Jan Jachimowicz

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.