An excerpt from A Job to Love by The School of Life

You loved the time when you were nine and made biscuits for a stall, sold them to people and turned a profit; it wasn't really the money, it was the excitement of seeing that people really liked what you'd done and were happy to prove it by giving up something unambiguously valuable.

Next time, you added different colored icing, and it was fascinating to see which colors people went for and which didn't appeal. You learned, and it made you confident.

You get a thrill out of guessing correctly what other people require, though it's not just guesswork, of course, it's because you're always on the lookout for little revealing signals that people don't even know they are sending.

You love profit because it is, in many ways, an achievement of psychology: the reward for correctly guessing the needs of others ahead of the competition.

You wander through the world aware of how much could be altered if you walk along a street; you might think: 'That early-20th-century eyesore could be flattened, and a block of beautiful brick buildings put up in its place!

You notice a pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled and think, 'Isn't there some other use for these?'

You grasp that every inefficiency is a business waiting to be born.

Not everyone sees this, but for you, making money is an intellectual pleasure.

You enjoy understanding your clients' needs better than they do themselves; you like coming up with a solution to a problem before other people have even realized there is a problem to be solved.

You like that making money is connected to a set of down-to-earth virtues: understanding, hard work, efficiency, discipline, canniness.

You know it is nice to have a bit of money (it's pleasant using an express lane at the airport and having the means to buy a work of art at a friend's exhibition), but you are clear in your own mind that this isn't a pleasure of working; it's a pleasure that comes as a consequence of work.

What you enjoy about your job is the process of generating a profit by applying your insights to the problems of the world.

The special appeal of money for you is the endorsement it brings of your insights and skills; you love how the fact that this year's profits are higher than the year before's is a confirmation that you were right in a myriad of little decisions you took over many months.

It is the clearest proof of the soundness of your judgment.