In an interview with entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, writer and creator of the Wait But Why blog Tim Urban says that you can group all careers into 2 buckets:

Careers where you’re the CEO include trying to start your own company, win fans and make a name for yourself in the arts, or work as a freelancer. These are all paths where you’re driving the ship of your career and making the key decisions.

Those careers where you work for the CEO involve being on “an existing ship that’s driven by someone else, and you’re doing a job on that ship.” For Urban, this includes not only obvious situations where you’re an employee of an organization, but also cases where the career itself is a predefined ship, like being a doctor or lawyer.

As Urban points out, there are some smart, special, and talented people whose gifts are best expressed as CEO. For others, their gifts are best expressed when someone else is worrying about keeping the lights on, and they can focus on their work.

Similarly, there are some people who need to be CEO to find their work fulfilling, and others “for whom being CEO and having their work bleed into everything is a recipe for misery.”

Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham writes in his essay What Doesn’t Seem Like Work that when you’re deciding on a career, you should pay attention to those things that seem like work to other people but are enjoyable to you.

And the stranger your tastes seem to others, “the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.“

Graham tells the story of his father, who was interested in math from a young age and eventually pursued a career modeling nuclear reactors.

For many people going through school, the problems at the end of the chapter of a math textbook represent work. But for Graham’s father they were the reward, and the text of the chapter “was just some advice about solving them.”

Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham writes that there are 2 types of schedules:

For managers, scheduling a one-hour meeting is merely a practical problem: the challenge is simply finding an open slot in the calendar.

But for makers, an hour is barely enough time to get started, and a single meeting can “blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

Graham proposes two solutions to help resolve this conflict:

“Imagine yourself many years in the future, on the last day of your life, looking back at the things that you created, developed, nurtured, and contributed. What, ideally, would you like to see?”

- Author Pamela Slim in her book Body of Work