Often students are asked about their passions: exercise, the LA Dodgers, the German language, or coding in C++?
However, a better question, according to an article by Jon Jachimowicz, Three Reasons it’s so Hard to Follow Your Passion, in the Harvard Business Review 15 October 2019, is what is your purpose? Central to the article is a Deloitte Survey of 3000 full time workers across all types of job levels. It found only a fifth were ‘passionate about their work.’
The problem with passion is that it is not something one finds, but rather is developed over time after one has applied oneself to a purpose, to action that solves a problem or addresses a need. Jachimowicz analyzed 10 years of graduation speeches given at the top 100 universities. Many emphasized ‘focusing on what you love.’ Others described the pursuit of passion, as ‘forming what you care about.’ Because, in the end, what you care about, your purpose, will allow you to endure rejections and difficulties and that’s important to achieving anything noteworthy.
To bring this point full circle, Jachimowicz noted that the German word for passion is ‘Leidenschaft,’ which translates into the ‘ability to hardship.’ Purpose enables this.
So, possibly what’s most important is to develop a passion to discover your purpose. A good guide for such a journey is William Damon, a professor at the Stanford School of Education, Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and author of The Path to Purpose. In his book Damon identifies key factors making a difference in those thriving after finding purpose. As Damon notes: “When someone thinks of work as a calling rather than merely a job, the experience of working is transformed. “
Damon defines purpose as an ‘intension to accomplish something that is personally meaningful while also of consequence to the world beyond oneself.” Ultimately, it’s finding one’s place in the world through reflection, experience, ‘including experience with failing and then bouncing back from it.’
Under the auspices of a Mellon Foundation Grant, Professor Damon is now in the midst of a 5-year study of 10 programs of higher education ranging from large research universities to small liberal arts colleges to study in a ‘rigorous and empirical way’ how these colleges might provide purpose to its students.
Bates College is already a believer. It along with the Gallup Organization published a report in Inside Higher Education, 11 April 2019, stating that 95% of Bates’s graduates considered a sense a purpose moderately important in their work, yet only 40% had discovered a meaningful career; 34% were ‘deeply interested in
their work’; and, only a quarter liked what they were doing on a daily basis. The study was conducted over 2200 graduates, 630 hiring managers and 1037 parents of Bates’s students.
To improve outcomes and guide its graduates to their purpose, Bates created a Center for Purposeful Work. It also identified a series of activities graduates to encourage purpose: internships; finding a mentor to guide and encourage purpose (the importance of mentoring drifting students was made by professor Daniel Chambliss at Hamilton College in a 2014 article found at https://www.ivycollegeprep.net/articles/2014/6/27/motivating-college-students.html?rq=hamilton%20college); and, having realistic expectations as one pursues postgraduate employment.
If you’re still not convinced that discovering a purposeful life is essential let’s add one more piece to the puzzle and that is in an article from Psychology Today, The Power of Purpose and Meaning in Life, 12 January 2019. In a British longitudinal study (ELSA) conducted by Andrew Steptoe, a psychologist from the University College London, of 7300 adults over the age of 50 those who had found purpose had greater health, enhanced social, emotional, psychological and emotional experiences, economic prosperity, slept better and lived lives spent in a variety of enriching activities.
So, when asked about passion, respond with purpose. When the passion dissipates the purpose will always remain and the dividends will keep paying well into the future.