conversation with Peter Hurford, June 2014.
if you’re not happy at work, you’ll be less productive: For the link between happiness and
productivity, see Ivan Robertson and Cary L. Cooper, eds., Well-being: Productivity and
Happiness at Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio
Proto, and Daniel Sgroi, “Happiness and Productivity,” IZA discussion papers, no. 4,645 (2009),
http://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/35451.
“You have to trust in something”: “‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says,” Stanford Report,
June 14, 2005. For criticism, see Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills
Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (New York: Business Plus, 2012), 3–11.
“You owe it to yourself to do work that you love”: Jenny Ungless and Rowan Davies, Career Ahead:
The Complete Career Handbook (London: Raleo, 2008).
A popular YouTube video: “What If Money Was No Object?”: https://vimeo.com/63961985. The
video, which reached two million views on YouTube before it was taken down for copyright
infringement, consists of a brief excerpt, with added background music, from a lecture delivered
by Alan Watts and later published as Do You Do It or Does It Do You?: How to Let the Universe
Meditate You, Sounds True, 2005.
In one study of Canadian college students: Robert J. Vallerand et al., “Les passions de l’âme: On
obsessive and harmonious passion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 4
(October 2003), 759, table 1.
fewer than one in one thousand high school athletes will make it into professional sports:
“Probability of Competing Beyond High School,” NCAA, September 24, 2013,
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/probability-competing-beyond-high-school.
Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson: Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T.
Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,” Science 339, no. 6,115 (January
4, 2013), 96–98.
(this is known in psychology as the job characteristics theory): These are probably the most widely
accepted and solid predictors of job satisfaction in current psychology. For discussion, see
Thomas A. Judge and Ryan Klinger, “Promote Job Satisfaction through Mental Challenge,” in
Edwin Locke, ed., Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior: Indispensable
Knowledge for Evidence-Based Management, 2nd edition, (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2009),
107–21, and Stephen E. Humphrey, Jennifer D. Nahrgang, and Frederick P. Morgeson,
“Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features: A Meta-analytic
Summary and Theoretical Extension of the Work Design Literature,” Journal of Applied
Psychology 92, no. 5 (September 2007), 1,332–56.
each of these factors also correlates with motivation, productivity, and commitment to your employer:
Benjamin Todd, “How to Find a Job You’ll Love,” 80,000 Hours (blog), August 16, 2012,
https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-to-find-a-job-you-ll-love/.
which some psychologists have argued is the key to having genuinely satisfying experiences: Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row,
1990).
There are other factors that also matter to your job satisfaction: See the information and references
cited in “Predictors of Job Satisfaction,” 80,000 Hours, August 28, 2014,
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/job-satisfaction/job-satisfaction-
research/#predictors-of-job-satisfaction.
He traveled in India: See Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 39–50.
while Jobs and Wozniak were trying to sell circuit boards to hobbyists: Jeffrey S. Young and William
L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, New
Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 35–36.