Design Your Way to a Happier Life

“What’s your passion?” It’s a question that gets asked of all of us as we imagine our futures, whether we are declaring a major, contemplating a new career or preparing for retirement. We seem to operate under the belief that if we just find out what we are passionate about, everything else will fall into place. But there’s a problem with this approach: It hardly ever works.

A series of studies conducted in 2002-09 at the Stanford Center on Adolescence (surveying over 1,200 subjects and published in various academic...