If You Still Haven’t Fallen in Love with a Passion, Read This
A late bloomer’s case for taking the long way to your obsession
“There is only one way of becoming an early bloomer, but there are an infinite number of ways of being a late bloomer.” — Scott Barry Kaufman
I was 21, weeks from graduating college, and I was convinced something was deeply wrong with me.
This was peak commencement-speech season for finding your passion. Two years earlier, Steve Jobs had given his famous Stanford commencement speech — which, for the record, I still love. I’ve always been a sucker for inspiration.
“You’ve got to find what you love,” he said. “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
I had a burning desire to do great work — work I was on fire about. If I could just find my thing, I thought, I could leave mediocrity behind and finally soar.
I didn’t find my thing.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. I left high school early clutching a camera to my chest, convinced photography school would feel like home. I switched to photojournalism, then journalism, then travel writing, politics, and international relations (I nursed a secret hope of being tapped, the way Sydney Bristow was in Alias, by the CIA). I was searching for my one true passion, the thing that would make me feel whole — a calling I could organize a life around. When I didn’t find it, I graduated feeling like my life was over before it had started. If I couldn’t find my passion by the end of college, I thought, I never would.
When I look back now, with almost two decades of living between me and that version of myself, the panic sounds almost charmingly absurd. Who says we need to find our passion by the time we’re out of college? Who knows themselves well enough at twenty-one to know what they actually love?
(Of course, a few do, which is why the rest of us think we should have it figured out by that age.)
There’s another issue with Jobs’s commencement speech, which I was just re-reading. I noticed these lines:
“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking — and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
Without meaning to, Jobs was promoting what the psychologist Paul O’Keefe calls the fixed theory of interest — the idea that our passions are out there just waiting to be found, that they’re fully formed, and that when we do find them, we’ll just know. But this is rarely how passions work: as Paul told me in an interview, “if you believe you’re supposed to find your passion, then what that suggests is that it already exists, it’s already there. And all you have to do is uncover it and reveal it.”
But, he explained, “that’s not how interests and passions work.” They’re developed over time — by following curiosities, by building skills, and by learning what you like and don’t like.
There are several reasons it makes sense that we might not develop our deepest passions until later in life.
First, as my friend the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman points out in one of my favorite articles about late bloomers, our brains are still developing well past the age most of us assume. The genes responsible for our abilities don’t come online all at once. Different traits come online at different times, like sections of an orchestra waking up at different moments. And one of the most important developments is invisible: the myelin sheath, the fatty coating that speeds information through the brain. Humans don’t reach peak myelin volume until their fifties.
Which is to say: as we age, we don’t just collect experience, we get better at accessing it — drawing connections between things that once looked unrelated. All of which means a passion that didn’t pull us in at twenty can become an obsession at forty.
Another reason is simpler still: exposure. In all my research on passionate people, exposure has shown up as the single biggest predictor of when a passion takes hold. You can’t fall in love with something you don’t know exists. And contrary to the love-at-first-sight myth, most passions take repeated exposure — months, sometimes years — before they stick.
Then there are the layers we build, slowly and often invisibly, over time. David Epstein makes this case in one of my favorite non-fiction books, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. His argument, in brief: people who sample broadly — picking up skills, frameworks, and curiosities across seemingly unrelated fields — tend to outperform early specialists in the long run, because the creative work that matters most depends on cross-pollination and pattern recognition between domains. The windy path, in other words, isn’t a detour from the work. It is the work. The same applies to passion. You don’t only discover a passion — you become ready for it.
And this isn’t just about careers. I assumed for years that because I hadn’t found a sport I loved by twenty-one, I was destined to be unathletic for life — to hate exercise the way other people, including most members of my own family, seemed to love it. (I wish I could go back and assure my younger self that the two athletic obsessions of her adult life — handstands and jiu-jitsu — were still ahead.)
Even writing this now, something clicks: ever since I fell in love with jiu-jitsu four years ago, part of me has wished I’d started as a kid. But I had two things working against me. First, there wasn’t a jiu-jitsu academy anywhere near my hometown, and I didn’t know a single person who trained. Second — and maybe just as important — I hadn’t yet built the layers it would take. The strength and body awareness from years of calisthenics. The presence and focus from studying sports psychology. The appetite for putting it all out there in public that any serious competitor has to develop. Even if I had been exposed to jiu-jitsu at twelve, the odds I would have tried it — let alone stuck with it after discovering I wasn’t a child prodigy — were close to zero.
“Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period,” David Brooks writes in my other favorite article about late bloomers.
All of which is to say: if you haven’t yet fallen in love with a passion — a career, a sport, an instrument, a craft — it’s not too late. Like me, you might just be a late bloomer.
There’s plenty more specific advice out there on what we can learn from late bloomers of the past (read all the linked pieces above as well as this book by Rich Karlgaard — they’re each reassuring in their own way). What I can offer from my own brutal wandering period and from years of studying people who found their passions late is this: trust that it will come together. It may be much later than you thought, or than you would have ideally chosen. But the layers are doing their work, underneath the surface, the whole time.
Follow your curiosities. Stay open-minded. Look for connections. Keep trying things — open-mindedness, it turns out, is one of the most important precursors to passion.
At some point, something will click. When it does, it will probably feel as if your whole life had been leading up to here. Because, in a way, it was.