In my first year of university, I did the math on how many hours I was going to dedicate to my career. How much of a lifetime an ordinary person spends "at work." The answer, intuitive as it is, becomes shocking when you put it into figures: 80,000 hours. When you see that number, you have two options. Either you pretend you never saw it (except time keeps passing anyway, sic), or you ask yourself some serious questions about what matters to you, and in whose service you want to spend a third of your life. The hardest part is the first time you ask yourself this question. Sitting on a university bench, staring out toward whatever comes next, how do you choose which way to go?

If you are a skier and you train on a slope, you have a series of "gates" you have to pass through. Blue and red poles alternate, telling you where to turn, when to bend your knee or push your shoulder forward. You follow the route the gates lay out and you will make it to the bottom without having to think about where to turn. If you have skied through gates for a long time, you start looking for them even when they are no longer there. You head to the same spot, just hoping to spot another blue or red pole. If your whole life you have had a system that decided your next step, told you which way to go and held your hand, it is hard to imagine the moment when that system evaporates overnight.

Many of us have had such a system; it is called "school." At seven, we sat down at our desks and it was clear there was still a long way to go before we would be free of school. And we would not need to be free of it any time soon, either: high school would catch up with us, and then we would head off to university. One schedule would turn into another, one test would become an exam session, one composition an essay. From every step, a next step would flow, logical and concrete. All we had to do, to get through childhood and adolescence, was to follow the steps in order. They would take us somewhere. What is more, every cycle is sly. It convinces you that it will never end, that there will always be something clear and certain to follow. Until we all arrived, on that last back-to-school September, and the rules were thrown up in the air. All of a sudden, it is no longer clear what comes next. Where we pay the rent, who we answer to, and who gives us our homework.

Faced with this enormous uncertainty, the first instinct, just like the skier looking for the gates, is to grab onto whatever seems safest. If you study at a top university, you have surely come across the big companies that show up to recruit on campus, take you out for an extravagant dinner and tell you about all the perks their employees receive. This is normal: companies have large budgets and many people working in recruitment who want to find the most talented graduates. Without falling into hypocrisy, for some of us a prestigious company is a good idea. But many others of us leave out of a slight inertia, down the beaten path; we find ourselves sending off one application and then another, only to arrive, a few years later, at that same wretched question: "what am I doing and how did I get here?"

The thesis of this essay is simple. Here are a few questions to ask yourself. The same questions apply if you do not know which way to go after you finish university. Or if a few years have already passed since your first job, and you are thinking of changing it.

One: How quickly do you need the gratification of seeing the results of your own work?

When you work on a project, do you need to see a quick result that motivates you to keep working, or are you content with the idea of the work, able to wait a longer stretch for your effort to be crowned with a concrete result? If you need immediate gratification, maybe it is time to consider a small company, where the pace is brisk and new challenges that need to be solved quickly keep coming up. A big company inevitably comes packaged with well-established (and somewhat lengthy) procedures that might end up demotivating you.

Two: How much of an appetite for risk do you have?

Do you want to carry great responsibility for your work on your shoulders, to feel that your decision matters and that you are turning some of the cogs in how your company runs? That is hard to get as a junior in a company of thousands of people. Or, at the opposite pole, do you want to be part of a diverse and sizeable team, where you learn directly from people with a great deal of experience? That is hard to get at a startup.

Three: Where do you draw your motivation from?

Is the process extrinsic or intrinsic? Here it is very important not to tell yourself a pretty lie. Maybe your main motivation is money, or the people you work with, or the feeling of grappling with a hard problem you are deeply passionate about. The closer you get to identifying what truly motivates you, the closer you will be to looking for (and finding) the ideal job for you.