4 Rules for Identifying Your Life’s Work

A big mistake many people make in their careers is to treat work as a means to an end, be it money, power, or prestige.

When a career is just a means to an end, the payoff will be unsatisfying. With the right goals - earning your success and serving others - you can make the work itself your reward.

There are two basic types of speeches from commencement speakers: One is to “Go find your purpose.” The other is “Find work you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Scholars refer to two kinds of happiness as hedonic and eudaemonia. Hedonic is about feeling good; eudaemonia is about living a purpose-filled life.

But hedonic alone results in empty pleasure and eudaemonia by itself can become dry. In reality, we need a balance of enjoyable and meaningful. If you find something that genuinely interests you, it will lead to being intensely pleasurable.

There are four basic career patterns:

1. Linear careers, which climb steadily upward, such as the "corporate ladder" or the billionaire entrepreneur.
2. Steady-state careers involve staying at one job and growing in expertise.
3. Transitory careers are ones in which people jump from job to job or field to field, looking for new challenges.
4. Spiral careers are like a series of mini careers. People spend many years developing in a profession, then shift fields seeking work that builds on the skills of their previous mini careers.

• An unhealthy passion is an obsessive passion, characterised by intense interest, negative mood and low concentration during the activity, and unhappiness when not engaged in the activity.
• Conversely, a healthy passion, also called "harmonious passion", is characterised by happiness, good concentration and a "flow state" while doing it.

While looking for something in which you are intensely interested, go further and ask "Does this job or career bring out the best in me?"