People stuck on a big decision, whether to quit the job or end the relationship, agreed to let a coin toss settle it as part of an economist's experiment. Those the coin told to make the change were more likely to make it. Six months later they were happier than the ones it told to stay put.
The "right path" usually gets described as something the universe signposts: the book that keeps turning up, the stranger's remark, the dream that keeps coming back. Signs like those will point wherever you already lean. The ones worth trusting are in your own days, and you can check them. Ahead: where people have their best moments and where they'd prefer to be instead, the belief about passion that makes people quit, the regrets that last longest, and what 24 people with the same job title said about their work.
Why the universe seems to be dropping hints
Once something is on your mind, you start seeing it everywhere. In 1994 a reader wrote to a Minnesota newspaper that, having come across the name of the Baader–Meinhof group once, he kept running into it. Other readers wrote in with their own. In 2005 a linguist gave it a plainer name: the frequency illusion.
Attention picks out what you're already thinking about, and memory keeps the hits and drops the misses. The book that keeps turning up was on that many shelves all along.
So the hints tell you something true, about you. You're thinking about a change. Whether to make it is a question they leave open.
The more useful hints are the ones you leave yourself. Your searches change, from how to survive the job to how to start something of your own. Your basket fills with books on changing course. You lose interest in who got promoted. The algorithm notices before you do.
1. Time gets away from you
Seventy-eight working adults carried a pager for a week and wrote down what they were doing and how they felt whenever it went off. The state of being fully absorbed, with a hard task and the skill to meet it, turned up mostly at work. It turned up far less in their free time. And yet their motivation ran the other way: free time was where they wanted to be.
That state has a name, flow. It came from the people first interviewed about it in 1975, who kept reaching for the same picture: "I was carried on by the flow."
So the wish to be somewhere else is a poor sign of being on the wrong path. Absorption is a better sign of being on the right one.
Try this: for one week, note every time you look up and find an hour has gone. Then read the list.
2. The reasons are your own
Whose goal it is matters more than how grand it is. When people's personal goals were tracked, over a weekend in one test and from New Year into the following months in another, the goals they had chosen for their own reasons were the ones they made progress on. Progress, in turn, lifted their mood.
A goal picked to please someone else, or to quiet a guilty feeling, gets less of your effort, however sensible it looks on paper.
One sign the reasons are yours: you stop explaining yourself. People who matter need no explanation. People who demand one matter less.
You get shorter with everyone else too. "That doesn't work for me" becomes a complete sentence. You leave the party when you're done, and you put down the book that bores you.
Try this: for each thing you're working towards, finish the sentence "I'm doing this because…" and cross out any answer that begins with "they".
3. You stay when it gets hard
People are told to find their passion, as if it were sitting somewhere fully formed. In five tests, people who believed that expected a found passion to supply endless motivation. When a new interest turned difficult, theirs faded much faster than it did in people who saw interests as something you build.
A path you're on gets hard and you stay. A path you're trying on gets hard and you take it as a message.
Try this: before you judge a new interest, stay with it past the first difficult stretch.
4. It weighs on you, and you'd choose it again
The right path is often the less comfortable one. In a large survey that pulled happiness and meaning apart, a meaningful life went with more worry, more stress and more anxiety than a happy one. It went with giving, where happiness went with taking, and with thinking about the past and the future, where happiness lived in the present.
So "this is hard and I'm tired" is weak evidence against a path. "This is easy and I feel nothing" is stronger.
Try this: ask of your hardest commitment whether you'd sign up for it again, knowing what it costs.
5. You'd regret leaving it undone
Regret changes with time. In the short run people regret what they did. In the long run they regret what they left undone.
The regrets that last longest have a shape as well. Across six tests, people's most enduring regrets were about the person they'd hoped to become, far more than about duties they'd failed. People patch up a neglected duty quickly. A neglected ambition gets left, and it keeps.
The fear that stops people trying is mostly regret paid in advance, and it's overpriced. Students and rail passengers asked to predict how much a near miss would sting guessed far higher than those who had just had one reported. The authors called the caution this buys "emotional insurance that they do not actually need".
Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in their last weeks, wrote down the regret she heard most from the dying: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." That's one woman's notebook, and it says the same as the six tests.
Houses keep the record as well. The room you avoid, the easel under the laundry, the exercise bike gathering dust: shrines to who you meant to be. The clothes you never wear and never give away are past selves hanging in the wardrobe.
Try this: write down the one thing you'd most regret never having tried, and the smallest version of it you could start this month. If nothing comes, ask who makes you jealous. Envy points at the life you've left unlived.
6. It gives you a reason
A sense of purpose shows up in how long people live. Followed for 14 years, the adults who felt their lives had direction outlived those who felt adrift, and that held at every age, retired or still working, and after their general happiness was taken into account.
Try this: finish the sentence "This matters because…" for the main thing you do all week. If nothing comes, that's information. Then write out your ideal ordinary working day, hour by hour, and see how far it sits from the one you have.
7. It leaves you room to change
More than 19,000 people aged 18 to 68 were asked how much they had changed in the past ten years, or how much they expected to change in the next ten. At every age they said they'd changed a great deal, and at every age they expected to change hardly at all from here on.
They were wrong at every age. The path that fits you now was chosen by someone who will have changed in ten years, so a good one has exits. Kierkegaard had the measure of it: life "must be understood backwards", and "it must be lived forwards". Daniel Gilbert, one of the three people behind the 19,000-person finding, wrote the readable book on why we misjudge our future selves: .
Try this: plan the next three years in detail and the next thirty in pencil.
8. Your body is on board
How people feel about their work shows up in their health. Across 485 sets of findings and 267,995 people, satisfaction with work tracked mental health closely: burnout most of all, then self-esteem, depression and anxiety. Physical illness followed more loosely.
It's a link, and the arrow can run both ways: being unwell sours a job as surely as a sour job wears you down. Either way, a body that dreads the working week is telling you something.
Try this: notice what your body does on the last evening before the working week starts. And when you face a choice, picture the first option and watch how your body answers, then the second.
The years you've already put in
They count for less than they feel. In 1985 two psychologists asked students to imagine they had bought a $100 ski trip and then a $50 one they expected to enjoy more, only to find both fell on the same weekend. More than half chose the dearer trip, the one they'd enjoy less.
Real money behaved the same way. Theatre-goers who paid full price for a season ticket turned up to more of the first five plays than those sold the same ticket at a discount: 4.1 plays against 3.3. By the second half of the season the gap had closed.
The same paper put the question the way people ask it of themselves: "Should I continue with this terrible job? I spent a year in training to get this position." What you've spent is gone either way. The only thing a choice can change is what comes next.
Governments do it on a grander scale. Britain and France went on paying for Concorde long after it was plain the aircraft would never pay its way, and economists named the habit after it: the Concorde fallacy.
None of it was wasted, though. The job you hated taught you what you needed, the degree you never used taught you how to learn, and the lost years were gathering data. The skills leave with you. Only the cost stays behind.
When you're stuck, lean towards change
Back to the coin. The people who made a change, whichever way the coin fell, were markedly happier two months later and six months later than those who stayed as they were. The economist's reading was that people are too cautious when the choice is a big one.
These were people already torn, who had volunteered to let a coin decide. It says nothing about throwing over a life you're content with.
Waiting for the right moment is the usual way of staying put. The perfect moment is a lie fear sells to keep you stuck, and "reasonable" is often fear dressed in logic. Rock bottom can feel safer than a leap because at least it's familiar. Readiness is a myth as well: ready happens while doing.
No committee is reviewing your application. You've been carrying the permission slip your whole life. It's called your life.
Leaning is different from leaping, though. People who started a business while keeping their day job, and went full-time later, kept it alive at a much higher rate than those who quit first. The slow way in turned out to be the safer one.
The paycheck funds the transformation, and bills still need paying while dreams are building. So go gradually. Moving too fast burns bridges you'll want later, and turning preacher alienates everyone. Share results before you share the process: let people see you happier before you explain how.
Try this: if the same decision has been circling for months, flip a coin, and notice which side you find yourself hoping for.
You may not have to leave
Changing path can mean changing how you hold the one you're on. When 196 employees were asked how they saw their work, they split almost evenly three ways: a job, done for the pay; a career, done for the next step up; or a calling, done for its own sake. ("Career", fittingly, comes down from the Latin for a wheeled vehicle by way of the French for a racecourse.) The ones with a calling were more satisfied with their work and their lives, and they missed about two days a year where the others missed three or four.
The surprise was in one office. Twenty-four administrative assistants, with the same title and much the same pay and schooling, split the same three ways: nine had jobs, seven had careers and eight had callings.
Part of that is what people do with a job once they have it. They take on some tasks and trim others, choose whom they deal with, and decide what the work is for. The name for it is job crafting.
Try this: list the three parts of your work you'd keep if you could drop the rest, and look for one way to do more of them next month. If the change does turn out to be a change of work, is a practical manual for it.
There is more than one right path
Hunting for the single best path has a cost of its own. Students who set out to find the best possible job landed starting salaries 20% higher than classmates content with good enough. They were also less satisfied with the jobs they got, and felt worse all the way through the search. Across seven groups of people, that habit of mind went with less happiness and more regret.
So "right" is a better target than "best". A path that passes the tests above is right enough to walk.
What about the money?
It counts, and more than the "follow your heart" line admits. Among 33,391 working adults who were pinged at random moments and asked how they felt, 1.7 million answers in all, day-to-day well-being kept rising with income, with no levelling off at $75,000 a year.
The best-paid path is still only one candidate. A path that leaves you short has a cost you'll feel daily, and it belongs in the sum.
The reverse holds too. Success on the wrong path feels like drowning in a golden pool. Sure, the water's expensive, and you're still going under.
Try this: ask how you'd spend your days if you had enough money, and no more than enough.
Who you walk with
Company moves with the path. Among 4,739 people followed for 20 years, a friend living within a mile who became happy raised a person's own chance of being happy by 25%, and the link could be traced three steps out, to the friends of a friend's friends. It showed between neighbours and nearby friends. It did not show between co-workers.
So expect some sorting. Real friends celebrate the change, and your growth gives them permission to grow. The gossips find you boring. The complainers say you've changed. They're right. And you start to meet people who speak your new language without explanation.
Try this: tell one friend what you're considering, and notice whether they lean in.
What each decade asks
No two lives keep the same timetable, so take this as a rough map. In your twenties the pressure is to choose before you know yourself. Experiment, and treat a wrong path as data. In your thirties you've put a decade into something, and you know at last what you'd never choose again. In your forties other people's approval loosens its grip, and playing safe starts to look like the bigger risk. After fifty the "too late" voice is at its loudest, and you have the judgment, the means and the perspective your younger self lacked.
If you're near fifty
A dip in midlife is close to universal. Across 145 countries, people's satisfaction with life traces a U, with the lowest point around fifty. It climbs again on the far side. A dip that arrives on schedule is a poor reason, taken alone, to burn everything down. And a late bloomer is still blooming.
When it's the mood, and the path is fine
Low mood makes every path look wrong. If yours has been there for most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, or the things you used to enjoy have gone flat, reach out for help, and let the big decision wait until the colour is back.
When you get there
Arriving brings its own surprises. Impostor syndrome changes its question to "Is this too good to be true?" Success on your own path is frightening because it's yours: no one else to credit or blame, no system to hide behind, no boss to please. And there's a grief in it. You mourn the struggle that defined you, because the seeker has no work left once the thing is found.
Four questions worth an honest answer
What would I do if I knew I would fail, and had to do it anyway? Whatever survives that question is worth doing for its own sake.
What would the ten-year-old me think of my life? That child was still new to settling.
What am I pretending not to know? The answer is usually sitting there already.
What am I hoping someone will give me permission to do? Write it down. That's your next step, and the permission is yours to give.
Write the answers down. A will outlast a note on your phone.
Stop waiting for a sign
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau wrote in 1854. He had no experiment to go on. We do, and it says the quiet part is optional.
The signs are plain ones: the hour that vanished, the hard thing you went back to, the regret you can already name. And one last test: if you knew you had five years left, would you change everything or change nothing? "Nothing" means you're on it. "Everything" is a set of marching orders.
Pick the sign you recognised while reading, and act on it this week. If you're torn, you know where to find a coin.
Know where you want to go, and wondering how to picture it? How to Visualize Your Goals the Way That Works — which kind of daydream gets you moving, and which one keeps you seated.
Ready to turn a direction into a plan? Success Conditioning: How to Set Goals You Reach — what separates the goals that last from the ones that fade by February.
Know someone who keeps saying "one day"? Send them this, and ask which sign they recognised.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If your mood has been low for weeks or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, reach out for help today.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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