Have you ever picked a job based on the fact that you were good at it but later found it made you feel very uncomfortable over time? When you select your career, there's whole lot more to it than assessing your skills and matching them with a particular position. If you ignore your personality, it will hurt you long-term regardless of your skills or the job's pay. There are several areas of your personality that you need to consider to help you find a good job. Here are a few of those main areas:

1) Do you prefer working alone or with other people?

    There are isolating(使孤立) jobs that will drive an outgoing person crazy and also interactive jobs that will make a shy person uneasy. Most people are not extremes in either direction but do have a tendency that they prefer. There are also positions that are sometimes a combination of the two, which may be best for someone in the middle who adapts easily to either situation.

2) How do you handle change?

    Most jobs these days have some elements of change to them, but some are more than others. If you need stability in your life, you may need a job where the changes don't happen so often. Other people would be bored of the same daily routine.

3) Do you enjoy working with computers?

    I do see this as a kind of personality characteristic. There are people who are happy to spend more than 40 hours a week on a computer, while there are others who need a lot of human interaction throughout the day. Again, these are extremes and you'll likely find a lot of positions somewhere in the middle as well.

4) What type of work environment do you enjoy?

    This can range from being in a large building with a lot of people you won't know immediately to a smaller setting where you'll get to know almost all the people there fairly quickly.

5) How do you like to get paid?

    Some people are motivated by the pay they get, while others feel too stressed to be like that. The variety of payment designs in the sales industry is a typical example for this.

    Anyway, these are a great starting point for you. I've seen it over and over again with people that they make more money over time when they do something they love. It may take you a little longer, but making a move to do what you have a passion for can change the course of your life for the better.

    Lots of people buy books and products from Amazon, an online seller. They offer and pay over the Internet and the books are shipped through the mail or a delivery service like FedEx.

    One day, people could get their Amazon deliveries from an “unmanned aerial vehicle”—a timely vehicle that looks like a toy helicopter. And instead of waiting days to get the parcel, it could be at the buyer's home in half an hour or less. The company is working on a fleet of tiny vehicles they call “Prime Air”. The vehicles are also known as “octocopters”. On their website, Amazon says, “One day, Prime Air Vehicles will be as normal as seeing a mail trucks on the road today.”

    The U.S.'s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working on safety regulations for unmanned flying vehicles like the Prime Air copters. Those regulations will make sure the copters are able to fly safely where they need to go. Once the FAA has put its rules in place, which could be as early as 2016, Amazon will be ready with its fleet of tiny flyers. The process could take as many as five years.

    The new delivery service would likely be available only in the United States, at first. The copters the company is testing now can handle packages up to five pounds (2.3kg) and they have a range of 10 miles (16 kilometers).

    Other companies are also looking at using unmanned flying vehicles to deliver their products. For instance, Domino's Pizza in the U.K. released a video showing a “DomiCopter”, delivering a pizza. That video may have been a publicity stunt（噱头）. In any case, just like Prime Air's octocopters, the DomiCopters don't have clearance（许可）to take off just yet.

    In October, I told the eight-year-olds in the class I teach in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, about my plan. "Since all of you have done extra jobs around the house to earn some money," I said. "Then we'll buy food for a Thanksgiving dinner for someone who might not have a nice dinner otherwise."

    I watched them while they walked up and down the supermarket. "Flowers!" Kristine cried. The group rushed toward the holiday plants.

    "You can't eat flowers."——It was more sensible(明智的) to use any extra money to buy something that could be transformed(转换，转变) into meals.

    "But Mrs. Sherlock," came the begging voice, "we want flowers."

    Defeated finally, I put a pot of "funny" purple(紫色的) mums in the cart full of foods. "She'll like this one," the children agreed.

    An organization had given us the name and address of a needy grandmother who had lived alone for many years. We finally pulled up in front of a small house. A slightly built woman with a weary face came to the door to welcome us.

    My little group ran to get the food. As each box was carried in, the old woman kept on saying "Thanks"—much to her visitors' pleasure. When Amy put the mums on the counter, the woman seemed surprised. She's wishing it was a bag of flour(面粉), I thought.

    We returned to the car. As we fastened our seat belts, we could see the kitchen window. The woman inside waved goodbye, then turned and walked across the room, past the turkey, past the goods, straight to the mums. She put her face in their petal. When she raised her head, there was a smile on her lips. She was transformed before our eyes.

    The children were quiet. At that moment, they had seen for themselves the power they possessed(拥有) to make another's life better. The children had sensed(感到) that sometimes a person needs a bunch of funny purple flowers on a dark November day.

    The world we live in gets more mechanized every year. Some countries which were mainly agricultural a hundred years ago have now become industrial. New factories and towns have been built on good agricultural land. There are now fewer farms to serve a much greater population, so these farms must be more efficient in order to produce as much food as possible. There is no place in the modern agricultural world for the inefficient farmer. Unfortunately, many of the picturesque aspects of farming are disappearing in the search for efficiency. The more tractors are used, the fewer horses are needed. Everyone agrees that horses are far more pleasant to look at than tractors. But they are less efficient. Cows are usually milked by machinery nowadays, and even pigs are fed automatically. There is not much art or poetry on the modern farm, and the old traditional idea of a farm as a slow, peaceful, romantic place is totally wrong nowadays.

    The modern farmer has to be a mechanic, a scientist, an accountant and a gambler. The more mechanized farming becomes, the more expert the farmer has to be. He must understand what machinery is necessary for his kind of farm, and he must know how to use it efficiently. He must also understand the new technical advances in agriculture, and how to use chemical and synthetic products to improve his crops. The more workers a farmer employs, the more he must know about the problems of wages and taxes. As in any other industry, most modern farmers find it necessary to employ office staff to deal with these. But although he has more modern equipments and far more scientific aids than his grandfather had, the farmer is still dependent upon the weather. As he can never be sure what the weather will do, he must be prepared to take risks, and face the possibility of losing everything.

    When the company was small, Google cared a lot about getting kids from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But Laszlo Bock, Google's former Senior Vice President of People Operations, said it was the "wrong" hiring strategy. Experience has taught him that there are exceptional kids at many other places, from state schools in California to those in New York. "What we find is that the best people from places like these are just as good if not better as anybody you can get from any Ivy League school," said Bock, who authored a book titled "Work Rules!"

    So what else does Google not care about:

    Grades: Google's data shows that grades predict performance for the first two years of a career, but do not matter after that.

    Brain-teasers: Gone are interview questions such as: Why are manhole covers (井盖) round? How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? "Our research tells us those questions are a waste of time," Bock said. "They're a really coachable skill. The more you practice, the better you get at it."

    Here's what Google does care about:

    Problem solvers: Your cognitive (认知的) ability, or how well you solve problems.

    Leaders: The idea is not whether you were president of the student body or vice president of a bank, but rather "When you see a problem, do you step in and help solve it?" and then critically, "Are you willing to let somebody else take over, and make room for somebody else? Are you willing to give up power?"

    Googleyness: That's what Google calls its cultural fit. It's not "Are you like us?" Bock said. "We actually look for people who are different, because diversity gives us great ideas."

    "What's most important is that people are intellectually humble, willing to admit when they're wrong, and care about the environment around them ...because we want people who think like owners not employees," Bock said.

    High school biology teacher Kelly Chavis knew smartphones were a problem in her class. But not even the students realized how much of a problem the devices were until Chavis did an in-class experiment.

    For one class period, students used a whiteboard to count every Snapchat, Instagram, text, call that appeared on their phones. Chavis is among a growing number of teachers, parents and health experts who believe that smartphones are now partly to blame for increasing the levels of student anxiety. "One girl, just during the one hour, got close to 150 Snapchat notifications. 150!" she said.

    Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University in California, said it is not a coincidence that youth mental health issues have risen with the number of phones. "This use of phones has led to a loss of sleep and face-to-face interactions necessary for their growth," she said.

    Researchers are still not sure whether phones cause student depression or depression causes phone use. But nearly 60 percent of parents said they worry about the influence of social media on their child's physical and mental health.

    Both schools and parents are starting to take steps to deal with the problem. Many public schools pay outside companies to watch students' social media activity for signs of anxiety. Other schools invite in yoga teachers and comfort dogs to help calm students.