Find Your Passion Through Self-Exploration

Take detours to find work that most fits you

Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same because we do not stay the same. (David Epstein, in “Range- How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”)

This article expands on the ideas discussed in the above book which explains why people with varied interests can find work that matches their talents, skills and interests better than those who seek to specialize on a narrow field early in their lives. The generalists also come out as better problem-solvers than the specialists.

“What do you want to do in your life?” or “what do you want to become when you grow up?”, is a question we throw at children casually. It’s an insensitive question to ask children. Even adults don’t know who really they are, what interests them, and what they are capable of.

The absurdity of asking children to fix their future early in life is stark because the brain’s executive functions mature at about age twenty-five. A lot of changes in personality traits occur between age eighteen and one’s late twenties.

Parents want to impose their unlived lives and unfulfilled ambitions on their children. An early start is a head start, we believe. The ten-thousand- hours- practice rule continues to charm us.

Parents think early specialization in sports, music or arts could produce geniuses later. Society’s obsession with historic achievements pressurises children to try so many things for which they have no aptitude.

When children cannot meet our expectations, we demoralize them by characterizing them as failures. The one-size-fits-all paradigm ignores the fact some flowers bloom late. Creativity often blossoms after the artists try so many things and fail. The moment of a tryst with destiny comes late after struggling with trials and experiments.

Self-awareness is not a strong point with most of us. Avalanches of parental expectations, peer pressures, and social norm sweep us away so that there is little time or inclination for self-reflection, little patience to listen to our inner voice for guidance. The intensity of external stimuli is so powerful that it mutes the signals of our inner calling.

A fixed career versus winding paths of self-exploration

Conventional wisdom about life’s goals and how to go about it assume human development as a linear process. Select a goal, work towards achieving it single-mindedly, and live happily thereafter is how we expect the story to progress. But it seldom does so.

Even when our brains mature, our personalities remain in a state of flux. We cannot cast personality in stone.

Benjamin Hardy, in his book, “Personality is not Permanent”, said:

When you change your subconscious, your personality will change as well. Your personality is merely a by-product or reflection of where you are emotionally. If you maintain suppressed emotions, you’ll develop a personality to either cope with or avoid them.

Not that we should avoid plan long term and have a head start in the chosen career or work. Some people are lucky to find work that matches their goals, skills and talent early in their lives. But to treat early achievers as the benchmark of human excellence misses the more common way of finding work that fits our personalities — taking detours, switching careers through self-exploration.

When we take up a profession, we find it difficult to switch over to other areas because of the sunk cost fallacy even after knowing that we had failed.

“The more we have invested and even lost, the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.” (Maria Konnikova in “The Confidence Game”)

When stuck in unfulfilling work, people have the choice either to explore, experiment and discover work that matches their abilities and passions or to suffer the drudgery of monotonous work to project a facade of success.

According to best-selling author David Epstein, there is nothing wrong in having a long-term plan about what we are going to do. But we should not treat the paths as permanent and see whether what we are engaged with is the best match right now. If not, fear of social scorn should not deter us in taking a detour to try something else.

Often, we surprise ourselves by making discoveries about ourselves that at the conscious level we never knew existed. The ‘self’, the person we identify with, is not a monolith. We have multiple selves. We only recognize these selves as we explore and experiment with alternative paths.

The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been.(David Epstein)

David Epstein cites the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Charles Darwin and Michael Crichton as typical examples of switchers and late developers who took winding paths before they found what they wanted to do in their hearts.

Vincent van Gogh as the archetypal late developer

Finding one’s sweet spot when talent intersects with discovery can be a tortuous journey. It can involve detours and switch of careers, hobbies, and creative pursuits. The ‘matching’ — the serendipitous alignment of talent with work — can even happen during one’s last years as exemplified by the life of the famous Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh.

One of the world’s renowned painters, Gogh led an ordinary and uneventful life till the last four years of his life. Nobody expected him to become an exceptional artist. His life journey looked most unremarkable until he discovered his calling:

• His first sketch- that of the family cat- was a disaster.
• Spent his time collecting beetle samples.
• At thirteen, joined a boarding school only to drop out soon.
• By fifteen, he spent his time going for long nature walks.
• Joined his uncle’s dealership. Fired from the job after a couple of years.
• Became an Assistant Teacher in a boarding school.
• Switched the job to another school.
• Got interested in religion and wanted to become a pastor.
• Became a bookstore clerk
• Nearing twenty -five, Gogh became a preacher.
• His priesthood ended abruptly.
• By twenty-seven, Gogh lost all hope and became despondent.
• Took up drawing.
• By thirty-three enrolled in an art school.
• Dabbled in different mediums.
• Got interested in oil painting and discovered it to be his forte.
• One evening, looking at out of his window, he saw the distant hills, got a flash of inspiration, and created the “Starry Night”, one of his outstanding paintings.
• Vincent van Gogh produced most of his best paintings during the last four years of his brief life before he died at age thirty-seven.

How Charles Darwin changed track and struck a massive blow for science

Charles Darwin’s father, a doctor, wanted his son to follow his footsteps. Darwin enrolled in a medical school. But his heart was not in practising medicine. One day he walked out of the class vowing never to return.

Darwin got interested in religion and wanted to become a priest. He considered many options. He signed up for a botany class. The professor recommended an unpaid position as a naturalist aboard HMS Beagle. In the five-year trip, Darwin toured many South American islands took samples of plant and animal specimens. He kept a diary and recorded his findings in it.

It took Darwin more than decades of research before he published his Origin of Species.

How a doctor abandoned his practice to become an award-winning author

Michael Crichton had a passion for writing. But he felt a writer had no financial security. A doctor’s job, however exacting, guaranteed a decent standard of life. He joined Stanford Medical School and became a doctor.

After a few years of practice, Crichton became disillusioned with the medical profession. He could no longer resist the clarion call of his Muse. He took up writing as a career. He used his medical knowledge to publish award-winning novels like Jurassic Park.

Exploring our multiple selves to find the right matches

“I know who I am when I see what I do.”(Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behaviour at London Business School)

Professor Ibarra distinguishes between the “plan-and-implement” and the “test-and-learn” models.

In the first model, we make a fixed long-term plan and work towards achieving it. It assumes we know what we want and what we are capable of doing based on the belief that our personalities are fixed.

In the “test- and learn” model, we examine the possibilities suggested by our multiple selves, test the waters, and learn from the experiences.

Contrary to popular belief, most successful people have taken the “test-and-learn” route. For instance, Michaelangelo hailed as an artist who planned everything in advance and tailored his art to match the plan, was an experimenter who learned while he was creating and tweaked his work as he progressed. He would always leave a sculpture unfinished and move on to the next. He also painted and dabbled in poetry.

Wrapping up

Who we are and who we can be cannot match unless we try many things and find work that fits us most. Parental expectations, peer pressures and social norms often lock us into careers early in life. The sunk-cost fallacy makes us stick to jobs we dislike. The allure of a head start and early specialization misses the point that our personalities change.

Generalists are not rolling stones or ghost ships drifting in the sea, They are experimenters who travel across meandering paths, take detours, and strike gold when they finally find the work that optimally aligns with their ambitions and strengths.

Finding one’s passion is not a one-stop journey, it is an adventure filled with unexpected twists and turns, accidental discoveries, and pleasant surprises.

Thanks for reading.