The seemingly well-intended advice to “find your passion” may carry hidden implications and result in negative consequences, according to a new study from Stanford University.

The research team — Paul O’Keefe, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and now an assistant professor of psychology at Yale Nus College in Singapore; Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology; and Gregory Walton, an associate professor of psychology — found that mantras like these undermine the way interests actually develop, and can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields or give up when faced with a challenge.

The research paper will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

What ‘find your passion” implies

The researchers wanted to understand how age-old statements like “find your passion” could affect an individual’s development of interests.

“We were concerned that mantras like ‘find your passion’ and ‘follow your passion’ were sending a potentially bad message to people,” said O’Keefe. “The first suggests that people have inborn interests that they simply need to find. The latter one suggests that a passion will do most of the work for you; that following your passion is passive process.”

This type of advice leads people to believe that passions are found fully formed, and that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy.

In their studies, however, the researchers found that this thought process can cause people to limit their scope of interest and give up on new passions when they encounter inevitable challenges.

“If one thinks that their interests and passions are inherent, then once they are found, there is little need to explore elsewhere. They might think, ‘I’m a math-person, so the arts or humanities won’t have anything of interest to me,’ ” said O’Keefe.

The study

To understand how people approach their talents and abilities, the researchers turned to Dweck’s prior research concerning fixed versus growth mindsets about intelligence.

Dweck’s research found that believing intelligence is “fixed” — that you either have it or you don’t — can cause people to be less capable of responding to challenges in school.  

To relate this idea to their study, the researchers set out to find if people view interests as fixed qualities that are inherently there, or as qualities that require time and effort to develop, and how that affects the way they pursue their “passions.”

They conducted a series of laboratory experiments involving 470 participants.

For the first study, the researchers recruited a group of students who identified either as a “techie” or a “fuzzy” — Stanford nicknames to describe students interested in STEM topics (techie) or the arts and humanities (fuzzy).

The researchers then had each of the students read two articles, one related to technology and the other related to the humanities.

They found that students who held a fixed mindset about their interests, meaning that they either identified as someone solely interested in tech or arts and humanities, were less open to reading the article outside of their interest.

In another experiment, the researchers engaged students by showing them an interesting video about black holes and the origin of the universe.

Most students were fascinated, but their excitement quickly dissipated when the researchers presented them with a challenging scientific article on the same topic.

The researchers found that this drop was most significant in students who exhibited a fixed mindset about their interests.

Developing passions

Overall, the researchers found that statements like “find your passion” can imply a fixed mindset when it comes to developing interests.

This can be harmful to people because it can cause them to give up on something difficult, or to fail to explore other options.

Having a “growth mindset” or a more open idea in regard to interests, however, can be beneficial in today’s interdisciplinary world, according to O’Keefe.

“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,” he said in a statement.

So, rather than saying “find your passion,” the researchers suggest that “develop your passion” is a more suitable advice.

“When we encourage people to develop their interests and passions, it suggests that it is an active process; one that requires effort, persistence, involvement, and commitment. This also suggests that interests and passions won’t always be easy to pursue,” said O’Keefe.

“Anticipating difficulties and setbacks is an adaptive way to pursue goals, and doing so can help you maintain your interests when they become challenging,” he continued.