Benjamin Todd

And the third problem is that it can make people needlessly limit their options.

If you're interested in literature, it's easy to think that you must become a writer to have a satisfying career and ignore other options.

It's also easy to have the idea that your one true passion will be immediately obvious and eliminate options that aren't immediately satisfying.

But in fact, you can become passionate about new areas.

If your work helps others, you practice to get good at it, you work on engaging tasks, and you work with people you'd like, then you'll become passionate about it.

The six ingredients are all about the context of the work, not the content.

Twenty years ago, we would never have imagined being passionate about giving career advice, but here we are writing this book.

Many successful people are passionate, but often their passion developed alongside their success and took a long time to discover rather than coming first.

Steve Jobs started out passionate about Zen Buddhism.

He got into technology as a way to make some quick cash.

But as he became successful, his passion grew until he became the most famous advocate of doing what you love.

In reality, rather than having a single passion, our interests change often, and more than we expect.

Think back to what you were most interested in five years ago, and you'll probably find that it's pretty different from what you're interested in today.

And as we saw above, we're bad at knowing what really makes us happy.

This all means you have more options for a fulfilling career than you think.

Do what contributes.

Rather than follow your passion, our slogan for a fulfilling career is, get good at something that helps others, or simply do what contributes.

We highlight get good because if you find something that you're good at that others value, you'll have plenty of career opportunities, which gives you the best chance of finding a dream job with all the other ingredients, engaging work, supportive colleagues, lack of major negatives, and fit with the rest of your life.

You can have all the other five ingredients, however, and still find your work meaningless.

So you need to find a way to help others, too.