You can’t fake passion over the long term. You can pretend to be interested in something for a little while, but ultimately your motivation will wane and your curiosity will take you in a different direction. Am I suggesting that one should simply follow their passion? It’s more complicated than that.
I think passions are quite ephemeral. Over the course of a year, I might become interested—and eventually lose interest—in lots of different things. That’s okay, trying things is fun! It’s how I figure out what I’m into. It’s also helped me understand how I learn and what things I want to get better at.
I see it as a positive feedback loop:
- Do the thing
- Get incrementally better at it
- Experience the joy of getting better
- Repeat steps 1 through 3
Focusing excessively on passion is short-term thinking.
When deciding whether to pursue a product idea, for example, I find it helpful to imagine what things might look like five years into the future, well after the sheen has worn off.
- What will I have learned?
- Will the challenges be bigger and more nuanced?
- Will I get to collaborate with people outside of the idea space, thus opening me up to new interests?
While it’s not terribly hard to be starry-eyed about the future too, I find that thinking on a longer timespan forces me to do an internal gut check: can I even see myself working on this for a year, let alone five years??
Truth is, I’ve fallen into the trap many times myself. I’ll get way too excited by an idea and research it like a madman, only to abandon it weeks later. What’s worse is sometimes my mind confuses someone else’s passion for my own. Anyone who’s watched The Queen’s Gambit knows what it feels like to want to be a chess Grand Master. For us mere mortals, reaching GM status would require thousands of hours of intentional study, gameplay and practice. In five years, would I still want to sit down at the chess board to study the weak parts of my game?
That’s what it takes to be great: working intelligently and consistently over a long stretch of time. Passion might get you started, but you’ll need a positive feedback loop to keep going.