If there is one thing that successful people have in common, it's passion. Whether with women, business, money, or happiness, no matter how you measure their success, these people are all extremely passionate about something.

Women come secondary. If women are your primary concern, you probably won't get many. If you are going day in and day out thinking about how you can get with women instead of being productive and developing a passion, you have no value.

The Surprising Science of Human Motivation

As Dan Pink recounts in the introduction to Drive, his new book about workplace motivation, our understanding of what compels people to action was upended in the late 1940s. Before this point, conventional wisdom said that we’re motivated by rewards (think B.F. Skinner and his rats). The more we are rewarded, the more fired up we get about our work.

Then Harry Harlow, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, began giving puzzles to the rhesus monkeys in his primate laboratory. He noticed a curious effect: when he rewarded the monkeys for solving the puzzle, they became slower at the task.

Twenty years later, Edward Deci, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, tested this effect in humans, and found a similar result: the presence of cash made them worse at solving creative puzzles.

This kicked off three decades of intense research into the sources of human motivation.

Eventually, Deci, working with his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan, corralled the diversity of (sometimes contradictory) research on the topic into a single, over-arching model called Self-Determination Theory (SDT). This model has been extensively validated and summarizes, to the best of our current understanding, what can make someone love what they do. (See this 2000 paper by Ryan and Deci, from the journal Psychological Inquiry, for a good overview).

At a high level, SDT makes a simple claim:

To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In more detail…

Autonomy refers to control over how you fill your time. As Deci puts it, if you have a high degree of autonomy, then “you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection.”

Competence refers to mastering unambiguously useful things. As the psychologist Robert White opines, in the wonderfully formal speak of the 1950s academic, humans have a “propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it.”

Relatedness refers to a feeling of connection to others. As Deci pithily summarizes: “to love and care, and to be loved and cared for.”

SDT explains why Laura’s career resonates with us. She clearly has autonomy (she handpicks projects and runs them on her own schedule) and competence (she’s highly regarded and compensated for her expert ability). She also has relatedness, both from her close-knit teams and her ability to build a schedule that dedicates extended amounts of time to friends and family.

What is Passion

Common to most peoples’ thoughts about passion are the following three foundational beliefs:

• 1) To feel passionate about something is to be engaged and fulfilled by working on it, and to feel a desire to return to it whenever possible.
  
  2) In the course of your regular life you will develop passions for various pursuits.
  
  3) You will live a much happier life if you can align your studies as a student or career as a graduate with one of your passions.

Here’s the hypothesis I’ve been developing recently: (1) and (3) are true, but (2) is false. And it’s this common misperception that allows “passion” to wreak so much havoc.

Redefining Passion

Based on my own anecdotal experiences working with students and young graduates, I would offer the following alternative definition of passion and where it comes from:

Passion: The feeling that arises from have mastered a skill that earns you recognition and rewards.

Belief (2) from above posits that passions exist a priori of any serious engagement with a pursuit; they’re some mysterious Platonic form waiting for you to discover. This is a dangerous fiction.

My alternative definition claims instead that passion is the feeling generated by mastery. It doesn’t exist outside of serious hard work.

When Scott’s readers say “I have too many passions,” what they really mean is “I have lots of superficial interests.” When my readers complain that their major is not their passion, what they really mean to say is “I don’t have a level of mastery in this field that is earning me recognition.”

I submit that this concept is liberating. It frees you from obsession over whether you are doing the “right” thing with your life. A mastery-centric view of passion says that aligning your life with passions is a good thing, but almost any superficial interest can be transformed into a passion with hard work, so there’s no reason to sweat choices such as an academic major or you first post-college career.

Your real focus should be on the long road of becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/11/24/a ... nstructed/

I wouldn't know, as I am not really passionate about anything, so I can't speak from experience.