The Desire to Know or Learn
How interests shape our attention, our work, and our lives.
How do you know what you’re interested in? I asked my class that the other day and here’s what they said:
Just trying things.
Seeing other people do things that captures your attention.
Intrinsic motivation - what are you naturally drawn to? what do you do just to do it?
Enthusiasm - things you enjoy doing or sharing with other people.
Flow state - doing something where you’re not focused on time.
When I was in graduate school, I had an immense amount of reading to do each day and never enough time to get to it all. I probably stayed up late six nights a week trying to get to it all in.
My days had this pattern where I would read and finish assignments in the morning, take the dog for a long walk, go to class in the afternoon or evening (where I’d get more reading assigned), come home and eat dinner with my wife, then as she was headed to bed I would work up the energy to go start reading again into the night.
It was never a fun moment, but once I got to my desk and opened a book, something would happen. I’d get a few sentences in and remember oh yeah, this is all really interesting, I like this.
I’d found a field that gave me energy, that captured my attention.
Vocational interests have always been a bit of a mystery to me - not because they’re mysterious or particularly hard to understand, but because we seem to rarely attend to them in any sort of deliberate or consistent way over the course of a career.
Here’s a funny thing about interests - they’re more stable than personality at a younger age and similarly stable in adulthood.1 That is to say, the activities and environments you tend to prefer get shaped when you’re young and tend not to change all that much as you age. Certainly they do change a bit, and the environments you find yourself in - or work yourself into - will also shape your interests (and personality) in turn. But I wonder how much of your early interests abide with you still, acknowledged/entertained or not.
In his book Draft No. 4, the acclaimed nonfiction writer John McPhee said of his own interests:
“I once made a list of all the pieces I’d written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety percent.”
Do you have interests that still remain from your childhood? Do they show up in your work?
If you’ve encountered vocational interests at all it was probably in a high school or college career counseling center. And in my experience, people tend to perceive the results as perhaps intriguing but not worth engaging, in some ways more humorous than helpful.
But the effect of interests persists.
It is as if there are these deep circulating currents in each of us that direct what we attend to, what energizes us, and what environments and outcomes we tend to seek out. And yet we spend so little time understanding these currents - what our interests are, what they mean, and how that information can help us better understand what to do.
Here’s a chart I saw recently that I thought was compelling. It compares the importance of interests, personality, and ability in predicting education and career success.2
We know ability is predictive of all sorts of outcomes, and we spend a lot of time talking about the kinds of outcomes personality can predict. Why not interests?
There may not be a better natural dynamic that we can tap into in choosing the kind of work we do, and where and how we do it.
As Michael Lewis, another acclaimed nonfiction writer, said:
[The] goal is to move through life in a way that you don’t miss the thing that you really love to do. That you don’t walk away from it by mistake. That you’re alive to it when it walks in the front door.
Are you alive to the things that spark your desire to know or learn? How do you become more alive to your interests? How do you move toward them more consistently?
Roberts, B. W., & Yoon, H. J. (2022). Personality psychology. Annual review of psychology, 73, 489-516.
Rounds, J., & Su, R. (2014). The nature and power of interests. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(2), 98-103.