If You’ve Lost Your Passion, Try Making It Harder

What the mastery loop teaches us about keeping passion alive.

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” - Sigmund Freud

I’ve spent the last two years talking to passionate people from all corners of life — bonsai masters and dragon boat helms, sports psychologists, children’s book illustrators, even die-hard Murakami fans. Most of these conversations have been for On Fire, but even when I’m not in official research mode, the topic seems to find its way in. (Asking what someone loves, I’ve learned, is the fastest way to skip small talk and get to the good stuff.)

I started On Fire because I wanted to understand something for myself: why some people stay lit up for a lifetime while others slowly lose their spark. What keeps passion burning once the honeymoon phase wears off? That’s the question I keep returning to — in my interviews, in my research, and in my own life.

Over time, certain patterns have started to emerge. Whether someone is obsessed with handstands or myths, presidential birthplaces or mentalism, the truly passionate ones share a few things in common.

First, there’s the community — almost everyone I speak to mentions the people they’ve met through their pursuit and the sense of belonging and shared enthusiasm that keeps them coming back. Then there’s freedom. Passion, at its core, is about autonomy and choice; no one can force us to feel passionate about something. Choice makes passion ours.

But the one that rarely gets talked about? Challenge. To stay passionate over time, we need something that stretches us — a skill to sharpen, a puzzle to solve, room to grow. Passion and mastery are intertwined; one keeps the other alive.

When I spoke to fingerstyle guitar legend Mary Flower about this, she understood it intuitively. She spent most of the Pandemic in a creative rut — she’d sit in her living room, guitar balanced on her knee, playing variations of the same notes for days. “I had friends that made entire albums during Covid,” she said. “I only wrote two songs.”

It was frustrating, of course. But after nearly fifty years of playing, Mary had come to expect the struggle — and even rely on it. “It’s a puzzle,” she said. “It’s finding the parts that make it interesting. I just keep kind of plowing through it until it all fits together. And when it does… it’s exhilarating.”

She smiled when she told me that, because by the time we spoke earlier this year, she’d found her flow again. “I went into an open tuning that I’d never used before, and the creative process just took off. You know that feeling when you’re so focused and having such a good time? I couldn’t stop.”

There was a lightness in her voice when she said it — the relief of someone who’d pushed through the mud and found her way back. It reminded me that those breakthroughs don’t happen despite frustration; they happen because of it. The hours that feel aimless — when you’re slogging through, ready to give up — are often the ones where your brain is quietly making connections you can’t yet see.

Even if you haven’t opened a puzzle since you were a kid, you probably remember: the easy ones were boring. The fun is in the challenge — the sense that it might almost be too hard, but not quite.

“The struggle has never stopped me before,” she said. “It’s a happy struggle.”

And that’s at the heart of it. The happiest struggle is one that still holds a challenge worth rising to. It’s what keeps our passion burning bright.

As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered, people experience their deepest engagement when their skills are stretched just beyond their current limits. Too easy, and we get bored. Too hard, and we give up. But right in that sweet spot — just at the edge of what we can do — we lose ourselves completely. Our brains crave that edge of difficulty. It’s where flow — and passion — thrive.

My friend, psychologist and mentalist Scott Barry Kaufman, calls this the “dynamic cycle between ability and engagement.” The more you engage in something, the more your skills grow — and the more your skills grow, the more engaged and passionate you become.

I’ve come to see this as the mastery loop: a self-reinforcing cycle where progress fuels motivation, and motivation fuels progress. The more you learn, the more you want to keep going. It’s the momentum that turns curiosity into commitment, and beginners into lifers.

I’ve felt this in my own life, too. When something comes too easily, I lose interest fast. But the pursuits that have held my attention the longest — handstands, writing, jiu-jitsu, passion itself — are all difficult and endlessly complex. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. It’s frustrating at times, of course, but the struggle is also what keeps me coming back.

Even writing this article reminded me of it. The idea had been swirling in my head for months, but translating something that, in one sense, feels like common sense into words kept eluding me. (Though as Shawn Achor wrote in The Happiness Advantage, “Common sense is not common action.”). I’d write a few lines, delete them, walk away — but I couldn’t let it go. Challenge, it turns out, doesn’t just fuel passion; it fuels persistence.

(Did I succeed? I’m not sure, but the challenge was mostly enjoyable.)

Challenge doesn’t just keep passion alive in theory — it’s something you can practice. Here’s how to build it into your own pursuits:

1. Reframe difficulty as a sign of growth.

When something feels hard, take it as evidence that you’re growing, not failing. Frustration isn’t a dead end — it’s a signal that your brain is stretching to make new connections. Difficulty means you’re still in the game, not drifting into boredom.

2. Follow your curiosity down new rabbit holes.

If you’re feeling or uninspired, don’t abandon your passion — shift angles. Every deep pursuit has hidden side quests: a new technique, a tougher variation, a fresh perspective. Curiosity is how you restart the loop: it turns stagnation into discovery.

3. Shrink the challenge to make it fun again.

Sometimes the road ahead feels too long and winding. When that happens, zoom in. Focus on one small skill, one experiment, one question to explore. Like a climber finding a new foothold, a tiny step forward can reignite momentum — and make the whole climb feel possible again.

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Because in the end, passion isn’t something we find once and keep forever. It’s something we rebuild each time we meet a new challenge with curiosity instead of fear. Mastery turns struggle into devotion.

The spark gets you started — but it’s the daily act of leaning into the hard parts that keeps the fire burning.

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