While some people have a clear “calling” from a young age, many leave education without knowing their vocation in life, and may spend their whole careers without having ever discovered a career that truly enthuses them. What can they do?
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Some answers come from the work of Paul O’Keefe at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore. In his view, the most basic foundation of passion is an intense interest in what we’re doing. And while that may depend on the type of work at hand, O’Keefe has found that there are some intriguing differences between people and their capacity to develop a deep engagement with what they are doing.
These experiments are inspired by American psychologist Carol Dweck’s pioneering research on “mindset”. Through decades of experiments, Dweck demonstrated that some people tend to see their abilities as “fixed” – you either have an inherent talent for something or you don’t. Meanwhile, others have a “growth mindset”: they believe that your abilities can change over time. (Of course, some people might not have extreme views either way, and your answers might change with context – whether faced with maths, say, rather than music.) Importantly, these mindsets then determine how we face challenges: whether we give up when something is difficult, or if we persevere in the knowledge that we will improve over time.
While mindset theory originally concerned views on academic ability and intelligence, O’Keefe and Dweck have now found similar patterns in our beliefs about our capacity to cultivate new interests, too.
In this case, people with the fixed mindset would agree with statements such as: “Your core interests will remain your core interests; they won’t really change”. Those with the growth mindset instead endorse statements like: “No matter how central your interests are to you, they can substantially change.”
People with the ‘growth mindset’ maintain their interest in difficult topics, wanting to know more despite the difficulties of grasping the technical material
Crucially, the team found that these mindsets determine the way that people respond to material outside their normal field of interest. Consider arts students looking at a piece about science, or “techy” students reading an article on literary criticism. Even if they had very little initial curiosity about the subject, the students with the growth mindset changed their ratings after actually reading the piece: they had allowed themselves to become intrigued. The people with the fixed mindset saw no such improvement.
The mindset also determined how long people’s interest lingered and whether they were prepared to grapple with more difficult content. In one experiment, the participants were first shown an attention-grabbing video about black holes – sparking an initial (if superficial) interest in theoretical physics. Then came the tough part: they had to read a challenging academic paper on the subject. The people with the growth mindset maintained their interest: they wanted to know more despite the difficulties of grasping the technical material. The flame of interest quickly burnt out in those with the fixed mindset, however. “Within the span of seven minutes they went from saying, ‘this is fascinating’ to saying, ‘hell no, I'm done’,” says O’Keefe.
Thankfully, our mindsets are malleable – simply reading an article about our capacity to grow new passions can change those implicit beliefs, so that our minds are more open to venturing into previously unexplored territories. O’Keefe is currently examining the real-world consequences of this. He gave arts students a short online course on the growth mindset during their first few weeks at university, and then saw how it influenced their enjoyment of compulsory STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) courses later in the year. Although he hasn’t yet published the research, the early analyses suggest the intervention had the desired effects on students’ enjoyment and their performance.