Many of us will think of our careers as a progression based on titles or salaries. We visualize our life's work as a linear progression, hopefully pointing up to the right as time progresses with more happiness and money.  But a recent Harvard Business Review article points out that our own career happiness is actually a series of ups and downs with peaks and valleys. But, what if we could figure out a way to make wiser career choices and shorten the time to the next peak? Of course, that would entail knowing what makes us happy.

Graphing our career over time can provide powerful conclusions. The added bonus is that drawing makes us think with a different more creative part of our brain than, for example, writing text.