Research: When It's Time to Leave a Career You're Passionate About

Harvard Business Review

16 hours ago

From commencement speeches to career advice columns, the call to 'follow your passion' is all around us. The advice, increasingly doled out and internalized, is clear: Find work you love, and pursue it relentlessly. But a wealth of research shows that we don't often get it right on the first try. Pursuing a passion can leave you burned out or misaligned with who you've become.
Consider Elizabeth Rowe, a world-leading flutist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who decided at age 50 that she wanted to pursue a different passion. To fully dedicate herself to something new, she felt that she had to quit music—something she has pursued since she was a child. But this felt antithetical to everything she's always been told: to persevere and keep going no matter how tough things got. Rowe struggled for years before finally pulling the plug, and is now (belatedly) thriving in her second career as a leadership coach.
So, why is it so difficult for people to give up on something that they are—or were—passionate about?
In our newly published research, we reveal one key barrier: worrying about being judged for walking away from a pursuit of passion. Whether it's a teacher reconsidering the classroom or a nurse thinking about leaving medicine, people worry that others will see them as immoral and incompetent for quitting their passion. As the author and former journalist Simone Stolzoff noted in an interview, 'I felt guilty. I felt that I was abandoning a calling. … Will my colleagues and my coworkers ever forgive me?'
But here's the twist: these fears are often misplaced.
The Research
In one study, we asked full-time employees who were passionate about their work to imagine giving up on it. We then asked them to predict how others would judge their moral character and competence for making that choice. In a separate sample of participants, we asked third-party observers to evaluate these same professionals for giving up on their passion.
The difference was striking: Passion pursuers expected to be judged far more harshly than they were actually judged for giving up on their current passion. We found this effect was unique to giving up on a passion. Specifically, when people were asked about giving up on work they were less passionate about (something akin to a job that is pursued to pay the bills), their expected judgments were well-calibrated with how others actually judged them for giving up.
Why the disconnect? We found that passion pursuers ruminated on all of the reasons why stepping away from their first passion signified that they were a failure. In contrast, observers—unburdened by the emotional weight of the decision—had a different view: They were more likely to view giving up as an opportunity to reengage with something better aligned with the passion pursuer. Said differently, the passion pursuers viewed giving up as 'the end of the line,' while third-party observers viewed it as 'a stop along the way,' a necessary yet courageous step to continue pursuing what matters over the course of one's career.
Crucially, we found that these anticipated negative judgments didn't just affect people's internal narratives—they also shaped how they intended to behave. In a study with PhD students highly passionate for their studies, we found that the more they feared being judged for giving up on their PhD, the less likely they intended to speak up about exploitative or unjust conditions in their programs. Speaking up about such conditions suggests dissatisfaction with one's pursuit of passion, which may have led students to worry that speaking up could be interpreted as walking away from their current passion. This pattern is not unique to academia: we observed similar dynamics among samples of teachers and nurses.
In another study, we found a way to reduce this fear of judgement. We recruited teachers who are—or once were—passionate about their work, and had thought about giving up on teaching in the past 12 months. We told half of them that people overestimate how harshly observers will view them for giving up on their passion for work. After providing this information, we measured their behavioral intentions 14 days later and found that they intended to engage in more actions related to giving up than the control group, such as creating a plan to quit and finding a resume coach. Thus, equipping people with the knowledge that their social concerns for giving up are misplaced may help people make the jump to pursue their next passion.
The Takeaways
People flourish when they see their careers as evolving journeys rather than fixed destinations, and yet so much of the discourse around passion pursuit focuses on ceaseless perseverance. We suggest reframing the discourse to emphasize that passion pursuit can have many stops along the way. Some pursuits of passion become less tenable over time as life circumstances change. Similarly, what one is passionate about today may change in the future. Both may require a pivot, and this should be seen less as giving up on a passion and more as a stop along the way of pursuing one's next venture.
If you're someone pursuing your passion and thinking about quitting, ask yourself: Are you staying because you want to—or because you're afraid of what others will think? It's easy to assume that walking away signals weakness. But our research shows the opposite: people view those who give up on a passion far more positively than predicted.
Giving up on a passion can be really difficult. After all, the time and effort invested is hard to part from. But it isn't necessarily giving up on yourself. It may be the first step toward something more aligned with who you are.