Develop your passion

When we were kids, my sister was a picky eater who said no a number of vegetables.  The elders almost always had the same advice: By refusing to even taste those dishes, she had no idea what she was missing.

Decades later, she talks about some of those tasty dishes that she has now discovered.  "Remember that amma used to make it?" I have asked her more than once.

We do not know what we are missing out on. It is one thing to reject tasty veggie dishes, but another to make decisions on choices that will have implications for the rest of our lives.

I have forever complained about forcing 17 and 18 year olds to commit to studying fill-in-the-blank in college.  What the hell do we know at that age, and what the hell are we missing out on when we make those decisions?

Except for a tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority of kids in their late-teens have no idea what they want to do.  They don't know what their "passion" in life is.  Well, ok, for most boys there is only one passion ;)  Kidding aside, how do we know what we are passionate about when we have not even tasted the dishes that the academic and the professional worlds offer?

From a Stanford study:

Mantras like “find your passion” carry hidden implications, the researchers say. They imply that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy. But, the research found that when people encounter inevitable challenges, that mindset makes it more likely people will surrender their newfound interest.
And the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited. That can cause people to narrow their focus and neglect other areas.

Exactly!

Being narrowly focused on one area could prevent individuals from developing knowledge in other areas that could be important to their field at a later time

Seriously, don't people ever find out anything contrary to what I have been ranting about for years?

[After] reading a challenging scientific article on the same topic, students’ excitement dissipated within minutes. The researchers found that the drop was greatest for students with a fixed mindset about interests.

I have seen this over and over with many students.  They think they know about a field of study, which they think they are passionate about, and when they start getting into it, they begin to quickly lose interest in that field.

So, what is a better route?  The title of this post says it all.

How does a 18-year old develop their passions?  A two-word phrase that will be familiar to even a casual reader of this blog: Liberal Education.  Students get to taste the awesome dishes and then they figure out what their interests are, and how they can be productive members of society.