By Richard Li '24
There’s a quote that has bothered me enormously for the past twelve years: “Find your passion.” Or its twin sibling, “Do what you love.” Out of all the advice that I’ve dwelled on, this has given me little closure and much uncertainty.
So, what can my passion be?
Ever since we started going to school, we have been told that we were good or bad at certain things. For instance, I was told in second grade that I was very athletic. To affirm this, I asked my parents to put me on an intense training regimen to help me win a medal in the school swim meet. I ended up with a silver in breaststroke, but tragically, my coach’s brutal, coercive methods had made me hate swimming. From then on, my affinity for swimming disappeared.
Reflecting on this experience showed me two things: one, that it is much easier to have a passion for something that you’re good at and experienced in. At a small school like SAS, we are incredibly fortunate to have a smaller pool of comparison, where anyone has a chance to be among the best and most recognized at any activity that they decide to take on. Whether it is athletic, academic, a social issue, musical, or artistic, fewer students are fighting for the same spots or pursuing the same goals. This creates a nice feedback loop where peer validation serves as motivation to improve, leading to more validation and more improvement. In contrast, at the larger public university that I’m attending this fall, I will have to rely upon other sources of motivation, including the intrinsic enjoyment that I derive from the activity itself.
This ties to the second thing, which is that you have to like your passion for the right reasons. Before anything else though, make sure that your passion is something that you like. Being good at something helps you start to like it, and getting good at most things takes time. But if the process sucks, or if you genuinely start to hate it, it’s important to re-evaluate what you call a passion. Furthermore, cherish them and don’t do things that might make them no longer a passion (like I did in swimming).
Even if you’ve decided that you truly love doing something, college applications might confuse you. As I learned from reading and writing essays, the most noble cause for a passion is intrinsic and unique. But in reality, there are other factors in the mix, including ones that are not unique but are equally valid outside of the Office of Admissions. Think a passion for sports because exercising with friends makes you happy. Or a passion for English because reading books is simply fun. That a certain passion can’t make it into your college essays doesn’t mean that it is not valid; admissions officers are not and should not be the arbiters of what activities you are proud of doing.
One last factor is money. Money is a tricky one, and it relates to passion on multiple levels. Not unlike the above causes for passion, no one writes in college essays that they are pursuing a certain career direction for financial reward. This motivation is completely extrinsic, the most un-unique thing ever, and perhaps the least noble end goal of a college applicant. However, it happens to be one of the most important of them all. To explore the connection between passion and money, we’d have to answer a series of questions, starting with this: “What is a passion?”
We established earlier that a passion has to be something that one truly likes. But what does it mean to truly like something? Does it count to like the feeling of being better than others at it? After all, that was what prompted me as a kid to participate in sports. And does it count to enjoy being praised or approved? The answers to these questions are fluid. I’m reminded of the term “superiority complex” and its negative connotation. But being awarded an Academy Award or a Grammy would rarely be discouraging, would it? If it’s possible to like things because of ulterior bases such as the recognition one receives for it, these questions then lead us back to the factor of money.
Can someone truly like something because it brings them a financial reward and they genuinely enjoy the feeling of doing work to earn money? I’m not qualified to answer this for myself in any way, and maybe I’ll come back to this article in thirty years with a verdict. It sounds like some people have this mindset, though I find myself associating this type with stereotypically greedy businesspeople like the Once-ler from The Lorax.
As a more realistic replacement for the one above, there is this related question: is a passion that happens to make money still a passion? This question feels like a dark, unfamiliar cloud that looms over my life and it terrifies me regularly. I vividly remember reading an SAT passage about an experiment in which researchers proved that introducing a monetary reward for performing a fun task annihilates the inherent enjoyment of the task itself. There is a brilliant Vox article on this, titled “The complicated reality of doing what you love.” In short, the author monetized their pottery hobby by taking commissions, made it their job, and lost the fun in the process.
My immediate defense was that the business model of commissions had handed over the creative portion of their art to the customer and that perhaps if the monetization of a passion hadn’t limited the function of the activity as a creative outlet, the hobby could have remained a passion. However, this is proven wrong by the aforementioned experiment, which tested a task that is noncreative, implying that money becomes a latent motivation that replaces the genuine enthusiasm from earlier. Therefore, the writer’s loss of enjoyment in their pottery hobby is inherently impossible to separate from monetization.
But, to what extent does financial reward kill enjoyment? Does it suck it all away, or just a little? I can see it varies on a case-by-case basis, but this great question might be too speculative to warrant a valid and generalized answer. Regardless, I believe that the ideal of passion converting into a fulfilling career is imperfect or even bad, depending on the question above.
The college application process turns a blind eye to all of this. Admission essays instruct us to expound upon the academic passion that we hope to pursue, likely for an income. When we get to explore different majors in college, we are told to take classes to help us discover the pathway that we truly love and enjoy. This extends into the workplace, where the word “passion” is often entangled with a career; for instance, it is ideal when someone is passionate about their job.
We have to recognize that we ourselves, not money or social and corporate expectations, get to take charge of how we can intrinsically enjoy our hobbies. Under this interpretation of the term “passion” as something to be pursued for a living, I might not end up finding my singular “passion” that will define my life’s work. Daunting, but it will keep my hobbies sacred and free. Hopefully, my job will merely be one unlucky sacrifice chosen from a large basket of things that I find enjoyable.
As for these other eggs in the basket, they are still passions—whether I’m good or bad at them, whether they are fleeting or enduring, job-conferring or not.
Senior Editor: Lucy Chen '24
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