Passion alone won’t carry you through in the face of difficulty, he said, when overcoming those challenges actually counts.

Sunny Verma, founder of the tutoring service TutorBright, said that if “desire drives your actions, which in turn, align with your belief, that’s when great things start to happen.”

He added: “If we are not naturally good at something, it becomes really easy to give ourselves a label of, ‘I am just not good at whatever I am trying to do.’ Then we carry this mind-set of learned helplessness with us to adulthood, and if we don’t succeed on our first or second try, we think it’s better to quit.”

As a result, we tend to internalize this intense fear of being terrible at something and failing, making it difficult to enjoy the difficulties and struggles, which are necessary and healthy parts of any process for growth and success. What’s missing, according to Mr. Verma, is an emphasis on positive psychology techniques, like affirmations and encouragement.

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Think of toddlers learning to walk. They struggle to find strength in their legs and not trip every few steps, but parents cheer them on instead of focusing on the failures. While we’re not all lumbering toddlers, the point is that many of us rarely feel that positivity and encouragement around our endeavors later in life.

One important step to change our approach to potentially new passions is to redefine failure as the catalyst to change and improvement, rather than as a final destination. When you look to successful people you admire, study them not only for their victories and achievements, but also for how they overcame failures and changed as a result of them. (Click here for more advice about learning from your failures.) And when you’re pursuing new passions, remember that the process itself and the steps you need to take are just as important as your end goal. Temper your expectations and build failure in to your plan, then learn to recognize and celebrate small milestones along the way.