Benjamin Todd

Rather, you can develop passion by doing work that you find enjoyable and meaningful.

The key is to get good at something that helps other people.

Where we go wrong

The usual way people try to work out their dream job is to imagine different jobs and think about how satisfying they seem.

Or they think about times they've felt fulfilled in the past and self-reflect about what matters most to them.

If this were a normal career guide, we'd start by getting you to write out a list of what you most want from a job, like working outdoors and working with ambitious people.

The best-selling career advice book of all time, What Colour Is Your Parachute?, recommends exactly this.

The hope is that deep down, people know what they really want.

However, research shows that although self-reflection is useful, it only goes so far.

You can probably think of times in your own life when you were excited about a holiday or party, but when it actually happened, it was just okay.

In the last few decades, research has shown that this is common.

We're not always great at predicting what will make us most happy, and we don't realize how bad we are.

You can find an overview of some of this research in the footnotes.

Turns out, we're even bad at remembering how satisfying different experiences were.

One well-established mistake is that we often judge experiences mainly by their endings.

If you missed your flight on the last day of an enjoyable holiday, you'll probably remember the holiday as bad.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

Professor Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness This means we can't just trust our intuitions.

We need a more systematic way of working out which job is best for us.

The same research that proves how bad we are at self-reflection can help us make more informed choices.