Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.

To do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. We know this because when we survey a group of people who are highly successful, resilient, and engaged and a contrast group of people who are less so, the two best questions to separate them are these:

• Do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day?

• Were you excited to go to work every day last week?

Those people who are thriving answer “strongly agree” to both of these.

So why the heck do we forget this when it comes to which activities or situations or behaviors we love? Why do we make do with generalizations?

“She just loves a challenge!” someone’s parents say proudly.

Really? Does it matter what sort of challenge? Does she love all challenges, or only those where she feels super-prepared? Or maybe it’s the opposite—maybe she loves only challenges where she has to react instinctively, and where, if she fails, she can console herself with the fact that she wasn’t actually expected to prevail.

Which is it? They’re totally different, and would lead her and her parents to set her up in completely different ways.

“He’s so good with people!” a boss writes in someone’s performance review.

Really? Which kind of people? Is he “so good” with people he doesn’t know yet and has to win over? Or “so good” at building deep trust with those he’s already acquainted with?

And how about a verb? What precisely is he doing with these people he’s so good with? Is he so good at selling to them, or teaching them, or calming them, or making them laugh, or remembering their names, or inspiring them? Each of these is starkly different from the others. Which is it with him?

One of the chief causes of our epidemic of anxiety and alienation is that both schools and workplaces appear impatient with, and deeply uninterested in, these sorts of details. They rely instead on the comfort of generalizations.

Practice is not a conscious discipline, demanding grit and stick-to-itiveness. Instead, seen through the lens of love, practice is an obsession.

Of all the sources of fire, I’ve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. It’s like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something you’re encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.