The Myth Of Passion.
Exploring curiosity over passion as the key to adaptable, playful, and resilient thinking in the AI era.
“Find your passion.” “Do what you love.” “Follow your bliss.”
DM me immediately if you haven’t heard any of these statements in your workplace. They may have become a moral imperative in the modern career discourse.
In the AI era, following your passion is not the key to success. It’s a cult that reduces growth. It’s a cognitive trap that hinders resilience.
We were told to follow our passion. Now we’re following burnout.
The Passion Paradox
Most people don’t have a pre-existing passion. Research shows that they develop it through mastery, not before it.
Furthermore, studies from Stanford and Yale demonstrate that a “fixed passion” mindset reduces perseverance. Simply put, when the first friction appears, they quit. Sad, but true.
In today’s highly pressured work environments, this “passion narrative” is insidious.
There are many levers a management team can resort to to extract more output from its workforce; emotional exploitation is one of them. Unsurprisingly, managers -especially, micro-managers – do not hesitate to take advantage of this dangerous intersection between passion, emotion and promotion.
What can an ingenuous young professional respond to, “You love this job, right?” In all honesty, if you need an external factor to go the extra mile (or the extra inch in the age of AI as described in a previous newsletter), you’re probably not following your passion.
Unchecked, passion blinds us to opportunity and, more importantly, adaptability. It’s not an expansion lens.
On the contrary. It’s a narrowing filter.
In a future world of work where we know generalists will triumph, passion makes us specialists.
The cognitive connection
It is tempting to specialise in a field you feel passionate about. You feel indispensable and unavoidable. You secure your spot in important meetings. You may even secure your job, although it’s inching towards exaggeration.
It’s time to reset this way of thinking.
The rise of various AI technologies is a career game-changing twist. Knowledge, including expert knowledge, gets commoditised. Your passion, too, gets commoditised.
It’s time to reset this way of thinking, and to achieve that, we need to better understand what passion is:
Passion is often retrospective.
People feel passionate after they’ve invested time and built competence, not before.
It may well be a genuine passion, but justified after the effort.
Passion often leads to a cognitive tunnel vision.
Once we are committed to a certain field, we defend our expertise, rather than question it.
We fall prey to the confirmation bias loop, constantly seeking information reinforcing our passion, rather than challenging it.
In other words, passion feels expansive. Its effect is opposite.
Worth turning to neuroscience to see why. The dopaminergic system, which fuels motivation, lights up not just when we pursue goals, but when we anticipate familiar rewards. In passionate states, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for self-regulation and flexible thinking, is partially hijacked by emotional salience. We focus harder, but see less. We dig deeper, but explore less widely.
That’s why passionate people often describe themselves as “obsessed.” Obsession is focus without perspective. It can drive short-term achievement, but it erodes learning adaptability, the single most critical skill in the age of AI.
In the workplace, this cognitive narrowing shows up subtly. Teams become echo chambers. Experts defend territory instead of exchanging ideas. The passionate developer resists a design change. The passionate marketer clings to last year’s campaign.
When passion becomes identity, questioning feels like betrayal.
So if being passionate is to be avoided, what should be nurture?
We should nurture a spark. This is where curiosity enters as an antidote.
The curiosity alternative
Passion thrives on predictability. Curiosity thrives on uncertainty. It may not feel reassuring at first to bet on curiosity, but let me explain why this counterintuitive statement generates the most long-term benefits. And again, I will briefly turn to neuroscience to justify my claim
In short, curiosity keeps the brain flexible. Neurologically, it activates a broader network (the hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, and default mode network), promoting pattern discovery and insight formation.
In more prosaic terms, where passion says, “I know what I love,” curiosity says, “I wonder what I don’t yet know.”
The brain’s reward system works with curiosity, too. Each small discovery triggers dopamine, creating a self-sustaining loop. From that point forward, mastery can emerge, but that’s not the goal. You may be willing to deepen a skill, but it will be a by-product of sustained curiosity, not its purpose.
And that small cognitive pivot changes everything: it reopens the mental aperture that passion closes. You keep thinking on your feet. You stay open to new ideas.
From a skill perspective, it builds up your “AI world of work survival kit” by strengthening adaptability, not identity. Curiosity keeps your sense of self fluid. You’re not “the marketing guy” or “the UX designer”: you’re someone who learns, connects, and reinvents. You are one of the AI transformers I alluded to on a few occasions already.
Curiosity also fuels sustainable motivation. Unlike passion, which peaks and fades, curiosity generates a steady loop of engagement and learning. A 2018 Harvard Business Review article (“The Business Case for Curiosity,” by Francesca Gino) found that curious employees make fewer decision errors and perform better under uncertainty.
Lastly, Curiosity sustains mental health and growth; research from UC Davis (Kashdan & Silvia, 2021) shows that curiosity correlates with greater well-being, cognitive flexibility, and resilience - benefits that obsession-driven “passion” can actually erode.
As mentioned earlier, passion makes us specialists. Curiosity, on the other hand, makes us explorers.
Passion keeps us efficient. Curiosity keeps us alive. It keeps us playing.
Beyond Passion: Toward Cognitive Play
“Find your passion.” “Do what you love.” “Follow your bliss.”
This is clearly not valid for the AI era.
With AI, the future of meaningful work is not about doing what we love. It’s about loving what we learn. This is a radical departure from today. Despite constantly evolving technology, today’s world of work looks desperately static when it comes to creating learning pathways. When it comes to elevating careers through learning.
We should treat careers as laboratories, not as ladders, that are increasingly made of rope anyway.
What do you do in labs? You experiment. Your brain is in a playful state and connects patterns freely: it is curiosity in motion. Play removes judgment, while passion often comes with pressure. If you are seen as passionate, you need to perform, to perfect and to prove. This external validation can quickly go away.
Until now, today’s world of work glorified hyperfocus. Extra-long hours were displayed as a badge of honour. Task execution was presented as the holy grail of operational discipline.
As AI equips us with its super-assistant powers, there is a fantastic opportunity for the notion of play to be restored in the workplace. Better thinking thrives in looseness, not control – and neuroscience is here to remind it to us.
Don’t double down on passion. Reclaim you mental elasticity that only play can train.