The same is true for you, of course. You have a unique relationship with the world, a relationship that reveals to you things that only you can see. It offers thread-weaving opportunities all the time, but the only person who knows if those threads are red is you. The world won’t do your weaving for you—it doesn’t care about your red threads. The only person who can stop and be attentive enough to identify these threads, and weave them intelligently into the fabric of your work, is you.

If you’re not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following:

• Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy?

• In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable?

• In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there?

“So, no, your red threads won’t tell you in which particular job you will be successful.

Instead, they’ll reveal how you—one particular individual—will be most successful in whatever job you happen to choose.

Use your emotional reaction to the raw material of your life to pinpoint which activities have these red-thread qualities.

Once you identify these red threads, your challenge will be to weave them into the fabric of your life, both at home and at work. We’ll get into how to do that later in the book, but for now please know that you do not need an entire quilt made up of only red threads. You don’t need to “do only what you love.”

Instead, you need only to find specific loves—red threads—within what you do. Recent research by the Mayo Clinic into the well-being of doctors and nurses reveals that 20 percent is the threshold level: spend at least 20 percent of your time at work doing specific activities you love and you are far less likely to experience burnout. Research by colleagues at the ADP Research Institute reinforces this finding. According to their recent global study of twenty-five thousand workers, if you have a chance to do something you love each and every day (even if you aren’t good at it yet), you are 3.6 times more likely to be highly resilient.

So, yes, love matters, but you don’t need to love all you do. You just need to find the love in what you do. And as the Mayo Clinic research reveals, even a little love goes a long, long way

“How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?