Jan Jachimowicz

Absolutely.

I had really high expectations for what would happen next.

I had worked really hard on this paper.

In many ways, it was the culmination of my intellectual journey.

And I was so proud to finally see that paper in print.

I was hoping that after that paper would come into press that there would be media attention, that public policy workers would become really interested and excited about what we have found, and that perhaps some change would happen.

But as the days passed, the weeks passed, I heard nothing from nobody.

And that was really challenging for me to deal with.

I mean, looking back, I can say I was overly idealistic, perhaps even naive.

But back then I just remember feeling so shattered because what I had worked so hard for and what should have been a success or what I thought would be a success ultimately just felt so empty.

Nothing followed after that paper went online.

You don't even get the physical copy anymore.

It just appears on a website with your name on it.

And so I remember in the days and weeks afterwards asking myself, why am I doing this?

Like, what is it all for?

I thought I'm doing this research because it could eventually make a difference in the world.

And now I have done the hard part.

I've done the research bit, or that's what I thought.

And now the making a difference bit will be a lot easier.

And so it was challenging for me to then come back the next day and work on all the other research that I had to do.

I was working on other papers at the time.

Just because I'd finished one paper, it doesn't mean that other papers didn't need to be written on and didn't need to analyze data for.

But then showing up to my office the next day and coming back and trying to analyze data or write a paper when I knew this didn't really make a difference the last time.

Why would it be any different this time?

That was really, really challenging.

Yeah, so I think the key insight that I learned in that time was that passion isn't something that you have, but something that you have to sustain.

Meaning that passion, kind of like a delicate flower, you have to look after it.

You have to water it, you have to prune it, you have to make sure it gets enough sunlight.

It doesn't just grow and bloom beautifully by itself.

But when I was starting this project and really starting to think about my research on passion, I looked at passionate people as if they were different from me, as if there was something different about those people, that they were special, that they had something that I didn't have, and that as a result, I might never be as passionate as they would be.

Meaning, if I lost passion for something, the inference that I draw from that is that there's something wrong with me,

and that in turn I will never become someone like them.

But what I ended up actually learning is that almost everybody that I talked to had an experience of having fallen out of passion, of having to learn that passion is something that they have to maintain, and that there was a wide variety of practices that they had all learned for themselves because there was nothing really codified.

but strategies that they now engaged in on a regular basis that allowed them to sustain that passion day in and day out, as well as an acknowledgement, kind of an acceptance internally that it's okay if you don't feel that passion every single day.

That's a great question from Julio.

And I think there's two things really to tease apart there.

I think one is that in many jobs, the majority of the tasks that we work on aren't in and of themselves gratifying.

This is what research calls intrinsic motivation, that the task in and of itself is really gratifying, that we get a lot out of just doing the task in and of itself.

When I do research, the vast majority of my time is not really fun.

I write, I analyze data.

Doing this interview is one of the few times that it... This is actually inherently enjoyable, so thank you, Shankar, for that.

But the vast majority of time, it really isn't.

But there is a second reason that I think is really helpful.

There's research on what's called construal level theory.

Construal level theory suggests that we can think of a task at two different levels of analysis.

We can think of a task just in and of a task itself.

What is a task that I'm doing concretely?

What does it require from me?

What does this task help me accomplish?

Just by looking very narrowly at the task.

But at a more abstract level, if I were to zoom out, where does this task fit in with all the other things that I am working on, that my coworkers are working on, that the organization is trying to accomplish when I'm thinking of the broader mission of what we're trying to accomplish?

Andrew Carton and others have done research showing that when people see the broader vision of something and they're able to connect what they do day to day to the broader vision of what it is that they actually care about, that can also be a real source of meaningfulness.

But doing that connection can be really challenging and it's something that we often depend on other people like our leaders to do for us explicitly.

What do you make of Reem's question, Jan?

Yeah, that's a great question, Reem, and thank you for submitting that.

I think that there's a way of thinking about it that could be helpful for Reem and maybe for others who are struggling with that as well.

Is what you're working on a sprint or a marathon?

Because if it's a sprint, then it doesn't have to be sustainable.

It is totally fine if for a very short time period when you feel really passionate about something that you truly do give it your all and where perhaps life feels a little unbalanced, where the famous work-life balance doesn't exist and it fully tilts toward what it is that you're working on.

But I would argue that more often than not, for many of us, the things that we are passionate about are not like sprints, but they're more like marathons.

They're very long-term things that might take days, weeks, or even months and years to accomplish.

And for that, I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is not, how can I give my all today?

But what can I do today to make sure that I'm still as passionate tomorrow and the next day and the next day?

We find in one of our papers that on any given day, the more passionate people are, the longer they work, that's wonderful.

But on the next day, they are more emotionally exhausted and that makes it harder for them to actually muster that passion again because we require those emotional resources to feel and experience that passion.

day in day out.

So perhaps a little counter-intuitively, on our most passionate days we should be most careful in how much of ourselves we give and perhaps even take a step back.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So one component of burnout is a lack of self-efficacy.

A lack of self-efficacy means I don't really feel like what I'm doing today makes a difference anymore.

I don't think I have the skills necessary to do that.

I don't feel like I have any sense of control over what I'm doing.

And so it can feel really defeating when what I'm working on doesn't really seem like it's moving the needle anymore.

The prescription there is not really taking any time off, but trying to figure out, can I work on other things where I could make a difference?

Or do I need to figure out how I can develop a better skill set that would actually allow me to make a difference?

That's one of the components of burnout.

The second component of burnout is what I think people often think about when they think about burnout, which is emotional exhaustion.

that is when people feel like their emotional tank is empty.

They don't really have a lot in them anymore to feel a lot of emotions anymore.

And that can be both positive and negative affect.

So we might find it harder to feel joy, excitement, enthusiasm, but it can also be really difficult for us to feel a lot of the negative emotions that are important for us to experience because they are helpful signals of how we react to the external environment.

And typically the prescribed solutions for emotional exhaustion in the short term is something like a vacation, a break, having psychological detachment from your work.

And in the long term, a more sustainable relationship to your work, making sure that in between work days you have adequate time to recover or that if you have a particularly emotionally intense work day that you take some more time to recover and so on.

But there's a third source of burnout that I think often goes missing.

And that component is called cynicism.

That is when you no longer believe in what it is that you are doing.

And when you're feeling cynical, no vacation is going to fix that.

No amount of upskilling is going to fix that.

When you're feeling cynical, what you need is to feel inspired again.

You need to remind yourself, why am I doing this to begin with?

But it's really difficult to continue giving more of yourself when you're feeling cynical.

It's one of the hardest things to come back from.

And it's something that can creep in because we don't really recognize it.

until it can be too late.

And so when it comes to diagnosing ourselves, I think it's just really helpful to think about what am I experiencing right now?

Am I feeling emotionally exhausted?

Is my tank empty?

Do I need a break?

Or perhaps do I need to renegotiate a different relationship to my work so that it's more sustainable?

Am I experiencing a lack of self-efficacy?

Are the tasks that I'm working on not controllable enough for me?

I can't really accomplish the outcomes that I want.

Do I need to upskill so that I can actually do the work that I want to be doing?

Or am I feeling cynical?

Do I no longer believe in what it is that I'm trying to accomplish here?

And that's a very different kind of break and a very different way of addressing it.

I'm so glad Nancy brought that up.

It was the main criticism that my wife had after our episode as well.

And I didn't talk about the socioeconomic component.

The truth is that many professions that allow someone to pursue their passion do not pay well.

If we think about the canonical example, the artists, the chefs, the musicians, a lot of these professions don't pay well.

There's some evidence also that seems to suggest that people can be exploited for their passion.

Meaning that if you ask somebody, oh, there's this additional task that needs to be done at the office, who do you give that task to that you're more likely to give that to the passionate person because you think, oh, they'll do it for free.

And there's also research showing that when people care very deeply about something, that they are less likely to want to bring up money in a salary negotiation because they worry that if they bring up money, other people might doubt how deeply they care about that.

So all these things seem to suggest it can be really challenging to bring money into the mix.

The broader evidence, however, is inconclusive.

When you look at broad, large-scale correlational studies, the relationship between people who pursue work that they're deeply passionate about and their salary is sometimes flat, it's sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

There's one paper by Yuna Cho and Winnie Jung who suggests that one of the reasons why the relationship might actually be

positive is that other people respond so positively to people who are passionate for what they're doing.

I mentioned earlier research showing that people want to exploit others who are passionate.

But in the same breath, I should mention that there's a lot of work that has shown that when we see someone who's really passionate for what they do, we also admire them more.

We want to help and support them more.

So there's this underlying conundrum.

What does it actually mean and look like?

There is one more thing I want to add to Nancy.

And I'm really glad, Nancy, that you went back to grad school after 25 years of banking.

More often than not, I think that's a very rare story for the following reason.

People often underestimate how much they change in the future.

There's this really wonderful work by Daniel Gilbert and others, and they call it the end of history illusion.

We think that we're the most complete version of ourselves at this point in time, and that we have changed more in the past than we will change in the future.

Whereas when you look at the actual data, that's not true.

We actually change a lot more in the future than we might think.

And so I have a lot of students who come to my office and who report the very same thing that Nancy was telling me.

I'm 25 years old.

I have student debt.

I need to go into finance, consulting.

I need to make money.

I need to save for retirement.

And I'm very sympathetic to those arguments.

And I say, I understand you have those constraints.

That makes a lot of sense.

But the students then are very quick to add.

And later on,

when I'm in my 40s, in my 50s or 60s, then I'm gonna change and then I'm gonna pursue work that's really meaningful to me.

What they underestimate is that when they are in their 40s, 50s or 60s, who they are has fundamentally changed.

The people that they have surrounded themselves with for the last 20, 30 years of their career will be very different to who they were perhaps at that moment in time.

Their values will be impacted by that.

Their lifestyle has changed.

And then switching back actually becomes a lot more difficult and challenging.

So many of the conversations I've had with alums who are in their 50s and 60s who are telling me, I remember when I was in my 20s and I wanted to pursue what I was passionate about and I put it off.

What they tell me now is I wish I had started earlier.

I wish I had found a way, even if I couldn't do it in my work, I wish I had found a way

to continue developing that sense, to find ways to experiment and explore so that when I finally had the time to actually make that the main attention that I could focus on, that I knew what to do and how to do it.

I think that we have elevated the pursuit of passion to such a high moral level where we are a good person for pursuing our passion and vice versa.

We're seen as a morally bad person if we don't pursue our passion.

And I think that that is a wrong expectation to have.

At best, I think it's unhelpful.

And at worst, I think it actively makes the pursuit of passion more challenging for the people who enter that.

Let me explain why.

I think that when we tell people you should pursue your passion,

it becomes an imperative and a source of pressure that can make it difficult for people to actually explore how they want to go about pursuing their passion, when they might want to explore their passion.

And it implicitly denigrates other ways of finding meaning in their life.

Amy Wojcicki has this really wonderful distinction between meaning and meaningful.

work can have a meaning without in and of itself being meaningful.

I can think of my work as having a really important role in my life.

It can empower me to do other things.

It might allow me to support my family.

But in and of itself, that work might not necessarily be meaningful.

And we need to be careful, in my mind,

not to denigrate people who find that their work has meaning, but who in and of itself do not find their work to be meaningful.

Because the reality is that for many people, pursuing work that is meaningful is a luxury or something that they feel like they are not able to do at that point in time.

And I think we as a society need to embrace that that is a perfectly great justification to do what it is that we're doing.

I think we would do better by highlighting that for some people, given their life circumstances at some time points, it might actually be more meaningful if they focused on work that isn't in and of itself something that they're passionate about, but that might empower them either to pursue their passion later on in life or to pursue their passion outside of work.

which is an equally noble, or in my mind at least, an equally noble way of doing something that we deeply care about.

Absolutely.

I think part of the challenge is that when we moralize passion in that way, we also worry about how other people might think of us if we were to quit or give up on one passion pursuit.

The implication being, if I am a good person for pursuing a passion, then what must be wrong with me that I'm now giving up on that thing?

There must be something inherently morally wrong with me.

I must be a bad person

for choosing to give up on what it is that I'm passionate about.

Or at least that's the belief that people themselves have.

What we actually find in the research, together with Zach Berry and Brian Lucas, is that other people understand that sometimes you need to give up on one passion in order to pursue another, that that's just what life is like, that you don't give up on passion pursuit altogether.

But from that person's perspective who's pursuing a passion, they might really worry about

Are other people going to think of me as a lesser person because I've given up on that passion?

And we find that that worry can keep people in jobs that they perhaps initially were really passionate about or where the working conditions perhaps initially were a really good fit.

But where for whatever reason, it's no longer a fit where they're now having troubles and challenges maintaining that passion or they're incurring negative outcomes that can harm them in the long run.

But they keep on persevering because they worry so much about what other people will say if they were to give up.

Yeah, that's a great question.

And it sounds to me like what Reem is paying attention to here is how people talk about their work and how they talk about what they're passionate about.

I think what I really appreciate about what Reem is highlighting here is that what is okay to conceal and what is important to

reveal can vary from one cultural context to the next.

So in the UK it is more acceptable and perhaps even expected to be a little more self-deprecating and that is a more acceptable way to talk about one's work and perhaps even a more acceptable way to talk about oneself, to disclose some weaknesses or some challenges to round out one's narrative.

You don't want to be too full of yourself and come across as perhaps too arrogant in that context.

Whereas in Germany, the way that Reem is describing it, people are more hesitant in disclosing some weaknesses and challenges that they've experienced.

And instead, it sounds to me like that's a more like a genius narrative or like a naturalness narrative, meaning that this comes very easy to me.

I've been passionate about this all along.

There is no struggle here.

Everything is great, which is a very different way of thinking about how much of myself I want to disclose and what I am worried about other people might think.

And so that can be really challenging in how we think about how we communicate our passion.

What I have found personally is that when I express my passion, I have to be a little bit more reserved in Germany.

I have to be a bit more thoughtful that I cannot wave my hands as intensely.

I cannot speak quite as loudly and quite as quickly in German because that is not how other people expect passion should be expressed.

Instead, it seems like passion in a German cultural context is more about deterministic focus, being really clear and articulate and having a vision that you can articulate.

Versus in the US, it sounds like there is no passion that can be too much.

I can wave my hands.

I can go absolutely nuts and crazy.

And people might say, look at this person.

They're so passionate about what they're doing.

I think there's a second component to what Reem was mentioning that I wanted to highlight.

extent to which we value passion or the extent to which we believe that passion is something that people should pursue.

There's some work that Paulo Keefe has done and Hazel Rose Marcus have done where they survey people across different countries around the world.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, what those two papers find is that in cultures that are less individualistic, so where it's less about what you yourself want to accomplish,

and more about what is beneficial for the group, that in those cultures, passion still matters, but it matters less as an important career goal.

Instead, other career goals take higher prominence, being able to support your family, being able to contribute to your community, and so on.

Whereas in cultures that are more individualistic, and the US ranks really highly there, so does the UK and many other Western countries, you see that passion floats a lot more to the top as one of the most important things to consider in your career.

I think that's a great question and I'm really grateful to Hank for bringing that up.

I can assure Hank that is a very common narrative.

Theresa Amabile and some of her colleagues have written a book about that in part because they are academics who themselves retired and then realized how difficult it is to retire and no longer do what it is that is really meaningful to you.

I think that what Hank is doing in and of itself, I think is really helpful, which is to starting to think about what will I do after retirement?

What Theresa Magli and others find in their book is that a lot of people under plan what retirement will look like.

Retirement is often seen as the end goal.

This is what I'm retiring from.

You know, I'm no longer doing work.

And instead they reframe it in a way that I think is really helpful.

What are you retiring to?

Not seeing retirement as something that is the end of a journey, but it's just a stop along the journey.

And what's the next destination that you're going to go to?

And then in that process, you can start thinking about what are the things even while I'm still working that I might want to do to prepare myself.

Perhaps that means I need to explore more of the things that I might want to do after retirement.

Perhaps that means that I need to engage in a little bit of a self-focus, exploring my identity.

Who am I?

What do I want out of life?

What is something that I've always wanted to accomplish?

And perhaps even experimenting, dipping my toes in a number of different things.

Is this really something feasible for me?

Is this something that I could see myself doing?

Is this something that I can do while I still live where I live?

Is it available where I am?

Or would it require a very different way of living?

But being more thoughtful and intentional, I think, is really helpful.

A great comparison, at least in my mind, are athletes.

Athletes retire when they're very young.

Many athletes retire when they're in their 30s.

And so retirement is a shock that we can observe and then actually look at for a lot longer time periods.

And there's this recent story that I love by Andrew Luck, who was a quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts for six years, retired, I think he was 29 or 30 when he retired, which is quite young for a football player.

And in the months and years that followed, or the way that he talks about it now, fell into a deep crisis of meaning.

He was completely unprepared for what he wanted to do next.

There were really difficult days.

And in large parts because he asked himself, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I?

And then to start thinking about what am I drawn to?

What else could I do?

That really opened the door for him.

He now ultimately, he went back to grad school.

He is now, I believe, the general manager of the Stanford football program.

So a very different role than he had before, but still somewhat related to the sport of football that he cared very deeply about.

But I think using that as an excuse to say, what if...

We thought more intentionally about what we might want to do after retirement and started experimenting now before we actually make that transition so that when retirement happens, we have something that we can retire to and we can start experimenting with.

Absolutely.

I love Phil Hansen's story because to me it exemplifies that we often have very narrow beliefs about how we want to go about pursuing our passion and that we're not attentive enough to the many different ways in which we could actually pursue our passion.

So for Phil, he wanted to make pointillism art.

That was what he had defined for himself as being his dream.

And so when it didn't work out for him, he fell into a deep dark hole because he said, this is the goal that I had.

This is the path that it would require for me to reach this goal.

That path is no longer available for me and therefore I cannot reach this goal.

when his neurologist said, wait, but you can still make art.

Like, why don't you just do it, but in a different way?

What Phil started experimenting with was to realize maybe there are other things that I could do, and maybe it'll take me to a different goal.

but perhaps that goal is still meaningful to me.

Perhaps that is still something that I could be passionate about.

So I think the initial step here that he talks about is that he had to let go of the conceptions that he had about himself.

The second step was to then embrace, okay,

What else could I do?

What other things can I pursue even with an uncertain outcome?

I don't know what I'm ultimately working towards.

And the way that I think about this is to be open to experimenting and in this way developing what it is that you're passionate about.

It sounds to me like what Phil is doing is finding out why he cares about art so much.

What it is that through art he wants to accomplish.

But I think more broadly, it highlights this distinction between the outcome that I think we become very fixated on.

I want to become X person.

I want to do Y thing versus the process.

Here is how I'm going to go about developing and experimenting.

This is a way in which I'm going to figure out who I am and what I care about.

And it might ultimately lead me toward a different journey, toward a different end.

But perhaps that can also be something

that I could be passionate about.

I love that story, Leonard, and thank you for sharing that.

I think what's important is to say that he approached it with a sense of open-mindedness.

Perhaps this could be something that I'm passionate about.

And I think having that approach toward the world is really helpful.

Matt Bloom and colleagues have charted the narratives that people tell

when they're engaged in deeply meaningful work.

And the narratives are not as straightforward as we often like them to be.

We want stories of passionate people to be A to B. I was really passionate about music, so I studied music for 30 years, and now I'm a really famous musician.

No challenge or strife, period.

That's the story that we like hearing.

I think it provides us with a sense of comfort that this is an easy narrative.

When in reality, the stories of people who pursue deeply meaningful work is a lot more zig-zaggy.

I did this, then I did that, then I learned about this.

This bad thing happened or this setback occurred and then I had this success.

And that's a much more normal way of living one's life, particularly a meaningful career.

I think the other thing that Leonard mentioned that I think is really helpful is that it can be helpful to differentiate how we pursue our passion and what we are passionate about.

And that over the course of our career, we can develop both.

We can both develop how we pursue our passion.

Maybe I'm passionate about one thing, but I'm going to try very many different ways of pursuing that thing.

And or I can pursue what it is that I'm passionate about.

Maybe that can change.

Maybe I have one passion, then another passion, then another passion.

But I think approaching it with this sense of curiosity and a developmental mindset, at least based on the research, seems really helpful.

I really like this way that Lynn did it by highlighting, here's the things I love.

And importantly, here are the red flags.

Here's the things that I don't want.

I think we often neglect those red flags.

And so I really like that exercise.

I think there are a couple of things that I have found can be helpful.

And it's not just things that I've developed.

This is trying on a lot of different research that people have done that I'm really grateful for that I can draw these tips on.

I think one of the ways to think about this, and this is based on research by Akira Shabram and colleagues who focused on people who have taken sabbaticals in their life and how they have used those sabbaticals to different ends, is to not only think of sabbaticals as places to recover, but to also think of them as places to discover more about oneself and importantly to then also practice.

And I think it's this practice component that we often underestimate.

I think a lot of people are very happy to do the kind of self-exploration that Linh talked about.

But the second step is then to apply that and to experiment, to practice.

What would it actually look like to then act on that information?

And what sort of feedback do I then get?

Erminia Ibarra calls that a provisional self.

It's kind of like putting on a jacket.

And you get two sources of feedback when you put on a jacket.

The first is you get to wear it and you get to look in the mirror and you get to ask yourself, do I like how I look in this jacket?

Do I like what it says about me?

But you can then also go to a dinner party or you can go to the office and you can see how other people respond to you.

And you can say, do I like how other people see me?

Is this how I want to be seen by other people?

And it's this experimentation that I think people don't do quite enough of, in part because it's really scary, but it's a really helpful source of information that can tell us a lot about ourselves, both about who we are and what we care about, but perhaps also about how we want to pursue that that we're passionate about.

I felt that question.

Thank you, Richard, for sharing that.

I think that on its surface, I can hear a lot of fear in that question.

What happens if one thing that I deeply care about

is no longer there for me and I don't know what comes next or I don't think that there is something that comes next.

That is really scary because in part it means that we don't necessarily know who we are anymore.

In many ways, it reminds me of the football player Andrew Luck who had to give up on football because of an injury and then was forced to confront himself with the question, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I?

Sally Maitlis similarly has focused on dancers who had a career-ending injury and those are the very same thoughts that they ask themselves if I'm not a dancer then who am I?

So I think recognizing that when a person goes through something like that it is normal and perhaps it should be expected that that's a very painful time period and that perhaps there is no easy answer or easy solution

that's fine and that's part of the journey.

I think what we do next is then what determines the rest of that journey.

What we do with that pain.

We can say, I'm going to do what I can to modify that pain, to treat that pain, but not the underlying symptom.

And I'm going to spread myself very thin.

I'm going to do a lot of different things.

They might not necessarily be meaningful, but they provide me with enough positive feedback that I can keep going.

And that's one approach but probably not an approach that will allow you to have long-term positive outcomes and will make you feel like your life is particularly meaningful.

I think the more challenging set of questions is well then who are you to begin with?

Like why did you care so deeply about this one thing

And how else could you pursue that?

How else could you use that as a jumping point to continue expanding?

So I think it speaks to, on the one hand, the possibility perhaps there is more we can do to prepare ourselves for what comes next if we notice that the flame of our passion is dying.

But I would even say if the flame of our passion is dying in this one thing, is there something I can do to rekindle it?

Just because a passion is dying, I wouldn't necessarily use the inference that means that it's gone forever.

Perhaps there's something I can do to reinvigorate that.

Perhaps I can go back and understand why did I care about this to begin with?

What has changed in the last few years?

When I think back to a time period when I was really fired up, what were the circumstances then?

Who was I working with?

What was I working on?

What was going on in my life?

I think we often make the inference that there must be something wrong.

But perhaps I'm under duress.

Maybe I'm really stressed.

Maybe something is happening in my life that makes it really difficult for me to experience passion.

So I think using that as an opportunity to diagnose, perhaps even to experiment.

And if none of that works and really you give up on a passion and you don't know what comes next, to give yourself the space to understand it is okay if it's really painful because what has happened is a big loss.

And after their loss, something else could happen and that provides space and opportunity for the next thing.

Thank you so much, Shankar, for having me.