Jan Jachimowicz

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.