“Follow your passion” is advice we hear so often, it almost seems like a cliché. It sounds fabulous, except for one thing: What if you don’t have a passion?

When I first started graduate school a million years ago, I was passionate about my chosen field of social psychology, but social psychology is just too broad a topic to provide much focus. I needed to figure out a more specific theme for the research I would be doing.

The problem was, there was no particular research question that meant the world to me.

My advisor at Harvard was Robert Rosenthal. You might know him from his research on the Pygmalion effect, or how our expectations for other people can shape their behavior, and for his contributions to research methodology. When I was in graduate school, he was interested in how our expectations are communicated nonverbally.

Read more here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202105/i-didn-t-find-my-passion-until-i-was-50-years-old