When Bezos built Amazon, he famously started with books. This wasn’t due to a passion for reading, but due to the practicality and commerciality of books as a product. And look at what he built with discipline and a strong work ethic – no passion needed!

The problem with passion is that it is emotive: it may light a fire, and it may be great fodder for inspirational quotations, but it takes discipline to keep the flame alive and produce genuine results.

Therefore, when it comes to building a focused mindset – committed to achieving success – passion needs to be understood as a small piece of a puzzle largely comprised of discipline-based habits.

The pitfalls of passion

It’s important to note that passion certainly has its place – the goal of this piece isn’t to completely denigrate passion and its uses.

However, given that we are – as a culture – inclined towards the assumption that passion is automatically desirable and sufficient as a means of achieving our goals, it’s important to take a moment to reflect on substantial, evidence-based discussions that cast this idea in a new light.

Before we even consider the world of work, the value of passion has been found to be debatable even at the level of school and education.

According to research undertaken by Professor Jihyun Lee, an academic in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, “in most countries, academically able students do not hold their schooling in high regard”. Professor Lee also found that, “similarly, in most countries, academically less able students do not necessarily have low opinions about their schooling.” The only conclusion she could draw, therefore, was that bright students’ motivation “isn’t from an abundant passion for school.”

This is a lesson that applies not just to school, but to any goals – passion isn’t necessarily going to sustain success. Research from Stanford psychologists found that people who consider themselves to be “passionate” suffer from “fixed mindsets” – they were unable to open themselves up to ideas and topics that don’t correspond to their interest, thereby prohibiting their abilities to generate new ideas and bring different fields together.

Predicting success

The Stanford study also pinpointed a second – and perhaps more significant – downside to passion.

The psychologists asked their subjects to watch an educational film about black holes, which most subjects found interesting. However, when the subjects were then asked to read a dense and complicated article on the subject, they were unenthusiastic.

The lesson here, as the psychologists themselves put it, was that recommending people to “find their passion” is unsound advice that may cause people to put all their eggs in one basket “but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”

Of course, when passion is viewed through this lens, the alternative is both clear and inviting: discipline is capable of picking up passion’s slack.  Where passion can lead to procrastination, perfectionism, and ephemera, discipline will see a project through to completion.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising to find that scientific studies are on hand to back up this observation. In fact, one such study even solves the mystery introduced by Professor Lee – an article published in Psychological Science suggests that academic success is best predicted by self-discipline.

Clearly, those high achieving students who weren’t motivated by passion made up for it with a healthy dose of discipline and diligence.

Getting the job done

If you rely on passion alone, your mindset is limited: you can only be passionate about so many things, and a fixed mindset – as we’ve seen – is counter-productive.

With a disciplined approach to work, study, and life, however, success is always on the cards – and the fruits of that discipline can be enjoyed as passionately as you like.