According to Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams, in his recent book How to fail at almost everything and still win big: Kind of the story of my life, passion and goals are way overrated.
    
Passion is pointless, he says. Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, and Mark Zuckerberg have all credited passion as the key to their success. And Adams postulates that the winners of American Idol are passionate people, but adroitly notes: so are all those who did not make it.

Eric Crampton, our Head of Research has been helping us brush up on our statistics lately, to remind us how to see through “bovine manure” as Adams so eloquently euphemizes. When celebrities or supposedly scientific studies claim that passion leads to success, it is necessary to consider some alternative explanations.

Does passion causes success? Does success cause passion? Or, is there something else going on that explains both the rise of passion and success?

To illustrate how ludicrous it is to conclude causation from correlation, consider that organic food sales are almost perfectly correlated with autism. Does eating organic food cause autism? Or is something else, like the wealth of a country, explaining both? (Organic food is expensive, and diagnosis of autism is more likely in countries with advanced health systems).

There is nothing wrong with passion per se – passion feels good - but it is unlikely to be the cause of success.

Adams also advises: forget goals, arguing they can be too precise in an unpredictable world. “You can’t predict where your career will be in a year. You can’t predict what technologies will change the world. You can’t predict whether robots will be taking your jobs. So picking a goal in this world has its downsides.”

Instead, he advocates for systems.  “Aiming for your boss’s job” is a goal, says Adams. But “making yourself more valuable for a variety of better jobs is a system”.

And there is a third ingredient typically found in recipes of success, which can probably also be ruled out: confidence.

Studies show that like passion and success, confidence and success are correlated. However, when measures of initial competence are taken into account, the correlation disappears.

One particular study found that while confident children were more likely to do better at school later on, the correlation between confidence and success disappeared when their previous success was controlled for. In other words, it was children's initial success that lead to later confidence and later success.  The study’s author said “Kids who do well feel confident because they did well; kids who feel confident despite not having done well don’t end up doing any better”.

Adams’ advice is refreshingly simple. Forget being passionate, goal-oriented, and while we are at it, confident.  If you want success, the only thing you need to be is valuable.  

Confidence and passion may result.