Last year, the convergence of two events gave me reason to articulate my recommendations on how to decide on a career path.

Our niece stayed with us for more than a year and we watched her struggle trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life.  Anyone who is over 50 years old has gone through this process at least twice, and sometimes more than that.

For more than 20 years,  I have been an MIT education councilor, interviewing high school students who apply to MIT. This last year, I encountered a few students who didn’t have a clue what that wanted to do in life and asked for some advice.

Here’s what I tell them:

To find your career path, you want to look at the answers to three important life questions:

1. What are your talents?

These are activities you are really good at. What does it seem you can do better than most people? This is different from your skills. Skills you can learn, talent is something that you are innately good at. Some people have a talent for music or for drawing or for math or for writing.

One of my talents is for translating complicated science and engineering into simpler terms. This goes hand in hand with my talent for teaching and writing. Another talent I have is for doing creative technical things: analog circuit design, programming, writing, or planning an experiment and implementing it.

What are you really good at?

2. What do you enjoy doing so much that you could do it for hours at a time, every day?

If you have a choice in how to spend your time, what would would pick to do? Maybe it’s travel, driving a car, playing video games, helping others, cooking or reading. Do you enjoy talking to or working with people, or do you like to work on your own? Do you prefer to spend most of your time in physical activities or sitting at a desk?

I enjoy writing, both fiction and technical stuff, creating presentations, performing in front of an audience and doing measurements and comparing them to theory or simulations.

3. What can you never learn enough about?

What subjects or fields are so interesting to you that you just can’t get enough of them? If you could, what subjects would live and breathe and eat every day? What topics always catch your eye when you browse in a bookstore, or flip through a magazine? Are there any sort of documentaries that keep you glued to the TV or the web? When you idly search the web, what sort of subjects do you find yourself drawn to?

For me, it’s science- this includes physics, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, cool experiments, new science gadgets, new technologies, and the new fields of biotech and genetic engineering. I just love listening to pod cast lectures in these areas, or college lectures from the Learning Company. I can’t get enough of any of this high tech stuff.

Sometimes its hard to get in touch with your answers to these three questions. It helps if you take a day and go for a hike somewhere and think about how you’ve felt about these questions, reflecting on your life experiences.

Sometimes, its useful to sit on these questions for a few months, going about your normal activities and watching yourself to see if you feel a response to these questions.

These are emotional, not analytical questions. They cannot be answered by reason or logic or analysis. They can only be answered by getting in touch with your feelings.

Once you have these answers, then it’s a matter of finding the bull’s eye you’ve hit after shooting these arrows. You want to find a profession, a career path or a field which will leverage your talents, let you spend your days doing what you enjoy, in a field you find fascinating.

These are the ingredients of passion. Find the activities that overlap these areas and your passion will be unleashed.