When Jon Jachimowicz saw Adam Davidson’s recent book, The Passion Economy, he knew he had to talk to him. Jachimowicz, who himself researches passion, is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Davidson is a journalist, New Yorker staff writer, and cofounder of the podcast Planet Money. The Passion Economy draws on Davidson’s reporting of several entrepreneurs throughout the United States over the last few years. It illuminates how the rules of the economy are evolving and offers lessons for the changing nature of work. Their conversation is below.
—Dave Nussbaum, Senior Science Editor
Jon Jachimowicz: Passion is a buzzword that people throw around a lot. How do you think about passion, and what does it mean for the entrepreneurs that you covered?
Adam Davidson: The core idea is a contrast with what I call the widget economy of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, there are external metrics of success. If you think of the development of the modern corporation, the modern job, and the modern career path, lots of signals tell people to get rid of things that are unlike the requirements of being a worker in this field and to adopt these external metrics instead. A ton of both academic literature and just literature talks about suppressing your own nature for the sake of your work. The idea that this [new] economy rewards or can reward the opposite—that you can look inward and find or develop those things that drive you forward, and specifically those things that make you different from other people—that was the idea I originally was heading toward.
As I was writing the book, I kept noticing that there are a lot of religious people who follow what I’m describing. I’m not religious, but I noted some of these people have a period in their life, every Sunday or whatever, when they’re forced to think about questions like “How do I fit in the world?” “What is my broader sense of myself?” That seems to be a good practice. I liked that passion also has a religious valence. But to me the economy part of the passion economy is equally important. It has to match an inward process, and there has to very much be an outward process, too, connecting your internal self with a market, with people who actually want to pay money for whatever it is you do or make.
When you started writing the book, did you expect to go the passion route?
Passion probably came a little bit later. The initial insight was that in industry after industry, I was noting that there was a conventional wisdom rule set that seemed to work pretty well for a good chunk of the twentieth century that was no longer working well. There were entrepreneurs, small-business people, and even people who have jobs in big companies who had an insight about that: “Oh, I need to not be the same as everyone. I need to be different.” Replication is no longer a good way to get ahead. The passion part of it came later, when I noted, “Wow, these people seem happy. They seem to have richer lives. They don’t seem to be as single-mindedly driven as other entrepreneurs I’ve met.”
An example that comes to mind is from Planet Money. At NPR, we created radio shows. Then this new thing called a podcast came along, and NPR didn’t quite know how to think about it. At first, they took small radio pieces and put them out as podcasts. People didn’t seem to like those. Then I and a few other people had this idea of a totally new thing. It was actually very difficult internally because the organization struggled with us—we weren’t a show, we weren’t a website, we were this other thing. It was striking to me how the organization was constantly communicating to me, “That’s not how we do things.” They were focusing on producing sameness.
In industry after industry, I was noting that there was a conventional wisdom rule set that seemed to work pretty well for a good chunk of the twentieth century that was no longer working well.
If I were talking to someone who had a job in a large organization, I’d advise them to do the job, show up on time, but start identifying the things that seem to set them apart. Note that, and start to think how you can build those capabilities and communicate them, and communicate the value of them up the chain. If you’re finding that you can’t, then that might be a sign your organization can’t support it. But I think it is increasingly possible to say to your management, “There’s this other way of doing it. I can take that on. Let’s figure out how to experiment and how to make that work.” I don’t have any data, but anecdotally that’s a better career path now than it would have been 30 years ago or 50 years ago.
You talk about the importance of figuring out what makes you different, what you care about, what you’re passionate about. I see a lot of people struggling to identify that. When you talked to the entrepreneurs that you covered in your book, how did they do it? When did they decide, “This is what I’m passionate about, this is what I’m going to do”?
For most of them it was a long struggle, and it went in unexpected ways. You’re not born with passion—it’s not that on your twenty-first birthday, you either have it or you don’t, and then you’re done. In fact, I think working on understanding your passion is so valuable that it’s okay—and maybe even good—that it can take 10, 15, 20 years. When I talk to people, it’s not just, “Sit around waiting until you have your passion, and then you’re good to go.” It’s, “This is your project. Figure this out and experiment, try things out, pay attention, listen to people.”
I became a journalist when I was 21 when I had my first paying job the day before I graduated college. I was 32 when I really started business journalism, and I’d say 38 before I fully understood how I wanted my career to go in a rich way. And I don’t see that as, “Boy, that sucked that it took so long.” I was doing stuff, I was trying things out. I tried to be a theater critic for a minute. I thought I’d be a playwright. I tried a lot of different things. Part of this economy is not having the clarity and stability that at least some people were able to experience in the twentieth century.
You’re not born with passion—it’s not that on your twenty-first birthday, you either have it or you don’t, and then you’re done.
What seems to be a magical place is to be at the intersection of two or three unlikely interests. In my case there’s audio and print, and weirdly there’s not a lot of people who do both. And then adding onto it business and economics and reaching a broad lay audience. I could easily identify a lot of people who are better at every one of those things. But there are very few people who are competing in that overlap, and that has allowed me to really carve a unique path, to help define that space for others. Passion is not a unitary thing. It’s a combination of a bunch of different things that you uniquely combine, and in a way that nobody else does. That doesn’t mean you have to get a job on day one that does all five things that you are passionate about—you’ll probably have to mess around with different things.
When you were 25 or 30 and you hadn’t figured everything out, how did you motivate yourself? It makes sense now looking back, but did you know in the moment that it’s all going to work out in the end and that you’re working on this project of figuring out how to pursue your passion?
I didn’t use that language, but a few choices I made early on turned out to be smart choices. I mean, tons of choices I made turned out to be stupid choices. But I remember right out of college I saw two paths, broadly speaking. One path was to be a minor cog in a big machine. Whether that’s to become a McKinsey consultant or a junior investment banker or an intern at a large media corporation. The other path is to make much less money, work for a much less prestigious place, but actually be able to do stuff. I chose that latter path. I went to a local public radio station.
Passion is not a unitary thing. It’s a combination of a bunch of different things that you uniquely combine, and in a way that nobody else does.
What’s important in figuring out how to pursue your passion is to actually do stuff and make mistakes. I remember a writing mentor of mine said, “Write a lot, badly.” When you’re figuring out what your writing is, don’t write two things that you spend years on and are very precious. Just write, write, write, write, write. When I meet 26-year-olds at McKinsey, if you talk to 10 of them they’re all going to say the exact same thing about what they want to do with their lives, and who they think they are, and where they’re going.
The way the career path is explained to us, there’s this perfect path, and you’re either on it or you’re not. Perfection is the goal, and not being perfect and not making smart choices every step of the way is unacceptable. But if you look at most religious traditions, it’s some version of “You’re a lump of sinful clay who’s going to screw everything up all the time.” Perfection is not going to happen. But there is something out there that is perfect, which you can take little pieces and sculpt yourself with.
I remember an Orthodox rabbi who was telling me, “I don’t go to synagogue every morning because it means something to me. Most mornings I hate it. It’s too early. It’s boring. It’s the same—but it’s the only place I ever have certain moments. And if I didn’t go every morning, especially the mornings I hate, I wouldn’t know when those mornings would come.”
I also think there is a path dependency. It’s not that there’s this platonic-ideal passion that is unchanging and exists inside you somewhere and then at 36, you find out, “Oh crap, I’m a dentist. What I really wanted to do was be a sculptor.” Maybe that happens, but it is something you’re finding out in the reality of doing your work. It’s better if you can manifest it through the experience and networks that you already have.
What’s important in figuring out how to pursue your passion is to actually do stuff and make mistakes.
The other thing that I didn’t do but a lot of people in the book did is focus on where you are actually adding value. Where are the moments when some human being is like, “You are making my life better, and I want to pay you money because of that.” I think of this accountant that I covered in the book, Jason Blummer. That was his only question in the beginning—“All my clients don’t want my services. Nobody wants to file a tax return, and nobody wants to have an audit or to sit down and plan their payroll. They have to. But what if my clients actually wanted my service—they didn’t need it, but they wanted it. What would that look like?” It took him 10, 15 years to figure it out.
We need more language and vocabulary of that, so when you’re a 27-year-old who moves home you can say you’re in your self-discovery of your passion period. We need to recognize that as a socially appropriate and valuable thing to do.
What you’re recommending is essentially uncharted territory, where you’re not doing things similarly to other people, but in fact you’re choosing your path as a mark of distinction from other people. How do you think people can deal with this uncertainty? What are some of the things that people need to learn?
It’s both that individuals have to
learn, and that we as a society have to come up with a language for it. We have
to come up with new institutions to support it. I don’t know if this is an
appropriate comparison, but I think of dating. I read a lot about what dating was
like in the early Second Industrial Revolution—the late 1800s to early 1900s—and
my own family history. My great-grandmother Anna Lewis was doing things that
today would be completely unremarkable. She was meeting boys and dating them,
but she could only be understood as a prostitute, even though she wasn’t a
prostitute. When she and my great-grandfather eventually got married, it was a
tragedy that ripped the family apart to this day, weirdly.
When you think of an agrarian economy collapsing, where women and partnership
is understood to be in one particular context, and there’s very clear “By these
ages, you should be doing this, by these ages, you should be doing that.” Now,
at least in contemporary cosmopolitan society, if you have a friend who’s getting
married at 23 to the first person they’ve ever been with, you’d be like, “That’s
crazy! You’ve got to date a lot of people. It’s too soon.” I’d like to think we
will find that for work as well. If someone’s says, “Oh, I’ve figured it all
out,” you’d say, “Wait, you’re 26. That’s irresponsible. It’s way too soon.”
We need more language and vocabulary of that, so when you’re a 27-year-old who moves home you can say you’re in your self-discovery of your passion period. We need to recognize that as a socially appropriate and valuable thing to do.
Now, I’m a believer in actively doing stuff, in not sitting around waiting. I think you should be productively engaged. When I went to be a journalist, I wrote for everybody. I wrote manuals for paper shredders, wrote everything I could think of, and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It wasn’t that one day I said, “Oh, this is what I’m going to be.” Over time I noticed I was drawn more to one thing than another. There was at some point a recognition, but that was well into my 30s. “Oh this is the writer I am.”
It’s also important that we as a society normalize that whole process so that it’s not as scary and embarrassing at 28 to quit your job as a lawyer and say, “I’m going to spend a year figuring out what I really want to do.” It feels like where we’re heading, that might happen in the next 10, 20 years. I would like to think it’ll happen. This is a point I make in the book: you need to be a storyteller about your value. If your resume is like, “I was a machine tool operator, and then I worked in a hospital, then I did this,” how do you tell that story so it’s, “I was accumulating and diversifying my passions, and I now know that I can provide you value that no one else can, and you will provide me value no one else can.” That’s a great story. But we just look at a resume with major leaps and think, “Wow, this person seems nuts. They’re bouncing all over the place.” So, learning the vocabulary, learning how to tell that personal story, and learning as a society how we can embrace that idea.
Thank you so much for this conversation, Adam! Is there anything you want to leave us behavioral scientists with?
I had a funny meet experience with Daniel Kahneman. I speak Hebrew, because my mom’s from Israel, and I went up to him at a New Yorker event because his stepdaughter is the fiction editor at the New Yorker. I introduced myself and I said what an honor it was to meet him. He said, “Ah, your writing is amazing. It’s an honor to meet you. I love your work, I read everything you write. You are amazing.” I couldn’t believe it! And then he said, “It’s funny, I thought Amy Davidson was a woman, but I guess you’re Israeli.” There’s another writer at the New Yorker, named Amy Davidson. I was like, “Oh no, I’m Adam Davidson.” He said, “Oh, you’re good too.” And then he walked away.
