Jan Jachimowicz

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.