here’s an all-too-common piece of advice about how to choose a : follow your passion. But if someone tells you to , it likely means they’re already rich. And typically, they made their fortune in some unglamorous industry like iron ore smelting.
Your mission, instead, is to find something you’re good at and apply the thousands of hours of grit and sacrifice necessary to become great at it. As you get there, the feeling of growth and your increasing mastery of your craft, along with the economic rewards, recognition, and camaraderie, will make you passionate about whatever “it” is. Nobody grows up saying, “I’m passionate about tax law,” but the best tax lawyers in the country are financially secure, have access to a broader selection of mates, and are—because they are so good at it—passionate about tax law.
It’s unlikely you will ever be great at something you dislike doing, but mastery can lead to passion. Maybe the worst aspect of the advice to follow your passion is that for most of us, it’s just Stanford psychologist William Damon found that only 20% of people younger than 26 can articulate a passion that guides their life choices. So four out of five of us can’t follow our passions even if we want to, because we don’t know what they are.
And even when we can “articulate a passion,” it’s often socially determined, reflecting what our culture expects of us, not anything inherent to us. Researchers studying the aspirations of young people ha.
