Even if they have the exact skills that I’m looking for, it’s better not to try to fit a round peg into a square hole. Each of us ought to be working in an environment that we love with the people who share our passions. And if along the way we realize that we’re meant to do something else, let’s celebrate that instead of seeing it as a failure.

Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

“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

Design a job as though there’s no love in it, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—you wind up designing loveless jobs in which the best have to actually break the rules and regulations in order to find love in what they do. As far as we can, it’s up to us to try to persuade our leaders that this is wrong. That if we can define jobs through the lens of those who love them then higher performance, higher quality, and less burnout are the happy result.