Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The sweet spot is where the demands placed on you slightly exceed your current abilities.
That's a fulfilling challenge.
What you should really aim for in a dream job.
Instead of following your passion, be systematic in working out what will or won't bring satisfaction.
There has now been three decades of research into positive psychology, the science of happiness, to guide us towards what that might be, as well as decades of surveys and research looking at job satisfaction and motivation in particular.
We've applied all this to make the following five criteria for a dream job.
The first lesson is that what really matters is not your salary, status, or even your job title, but rather what you do day by day and hour by hour.
1.
Work that's engaging Engaging work is work that draws you in, holds your attention, enables you to enter a state of flow, the sense of immersion that emerges when absorbed in a task.
It's the reason rambling, incoherent meetings feel like pure drudgery, while an hour spent playing a video game can feel like no time at all.
Games are designed to be as engaging as possible.
Why are video games engaging while so many aspects of office life aren't?
In a major meta-analysis, researchers identified the following four factors, which have been called the most empirically verified predictors of job satisfaction.
The freedom to decide how to perform your work.
Clear tasks with a well-defined start and end.
Variety in the nature of those tasks.
And feedback so you know how well you're doing.
These factors correlate about twice as much with job satisfaction as match between your interests and your job.
And while they are even more important for people who especially desire accomplishment and learning, they matter for everyone.
Interestingly, these four factors are about how your work is structured, not its content.
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