DISCOVER Your REAL Path To Success | 3 Minutes

You don't have to choose between doing what you love and making a good living. Being asked what you hope to grow into is normal when you're a kid. Sooner or later though, you reach a certain age where people stop asking, or if they do, the tone of the question becomes ominous. Suddenly, "What are your dreams? You can do anything you want!" becomes, "What are you going to do with your life? You better figure it out soon!" No matter your choice, you'll probably jump into it with limited information and without a full understanding either of how to get there or what the landscape will look like when you finally arrive. And to complicate matters further, throughout the next few years, all sorts of things may happen to change the course of those initial decisions. After an initial investigation into something you thought you'd enjoy—perhaps a college class, an internship, or a first job—you you might discover that it's not your thing after all. You may get a degree in something only to discover that the field you were interested in has become outdated. Or you might start looking for a position only to find that the job market in your proposed field is particularly crowded. Or maybe you start a family and those choices affect the career options that are available to you. Most common of all, and no matter what course of action you take, you may stumble into something completely different as you go along. You may discover a skill you didn't know you had, a passion you never thought you'd have the chance to pursue, Or a new job opportunity you never expected. Maybe a former colleague calls you to offer you a job at his new company, or a part-time business shift with a friend from college turns into a real business. You didn't plan for it, but all of a sudden you're doing something you've never considered before. For the most part, we all want to find a career that meets the same few specific needs. Put simply, here's what we're looking for: something that makes us happy—joy. Something that's financially viable—money. Something that maximizes our unique skills—flow. There's more than one path to this ideal world, but without all of these characteristics being met, you won't have a perfect match. It's entirely possible to do something you love that doesn't pay well. It's also possible to get paid well for something you dislike or something you just tolerate. Plenty of people essentially forge a compromise, putting up with a bad situation in exchange for a good paycheck. Finally, it's also important to enjoy what you do or get paid well for it, or both, but to still lack that sense of all-encompassing flow where the hours pass like minutes because you're so completely in the zone of doing something you're really good at. None of those situations is what you want, though. To find the work you are born to do, you need the right combination of joy, money, and flow.