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Stanford Scientists Find That Finding Your Passion is Pretty Terrible Advice
斯坦福大学的科学家发现，找到你的激情是非常糟糕的建议
A cliché but often-given piece of career advice can set us up to fail.
一个陈词滥调但经常被提及的职业建议会让我们走向失败。
作者Betsy Mikel
Everyone has an opinion about finding your passion. It's either the best piece of career advice you've ever heard or the worst.
每个人都有关于找到自己的激情的看法。这要么是你听过的最好的职业建议，要么是最差的。
Bill Gates is all for it. He discovered a passion for writing software as a kid and kept at it. Seemed to work out pretty well for him.
比尔·盖茨完全赞成。他从小就发现了写软件的激情，并一直坚持下去。而且似乎干得很不错。
Mark Cuban is vehemently against hanging your success on finding your passion. Just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean you're good at it. He advises you find where you're putting in the most effort, then double down on that to achieve success.
马克·库班强烈反对把你的成功寄托在寻找你的激情上。你对某件事充满激情并不意味着你擅长。他建议你找到自己最努力的地方，然后加倍努力去获得成功。
Stanford researchers recently decided to get to the bottom of the matter. They performed a series of experiments and published their findings in Psychological Science.
斯坦福大学的研究人员最近决定弄清事情的真相。他们进行了一系列的实验，并在《心理科学》杂志上发表了他们的发现。
Everything that's wrong with the 3-word cliché
一切都是错误的三字陈腔滥调
The Stanford psychologists found a few problems with encouraging people to find their passion.
斯坦福大学的心理学家发现，鼓励人们找到自己的激情存在一些问题。
First and foremost, it perpetuates the misconception that you can only be passionate about -- and thus successful in -- one thing. It narrows your focus too much. If you go all-in on a single interest, you close yourself off to exploring other interests or passions. The researchers called this a fixed mindset.
首先也是最重要的一点是，它使一种误解长期存在，即你只能对一件事充满激情，并因此而成功。它会让你的注意力过于集中。如果你只专注于一种兴趣，你就会把自己封闭起来，不去探索其他兴趣或爱好。研究人员称这是一种固定的心态。
In one experiment, they recruited students who had a fixed mindset and identified as "techie" or "fuzzy." This is apparently Stanford-speak for someone who's passionate about STEM or the arts and humanities. The students read articles on both topics. Those who had a fixed mindset about one topic were less open to the article outside their interest area.
在一项实验中，他们招募了一些思维模式固定的学生，并将他们定义为“技术狂”或“含糊”。这显然是斯坦福在说那些热爱STEM或者艺术和人文学科的人。学生们阅读这两个主题的文章，那些对其中一个话题有固定想法的人对他们感兴趣领域之外的文章不太接受。
People with singular mindsets aren't likely to have light bulb ideas or bright forth new innovations.
思维单一的人不太可能有灯泡理念或想出新的创新。
"Many advances in sciences and business happen when people bring different fields together, when people see novel connections between fields that maybe hadn't been seen before," said Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton, one of the study's co-authors.
“当人们把不同的领域联系在一起时，当人们看到不同领域之间的新奇联系时，科学和商业的许多进步就会发生，”斯坦福大学心理学家、该研究的合著者之一格雷戈里沃尔顿说。
Finding your passion is problematic
找到你的激情是有问题的
To find your passion sounds like you will simply somehow stumble across it. That passion just already exists somewhere out there. You just have to find it. Then you can ride that passion to the top.
找到你的激情听起来就像你会不知不觉地偶然发现它。那种激情已经存在了。你只需要找到它。然后你就能驾驭激情到达顶峰。
Should be easy, right? Totally wrong. Ask anyone you consider successful about their journey. They're likely to tell you it wasn't easy. They probably failed multiple times along the way.
应该很简单，对吧? 完全错误。向你认为成功的人询问他们的经历。他们可能会告诉你这并不容易。他们可能失败了很多次。
This is yet another problem the find your passion advice. People assume they'll be endlessly motivated to keep going. A passion sounds like it should be easy and fun. So when you inevitably hit a hurdle or it becomes challenging, you're more likely to get discouraged and quit.
这是另一个问题，找到你的激情建议。人们认为他们会有无限的动力继续前进。激情听起来应该是简单而有趣的。因此，当你不可避免地遇到障碍或遇到挑战时，你更有可能气馁并放弃。
In another experiment, the researchers showed students a video about black holes. Most of them were intrigued. When the same students had to read a complex article on the same topic, they quickly lost interest. It was just too hard to understand.
在另一项实验中，研究人员向学生展示了一段关于黑洞的视频。大多数人都很感兴趣。当这些学生不得不阅读一篇关于同一主题的复杂文章时，他们很快就失去了兴趣。这太难以理解了
。
The researchers wrote a poetic conclusion: "Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry."
研究人员得出了一个富有诗意的结论:“敦促人们找到自己的激情可能会让他们把所有的鸡蛋放在一个篮子里，但当这个篮子变得难以携带时，他们就会把它扔掉。”
What you should do instead
那你应该怎么做呢
The researchers propose people follow this advice instead: Develop your passion.
研究人员建议人们遵循以下建议: 培养你的激情。
This approach is more realistic. Developing your passion entails working at it. It means you might suck at it at times. And it means the path might be difficult. But if you keep at it, you can achieve. "You take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment," Walton said.
这种方法更现实。培养你的激情需要努力。这意味着你有时会做得很糟糕。这意味着这条路可能会很艰难。但是如果你坚持下去，你会成功的。沃顿说:“你需要一些时间去做，你会遇到挑战，随着时间的推移，你会建立起这种承诺。”
Develop your passion might one piece of advice both Bill Gates and Mark Cuban can get behind. Though Gates found his passion for software development at a young age, he certainly had to develop it to build his Microsoft empire. Mark Cuban's path to success may have been different, but it also entailed putting in time to get really good at something.
培养热情可能比尔·盖茨和马克·库班都会落后。尽管盖茨在很小的时候就发现了他对软件开发的热情，但是他必须开发它来建立他的微软帝国。马克·库班的成功之路可能有所不同，但也需要投入时间去真正做好某件事。
Fulfilling work you're passionate about is definitely achievable. Just don't be so foolish as to think this will make every work day amazing. Even Oprah agrees. "Your job is not always going to fulfill you," she told journalism graduates during her University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism commencement speech. "There will be some days when you just might be bored. Other days you may not feel like going to work at all. Go anyway."
完成你热爱的工作是完全可以实现的。只是不要傻到认为这会让每一个工作日都很精彩。就连奥普拉也很赞同这点。“你的工作并不总能满足你，”这是她在南加州大学安纳伯格传播与新闻学院的毕业典礼上发表演讲时对新闻系毕业生说过的话。“总有一天你会觉得无聊。其他时候，你可能根本不想去工作。无论如何还是去吧。”