Jennifer Tosti-Kharas

So she knows this world.

very, very well.

So she has been studying musicians over a long career span, so 11 years and counting.

And she started studying them when they were in a program for talented high school students who were talented at music.

And she assessed their level of calling toward music, then saw years later, do they pursue music professionally or not?

Maybe not surprisingly, the stronger the calling, the more likely people are to pursue music professionally down the road.

But that one of the drivers of this is not their actual ability or talent level, as we might think, but their perception that they're talented.

And that actually with strong callings, people tend to have overinflated perception of their own ability level.

So they think they're better than they are.

And that leads them then to pursue this pretty risky career path.

So that started this idea that strong callings might lead to a sort of a career tunnel vision where you truly can't imagine that you won't make it because I love it so much.

You know, how can I not be the one to break through when this is my passion and this is my calling?

Yeah, they do not listen to that feedback.

So Shassa and I have studied this specifically in the context of musicians.

And so what we found was the stronger musicians calling toward music, the less likely they were to follow the advice of their private music teacher if that music teacher discouraged them from going into music.

They would basically say, thank you very much.

I disagree.

I'm doing it anyway.

And lest we think this phenomenon is limited to or specific to musicians or the context of music or the arts, we replicated this exact finding in a sample of business school students who said the stronger their callings toward business, they would not accept the advice of a trusted mentor.

We left this one more open, a trusted mentor who discouraged them from going into business professionally.