Don't find your passion, build it through progress

The Short Version

The popular advice to "find your passion" gets the order backwards for most people. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke tells patients to "Stop looking for your passion. And instead look around right where you are" [1]. Neurologist Masud Husain describes motivation as a loop of starting, persevering and learning from outcomes, and he agrees with Andrew Huberman that waiting for passion to arrive may not work [2]. Tony Hawk, who says plainly "I wasn't a natural," has spent more than 40 years chasing the buzz of figuring out a trick he had worked through himself [3]. Maya Shankar adds a caveat: sometimes passion does arrive early, but what lasts is curiosity and the joy of getting better [4]. Put together, their answer is that passion is usually built by effort and progress, not found before the work starts.

Table of contents

What They Said

Anna Lembke: stop searching and look at what needs doing

Lembke, a psychiatrist who is chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic and the author of Dopamine Nation, comes to passion from an unexpected direction: boredom and addiction [1]. Huberman opens the topic by pointing out how widespread the passion story is, noting that "Even the commencement speech given by Steve Jobs on this campus was really about finding passion" [1]. He asks whether there is a link between how boring ordinary life can feel and a tendency toward addiction [1].

Lembke's answer starts with what modern life is like. "I think that life for humans has always been hard, but I think that now it's harder in unprecedented ways," she says, and "the way that life is really hard now is that it actually is really boring" [1]. The reason is that "all of our survival needs are met" [1]. People differ in how much friction they need, and she believes many of her patients are unhappy not because their brains are broken but because their brains are not suited to this world [1]. After 25 years in psychiatry she has come to think that much of what we now call mental illness consists of traits that would be useful in a different environment [1].

Against that background, she sees the "find your passion" message as a mixed blessing. "In a way that's good because it has people out in the world and seeking," she says, but it can also be misleading, because people are not fully aware "that the world is a hard place and that life is hard" [1]. Its cost falls hardest on the young: "There's a lot of burden now on young people that they have to find that perfect thing. And until they found that perfect thing, they're going to be miserable" [1].

Her alternative is direct: "You don't have to do that. Look at the life you were given. Look at the people around you. Look at the jobs that present themselves to you and do that job simply and honorably one day at a time" [1]. She suggests asking what needs to be done, even something as small as picking up litter [1]. She ties this to the "incredible humility" she sees in people in recovery, who feel "so broken, so ashamed" but "pick yourself up one day at a time" and build a life around the question "what can I do right in this moment that might benefit another person and thereby benefit me?" [1].

Her clearest example is the young patients who game all day and hate their studies. She tells them they have it backwards: video games are so dopaminergic that nothing else can compete, and after abstaining, many are surprised to find their classes interesting again [1]. The lack of passion for school was not proof that school was the wrong fit. It came from a reward system flooded by something far more stimulating. In her framework, escaping the present through screens or drugs is "the booby prize" [1].

Lembke also puts boredom in a different light. Boredom, she says, is scary and can feel like free fall, but it is also where we face what we truly value [1]. When Huberman offers that "anxiety and boredom can hang out together," she agrees: "boredom is highly anxiety provoking" [1]. Huberman adds a line that fits the whole topic: "I feel like we have a ton to do. We just don't really want to do it" [1]. In this view, much of what feels like a missing passion is really an unwillingness to sit through the discomfort of work that isn't immediately rewarding.

Finally, she links the day-to-day approach to how the brain works: the brain is wired for the 24-hour day, which is why taking life one day at a time, as 12-step groups teach, works so well [1]. She observes that chasing a prize often leaves us unsatisfied, while focusing on making each day meaningful and useful to others tends to add up to real accomplishment [1].

Huberman, via Cal Newport: skills first, passion second

In the same conversation Huberman brings up Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, which he describes as being "about not meditating or doing much work to try and figure out what one's passion is by thinking, but rather go out and acquire skills and get develop a sense of passion for something by your experience of hard work and getting better" [1]. He links this to "a little bit of the growth mindset thing our colleague Carol Dweck" and to Navy SEALs he knows who constantly scan for what needs doing [1]. Lembke's answer to what should I do? and Newport's answer to how do I get passionate? land in the same place: do the work in front of you, get better at it, and the attachment follows.

Masud Husain: motivation is built through starting, persevering and learning

Husain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford, gives the most mechanical account of how drive works [2]. He admits that about 15 years ago he thought of motivation mainly as personality [2]. Then he met David, a productive and sociable man in his 30s who suddenly stopped caring about anything after two tiny strokes in the basal ganglia, specifically the ventral striatum [2]. David wasn't unhappy, but he would not even set up his stereo to listen to music he enjoyed, because it would take too much effort (about five minutes of work) [2]. A dopamine agonist, ropinirole, restored him: three months later he arrived showered, in a suit, with a new job and a new girlfriend [2]. For Husain, the case showed that motivation has a biology that can be taken apart, and sometimes repaired [2].

From this he builds a framework. The brain values each possible action by its expected reward and its cost in physical, cognitive, social or emotional effort, and the winner becomes your motivated behavior [2]. Across neurological disorders, his team found a consistent signature: "everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards" [2]. That matters for the passion question. Almost everyone will chase a thrilling goal. What separates people is whether they will do the small, unexciting steps.

Husain then describes motivation in stages: starting, persevering, and then the pleasant or unpleasant outcome, which feeds reinforcement learning and changes how we value that option next time [2]. Dopamine is involved in this learning too [2]. He stresses that starting isn't enough; people who don't finish show that completing matters just as much [2]. This is where passion comes from in his model: the value we assign to an activity is not fixed. It is updated each time we try, persist and see a result.

The key passion exchange in this episode comes from Huberman, and Husain responds. Huberman describes his "chop wood, carry water" mode: "I just really don't want to do something. And I say, say like, all right, it's chop wood, carry water. I'm doing it just to do it. And you finish and you feel pretty good about the effort" [2]. He answers the many questions he gets about finding passion this way: "you find your passion by getting good at effort in things that you're not passionate about so that when you eventually find your passion, you can just get there much faster. You can't just sit around waiting to be passionate" [2]. He points back to David as the cautionary case, "that's sort of what David was doing," and "it wasn't pulling him forward" [2]. Husain agrees that waiting for passion to arrive may not work [2].

Husain adds a warning about how we read our failures along the way. Generalizing them in an unhelpful way, concluding you are bad at everything, can shade into depression [2]. He is careful to separate the two conditions: apathy and depression can occur separately or together, David had pure apathy, and some depressed people remain motivated [2]. He also notes that apathy can show up in some areas of life and not others, so someone might be socially apathetic but highly curious intellectually, and one failure doesn't have to spread to everything [2].

On long-term drive, the kind that sustains a career, Husain is frank about what science doesn't yet know. Most studies are over very short time scales, like "the slot machine type of study" [2]. He thinks extended, years-long perseverance involves "much higher level goals and plans that you might think are being constructed in the cortex particularly the frontal cortex," rather than simply the basal ganglia [2]. People also vary a lot in how they discount delayed rewards: "people differ in their levels of how they will discount the reward that they're willing to take with time and that varies enormously between people" [2]. Asked what lets someone wait a year for a bigger reward, he says "I don't think we've we've really got the neuroscience of that" [2]. Likewise, he says the neuroscience of ambition isn't known, and he recalls the Harvard study of aging suggesting that people living "average" lives reported the highest happiness [2]. He credits his own path to Oxford, neurology, research and writing to refusing to accept limits [2].

Huberman offers his own practical rule for long efforts: "get a PhD because you'll teach yourself that you can work on things for long periods of time, sustain a lot of effort and uncertainty" and come away able to say "I can do hard things uncertain things over four to six years" [2]. He adds, "hopefully you're interested in what you're doing it really helps" [2]. He also describes perseverance as "making the pain a shorter experience than the win," letting wins "seep into our self-concept a little bit more," which he calls "a functional self-dilusion" [2].

Tony Hawk: 40 years of drive grown from getting better

Tony Hawk is the living example. Huberman introduces him as someone who "for more than 40 years" has "been at the forefront of skateboarding, developing new maneuvers," and who "still to this day, skateboards daily" [3]. Huberman frames the episode around "the whole concept of a life of continual progression" [3].

Hawk's story does not begin with a destiny. As a child he was put in advanced classes, which felt like being classified as a nerd, and he thought he might become a teacher [3]. He was fine at basketball and baseball but never the standout [3]. When he started skating around 1977 or 1978, it was a fad and mostly transportation [3]. His first trip to Oasis skatepark in San Diego was an epiphany: watching people fly around the pool looked like magic [3]. Skating appealed to him because he could be a daredevil and part of a scene while doing it his own way [3].

That early spark is real, but Hawk is clear that talent was not what carried him: "I wasn't a natural" [3]. He was gangly and fell constantly [3]. He was physically tiny, still looking 13 at 16, and wore elbow pads as knee pads [3]. He turned pro at 14, when there was no real career to aspire to; first prize at a contest was $150 [3]. His style was mocked, he was labeled a trick or robot skater, and Thrasher criticized him even when he won [3]. His answer was to go back to the skatepark and learn more tricks until his foundation was undeniable [3]. The turn came at the Upland Pipeline, a big, rough, frightening pool, where he drove every weekend after school, skating Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday morning, making it his mission to figure it out [3].

The clearest evidence for the insight is what Hawk says feels best. He goes back to learning backside varials below coping, alone in the pool at Oasis, when no one had done them before [3]. The feeling as he rode away was unlike anything he had experienced, and he calls it the buzz he has been chasing ever since, because he thought of it, worked through it and figured it out [3]. His lifelong drive, in other words, is tied to a moment of progress he earned. Huberman frames this neurochemically: "It's like a chemical fingerprint of progress" [3]. That small trick became the building block for full 360 varials six feet in the air [3].

His method for new tricks shows the same pattern of building on work already done. He combines existing tricks and checks whether body positions will work in sequence: "I have all the pieces to this" [3]. He never throws caution to the wind hoping to see what happens [3]. Even now, each new trick takes real effort. About a 360 shove-it to 5-0 to fakie he landed once, he says "it's going to take the same amount of effort. I didn't learn from that one that I made some trick that makes it happen every time" [3]. Ideas come to him in the twilight state before sleep and in ordinary moments: "That's usually in the sort of mundane moments that I get inspiration" [3]. Before the X Games in Japan he conceived a half-cab body varial to backside blunt while falling asleep, prepared for weeks, made it twice alone on his ramp, and landed it on his last run. It didn't move the needle with the judges, but for him it was a huge moment [3].

On talent versus drive, Hawk has watched both kinds of skater. He has seen naturally gifted skaters who lacked discipline and didn't take advantage of their gifts, and driven, sloppy skaters who became the best [3]. He names Andrew Reynolds, who joined his team and kept sending videos of new techniques until he became the boss [3]. Hawk says drive deserves as much weight as natural ability, and he would say more [3]. Huberman agrees, comparing it to scientists who keep working when others leave, and adds that a little internal friction helps [3]. He also notes that "there's no deep fake version of skateboarding": you can't fake skill on a board [3].

Hawk's drive held even after his worst injury. He broke his femur doing a 540 McTwist, a trick he had done thousands of times, then rushed back and lived with a non-union fracture for months [3]. After surgery and two months without movement, he was relearning tricks every session [3]. He accepted some losses (he can't reliably grab a slob air anymore) but felt he had to do a 540 again, not out of pride [3]. He changed his diet, stopped drinking, practiced just the spin and the landing zone, and built a playlist for the trick [3]. He went high on purpose: "The bigger the ramps for me, the safer it is because I have a better landing zone" [3]. He made it after about an hour and a half, helped by a tip from a 10-year-old skater, Reese Nelson: "I think you need to pull out a little more" [3].

Notably, Hawk admits he doesn't think about his drive much; he just knows he has to do it [3]. And the deep enjoyment came late. He says he has only truly enjoyed what skating has given him in the last five to ten years: "I can't believe I get to do it for a living" [3].

Maya Shankar: the anchor is curiosity and getting better, not the activity

Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar adds a view that both supports and complicates the thesis [4]. She fell in love with the violin at six after finding her grandmother's violin in the attic, and her parents never had to push her to practice [4]. So for her, a strong passion did arrive early. But at Juilliard, as a self-critical teenager comparing herself to true prodigies, she found her joy lower after age 12 [4]. Then a torn tendon ended her career at 15, and she went through what cognitive scientists call identity paralysis [4].

What rebuilt her was not a new passion that arrived fully formed. After reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, rather than asking whether she loved cognition as much as the violin, a bar nothing could meet, she asked a gentler question: am I curious enough to want to learn more? [4]. She then talked her way into upper-level classes and research labs to test whether she enjoyed the actual process, not just the idea [4]. She warns about the gap between the two: "You're really passionate about something. But you actually hate the process, right? Like you hate the actual work that's involved in getting better at it" [4]. For her, it was important that "I not only was excited, but that I could actually enjoy parts of the process of getting better" [4].

She now anchors "my identity to why I do the things I do rather than what I do" [4], and names two traits that define her: "One is that I'm a deeply curious person and the second is that I really relish getting better at things. I love seeing progress internally" [4]. Those, she says, "no one could take" away from her, in her violin life or her current one, and they give her "a foundation that feels really sturdy" [4]. Huberman describes these traits as not "domain specific": "the desire for progress through effort and through focus" [4]. She also says finding what you love is slow and repeated: "It can sometimes take you years, decades to figure out what it is that you love, what you're passionate about," and "it's not also a one-time experience" [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: don't wait for passion before you act. Lembke tells people to stop looking and do the job in front of them [1]. Huberman says "You can't just sit around waiting to be passionate," and Husain agrees that waiting may not work [2]. Hawk's life shows the alternative: return to the park, learn more tricks, and let the buzz of figuring things out keep pulling you forward [3]. Shankar replaced do I love this as much as violin? with am I curious enough to learn more? [4].

Agreement: progress is what feeds drive. Husain's model says the outcome of each effort changes how we value that option next time [2]. Hawk has chased the feeling of his first self-invented trick for decades [3], and Huberman calls it "a chemical fingerprint of progress" [3]. Shankar says "I love seeing progress internally" [4]. Newport, as Huberman describes him, says passion develops through "hard work and getting better" [1].

Agreement: effort beats talent over time. Hawk would put drive ahead of natural ability and has watched gifted skaters waste their gifts [3]. Husain found that everyone works for big rewards; the difference lies in whether people take on the small ones [2].

Where they differ: can passion come first? The sources don't fully agree that passion is always the result. Shankar fell in love with the violin at six before any serious training [4], and Hawk's first visit to Oasis was an epiphany that looked like magic [3]. Huberman's own wording leaves room for this: getting good at effort helps "so that when you eventually find your passion, you can just get there much faster" [2], which suggests passion is still something you eventually find. The best reading of all four sources is that an early spark can come first, but sustained drive over years (Hawk's 40 years, Shankar's rebuilt career) grows from effort and improvement. Shankar's own case shows a spark alone is fragile: her joy dropped under comparison at Juilliard [4].

Where they differ: is the passion message harmful or useful? Lembke is the harshest critic, arguing it puts a burden on young people, though she grants it gets people "out in the world and seeking" [1]. Shankar doesn't reject passion; she redirects it from a specific activity to underlying reasons like curiosity and connection [4].

Where they differ: how much do we know? Lembke speaks from clinical experience [1]. Husain is more cautious about the science of long-term drive, saying the neuroscience of waiting for bigger rewards and of ambition isn't yet known [2]. He also pushes back on the popular idea of "dopamine hits" from scrolling, saying the evidence isn't really very strong [2], while Lembke calls social media "a drug and it's engineered to be a drug" [1]. They share the basic point that dopamine is involved in wanting and learning, but they disagree on how confidently it can be applied to phones.

Why It Works

Rewards compete, and the strongest one wins. Lembke explains that pleasure and pain are processed in the same brain regions and act like a seesaw that always wants to return to level [1]. Overindulging in high-dopamine activities makes the brain turn down its own dopamine transmission [1]. That is why ordinary work seems dull next to gaming, and why abstaining can make classes interesting again [1]. Some of what feels like "no passion" is a reward system tuned to something more intense. Her 30-day reset is based on this: in her clinical experience, that is roughly how long it takes the reward pathway to recover, and "you will feel worse before you feel better" [1].

Motivation is a reward-versus-effort calculation. Husain describes the brain valuing each option by expected reward and effort cost, with dopamine circuits in the basal ganglia turning the result into action [2]. Apathetic people still work for high rewards but turn down low ones [2]. In a study of Oxford students, the apathetic ones even showed more activity in the ventral striatum and medial frontal areas while deciding: "apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision" [2]. Thinking about effort costs something on top of the effort itself.

Outcomes reshape value. Because outcomes feed reinforcement learning and change how we value an option next time, each finished effort that goes well raises the value of doing it again [2]. This is the most direct mechanism the sources give for passion growing out of effort. Hawk's lifelong pursuit of the feeling from his first backside varial is a real-world version of it [3].

Perceived effort is often larger than real effort. Huberman notes that for learning a skill like the tango, the actual work "in most cases turns out to be much lower than the perceived effort" [2]. His friend Ken Rideout tells rivals he never gets tired and then pulls away; as Huberman says, "the hill is the hill," which suggests part of what we feel as effort was a mental cost all along [2].

Starting and being recognized along the way add reward. Husain says starting is often a big motivational pull, and a manager's "well done" gives a reward before the project is finished [2]. Breaking work into if-then pieces turns a mountain into a series of mounds [2].

Agency and intrinsic motivation. Shankar notes that people are much more satisfied with outcomes "when it's them that's in the driver's seat" [4]. Huberman cites the Bing Nursery School finding that rewarding kids for something they already enjoy undermines intrinsic motivation [4]. Drive grows best when the reward is the progress itself.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies most to people stuck waiting. Lembke's young patients who feel they must find "that perfect thing" before they can be happy are the clearest case [1]. So are Huberman's listeners who ask how to find their passion [2].

It applies to long careers. Hawk's 40 years show drive growing through setbacks, criticism, lean years and injury [3]. Shankar's shift from violin to cognitive science shows the approach works after a loss [4].

It doesn't mean passion never comes first. Some people do fall for something early, as Shankar did with the violin and Hawk did at Oasis [3][4]. The thesis is about what's usual and what lasts, not a rule for everyone.

It isn't grind at anything forever. Shankar warns that you can be passionate about an idea but hate the process, and she tested whether she enjoyed the actual work before committing [4]. Husain notes that apathy can be specific to some areas [2]. Effort builds passion best where you can see progress and feel some curiosity.

It has limits when something medical is going on. David's apathy came from strokes and only lifted with medication [2]. Husain warns that turning failures into "I'm bad at everything" can shade into depression, and that apathy and depression can occur separately or together [2]. Lembke's patients with severe addictions may need residential care [1]. If a lack of drive is total, sudden, or comes with low mood or compulsive use, talk to a doctor or mental health professional rather than treating it as a passion problem.

The science of long-term drive is incomplete. Husain says most studies cover short time scales, and the neuroscience of waiting for big rewards and of ambition isn't yet known [2]. The mechanisms above explain short loops of effort and reward well. The years-long picture relies more on stories like Hawk's [3].

What To Do With It

1. Drop the search and look around. Follow Lembke's advice: "Look at the jobs that present themselves to you and do that job simply and honorably one day at a time" [1]. Ask what needs doing today, even something as small as picking up litter [1].

2. Reduce the rewards that drown out everything else. If games, feeds or other high-dopamine habits make ordinary work feel dull, try a break. Lembke uses 30 days for serious habits and says even a single day can help with milder ones like most people's phone use; expect to feel worse before you feel better [1].

3. Practice "chop wood, carry water." Do some tasks you don't want to do, just to do them, so you get good at effort itself [2].

4. Make starting cheap. Plan your day or week in advance because "Every decision has a cost," break projects into if-then pieces, and just start [2].

5. Finish things and notice the result. Husain stresses that completing matters as much as starting, since outcomes shape how you value the work next time [2]. Ask for, or give yourself, recognition along the way [2].

6. Build new skills from pieces you already have. Like Hawk, combine what you already know ("I have all the pieces to this") and progress step by step rather than hoping for a leap [3].

7. Keep going when criticized. Hawk's response to mockery was to return to the park and learn more tricks until his foundation was undeniable [3]. Pick your own "Upland Pipeline," a hard challenge you return to until you figure it out [3].

8. Test the process, not the idea. Before committing, do the real work for a while, as Shankar did in research labs, to see whether you enjoy getting better at it [4]. Ask am I curious enough to learn more? rather than do I love this? [4].

9. Anchor to why, not what. Name the underlying traits you bring to any work, such as curiosity and relishing progress, so your drive survives a change of field [4].

10. Hold wins longer than losses. Let your wins "seep into our self-concept a little bit more," as Huberman puts it, and don't let one failure spread into "I'm bad at everything" [2].

Sources

1. Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction · Huberman Lab
2. Dr. Masud Husain on Motivation, Apathy, and the Brain's Effort vs. Reward Trade-Off · Huberman Lab
3. Tony Hawk: Harnessing Passion, Drive & Persistence for Lifelong Success · Huberman Lab
4. Dr Maya Shankar How To Shape Your Identity Goals · Huberman Lab