Benjamin Todd

All this is why personal fit is one of the key factors to look for in a job.

We think of personal fit as your chances of excelling at a job if you work at it.

If we put together everything we've covered so far in the guide, this would be our formula for a perfect job.

Career capital, that's skills, connections and credentials.

plus impact, that's pressing problem in the right method, plus supportive conditions, that's engaging work, colleagues, basic needs, and fit with the rest of your life, all added together, then multiplied by personal fit.

You can use these factors to make side-by-side comparisons of different career options.

Learn more about how to do this in Appendix 4.

Personal fit is like a multiplier of everything else, which means it's probably more important than the other three factors.

So we'd never recommend taking a high-impact job that you'd be bad at.

But how can you figure out where you'll have the best personal fit?

Hopefully you have some rough ideas for long-term options from earlier in the guide.

Now we'll explain how to narrow them down and find the right career for you.

Why introspection, going with your gut, and career tests don't work.

Performance is hard to predict ahead of time.

When thinking about which career to take, our first instinct is often to turn inwards rather than outwards.

Go with your gut or follow your heart.

People we advise often spend days agonizing over which options seem best, trying to figure it out from the armchair or through introspection.

These approaches assume you can easily work out what you're going to be good at ahead of time.

But in fact, you can't.

Here's the best study we've been able to find so far on how to predict performance in different jobs over the next couple of years.