‘Find your passion’? That’s bad advice, scientists say.

“Find your passion” is a mantra dictated to everyone from college students to retirees to pretty much anyone seeking happiness.

But according to a forthcoming study from Stanford and Yale-NUS College in Singapore, it’s actually bad advice – and may actually make it harder for people to figure out what they love to do.

Why? The idea of “finding” one’s passion implies that people have built-in interests just waiting to be discovered, and if you can simply figure out what they are you will magically be able to embrace them, says the study, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

But people with that mind-set are more likely to give up on their newfound interest when they hit the inevitable roadblock, the study found. Instead, researchers say true passion develops – through being open-minded about delving into a new topic, and being willing to put some work into it.

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