In the Harvard Business Review Daniel Gulati broke down the top career regrets people have. 

#2 was “I wish I had quit earlier.”

In fact, people with no job are happier than people with a lousy job.

1) Money Isn’t Meaningful

Plenty of research says money doesn’t make us all that happy once you can pay the bills. I know, you’re skeptical.

But you don’t need to believe the pointy-headed researchers; ask people about their jobs and you hear the same thing.

Having meaning in your life increases life satisfaction twice as much as wealth.

6) Find Flow

Flow is when you’re so wrapped up in what you’re doing that the world fades away — like when athletes are in “the zone.”

If you find a job where you’re spending most of your time in “flow”, you’ve got a winner.1

Via How to Find Fulfilling Work:

In a typical flow experience, we feel totally engaged in the present, and future and past tend to fade away – almost as if we were doing Buddhist meditation. In his renowned study of surgeons, Csikszentmihalyi found that when performing operations, 80 per cent of them lose track of time or feel that it passes much faster than usual. They’re in the zone.

For more on flow, and how to achieve it, click here.

10) Ready, Fire, Aim

Here’s something you rarely hear: “Do not plan ahead. Do not start thinking.” Because you don’t know anything yet.

The problem with careers is when we make the decisions, we rarely know much about the thing we’re choosing.

35% of college graduates end up in a job that was not their major. Planning sounds good but as the old saying goes: “The map is not the territory.”

Ever talk to a cop or a lawyer and learn their job is not like it looks on TV? Exactly.

It’d be great if you could go try a bunch of different jobs for a month each. But that’s just not realistic for most of us.

So you need to talk to people, the people who are doing the job you think you want.

You’re going to spend 80,000 hours working over the course of your life.

Yeah. 80,000.