Work what makes you happy

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Search Career Advice. Daniel Bortz, Monster contributor. If you're happy and you know it, you'll do a better job at work. Related Articles. Browse articles by Find The Right Career Path. Professional Development. Most Recent Jobs. The second goal worth pursuing at work is service to others —the sense that your job is making the world a better place. On the contrary, you can find service in almost any job. One of my students made this point better than I can, in an op-ed he wrote to explain why he had forgone jobs in his field of academic study to become a waiter in Barcelona.

From the April issue: Quit your job. One of the most famous examples of this comes from the first story in the Bible.

The research above sheds some light on all of this: Adam and Eve were still farmers in both cases, but you might say their relationship with the boss had soured, and they went from earning their success to dragging themselves to work to pay the bills. From the July issue: Your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think.

Okay, saying that job dissatisfaction is the price of the fall of man might be a little much, but it is pretty bad. And while a good job might not be quite as idyllic as the Garden of Eden, when we know the secrets to a career that is truly satisfying, work really can be a joy. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. This is the sort of happiness that we derive from optimal functioning and realising our potential.

Research has shown that work and effort is central to eudaimonic happiness, explaining that satisfaction and pride you feel on completing a gruelling task. On the other side of the work-life balance stands hedonic happiness, which is defined as the presence of positive feelings such as cheerfulness and the relative scarcity of negative feelings such as sadness or anger.

We know that hedonic happiness offers empirical mental and physical health benefits , and that leisure is a great way to pursue hedonic happiness. But even in the realm of leisure, our unconscious orientation towards busyness lurks in the background. A recent study has suggested that there really is such a thing as too much free time — and that our subjective wellbeing actually begins to drop if we have more than five hours of it in a day.

October 21st, 0 Comments. Nageshwar Reddy January 5, at am - Reply. Paula Clapon January 5, at pm - Reply. Ella Bane June 12, at am - Reply. Paula Clapon June 16, at pm - Reply. Resha Shrestha January 17, at am - Reply. Henrietta August 3, at am - Reply. Paula Clapon August 22, at am - Reply. Nicoli Redmayne August 5, at am - Reply. Asik khan January 19, at am - Reply. Diane April 4, at pm - Reply. Great post Paula, thank you for writing. We are hyper focused on this topic where I work.

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