The common advice to ‘find your passion’ when looking for a new career, hobby or interest could be misplaced.
Passions need to be sought out rather than just stumbled upon, research suggests.
Being open to all possibilities and taking an interest in everything that comes your way could lead to a new hobby, passion or even career.
The common advice to ‘find your passion’ when looking for a new career, hobby or interest could be misplaced.
It suggests that passions are there just waiting to be discovered.
This ‘fixed mindset’ encourages people to concentrate on their existing interests.
Instead, adopting a growth mindset helps people open up to new areas of interest.
It can also make them more likely to stick at those interests despite difficulties along the way, psychologists have found.
The study’s authors write:
“A growth theory, by contrast, leads people to express greater interest in new areas, to anticipate that pursuing interests will sometimes be challenging, and to maintain greater interest when challenges arise.”
The conclusion comes from a study in which people were encouraged to read an article that either coincided with their interests or not.
People who had a fixed mindset didn’t pay much attention to the article that was outside their interests.
However, people with a growth mindset got into the article, even though it wasn’t their usual thing.
Other tests in the same study also suggested that having a growth mindset would encouraged people to push on through barriers.
Moral of the story: take an interest in everything, you might be surprised where a new passion can come from.
Dr Paul A O’Keefe, the study’s first author, said:
“Encouraging people to develop their passion can not only promote a growth theory, but also suggests that it is an active process, not passive.
A hidden positive implication of a growth theory is the expectation that pursuing one’s interests and passions will be difficult at times because people are less likely to give up on them when faced with a challenge.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (O’Keefe et al., 2018).
