things you've observed, Jan, is that sometimes in order to keep passion alive, we need to look for aspects of jobs that we care about. Sometimes the things that really lift us up are not in our literal job descriptions. This was the case for your own mother. Her life took a new direction when she found herself laid off. What happened?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  My mother worked as a secretary and during the financial crisis, lost her job in 2008, 2009. She was offered retraining and so took retraining for another profession, trying to find another office job that required new software skills that would hopefully make her more appealing to a broader audience of different organizations. But she was unable to find a job. Everywhere where she applied, she wasn't taken. At that time, she was in her 50s. She really wanted to work and she was getting really frustrated not having a job. And so after more than a year of trying to get another job, retraining, not getting another job,

• 47:11Speaker 02

  she recalls this moment when she was walking on the way to the retraining school where she was going and she was walking past this retirement home and she heard the women inside that were working in the kitchen singing. And to her mind, it was weird because she thought, wait, they're working in the kitchen. That's not a particularly glamorous and fun job. They seem really happy over there. I wonder what's going on. And so the next day, she took her CV and she went into the retirement home. And she said, you know, do you have, do you have a job available? I would love to work. I'd love to see what this is like. And so she ended up taking a job as a member of the cleaning staff in this retirement home.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  You know, and you would think on its surface, it's not necessarily a job that, you know, is very fulfilling. Like what you do day to day, that's, that doesn't bring you a lot of passion. This actually ended up being the job what my mom would describe as like the most passionate job that she ever had. And she held on to it until she ended up retiring a few years ago. At the time when my mother took this job, she had been in the country, she'd been in Germany for almost thirty years. She had a lot of experience and expertise of what it's like to be an immigrant in Germany, how to deal with the authorities, how to figure out how to integrate into this society that at the same time was so foreign and had also become a home for her.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And a lot of the people that worked there were immigrants who were younger than her and who had come to the country a lot more recently than she had. And so she was able to take on a role of advising them about how to navigate this place, how to figure out which authorities to go to, how to make sense of cultural mismatches and clashes that were difficult to explain. She ended up driving one of her colleagues to work because this person was worried about driving in Germany because the drivers in Germany were so intense. She had a hard time figuring out how to drive on these streets. And it was such a fulfilling place for my mother. And it really taught me, you know, there's jobs that on the, that where the tasks that

• 49:15Speaker 02

  you get to do on its surface feel like they're very fulfilling and very meaningful and that what you do is very passion evoking. And then there's jobs like this one where my mother was a member of the cleaning staff and ostensibly, you know, we would look at it from a societal perspective and say, surely people aren't passionate in this job. But this was the job that my mom was the most passionate about in her whole career.

• 49:39Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you had a startling moment of reevaluation when you went back and reread that book that had so inspired you as a young man. This is Mountains Beyond Mountains about Paul Farmer. When you went back and read the book, what did you notice about Paul Farmer's life this time around, Jan?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  When I was younger and I read it for the first time, I was so focused on what he was doing, the difference that he was making, all the amazing things that he was accomplishing. I wasn't paying attention to all the things that he wasn't describing or all the things that he wasn't doing. Like Paul Farmer, for all the amazing accomplishments that he has had. He wasn't happy. You know, it wasn't like he would ever sit back and say, "Look at all the amazing things I have accomplished. I have changed the way that we think about public health, particularly in low-income countries, changed the way that we think about tuberculosis care." Like, so many things where you see the impact that his organization and his work have had. Instead, like, what you see in this book

• 50:40Speaker 02

  that Tracy Kutter wrote is that no matter what Farmer ended up doing, there was always this belief that he had, "There's always more than I can do."

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Like, I'm always and perpetually dissatisfied because I'm always falling short of the aspiration that I have. And it's something that I think I've internalized now that I've been doing this for a little bit and I've seen this in a lot of people that I've spoken with. When you pursue what you're passionate about, I think that's just part of what it means.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  And I don't think this is something that I personally will ever be able to resolve. And more and more, I've come to understand that perhaps not resolving it is what keeps the passion alive. Because by not resolving it, you have to continue finding new solutions, new ways of tackling it, new ways that you're trying to figure it out. But ultimately, you have to find comfort in the fact that maybe you will never be able to resolve it and part of you is always going to be unhappy and dissatisfied.

• 51:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Jan Yehimovitch is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. Jan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Shankar.

• 52:16Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're feeling burned out or lackluster at work, Jan has a set of questions he suggests you should ask yourself. In our companion story exclusively on Hidden Brain Plus, Jan shares those questions with you and also explains the subtle but crucial distinction between asking what we care about and asking what we love. Turns out, one of them is a much better predictor of long-term passion. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled "How to Stop Feeling Burned Out." If you're not yet subscribed, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 53:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Do you have follow-up questions for Jan Yimovitch about identifying and following your passions? If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "passion." That email address again is [email protected].

• 53:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Finally, Hidden Brain is turning 10 this year, and to celebrate, I'm crisscrossing the country for a series of live shows. I'll share seven key insights from the first decade of the show. To see if I'm coming to a city near you, please visit hiddenbrain.org/tour.

• 54:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 54:13Speaker 06

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