The science of feeling fulfilled in the workplace is about moving beyond titles.
4 Professional Paths And How They Align With Your Inner Blueprint
Forget job titles. True career satisfaction depends on your motivational system and identity.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
Career confusion is often framed as a failure of direction. We think that if we somehow find ourselves in the wrong job, people around us will likely assume that we don't know what we want, that we didn't plan far enough ahead or that we failed to commit to our career path early enough.
However, this framing ignores the fact that few people are confused about work because they lack ambition or discipline. Most are confused because they're following a career structure that rewards the wrong things for how they are wired.
In a widely circulated video, social scientist Arthur C. Brooks outlines four broad career paths that capture how people tend to build working lives over time: expert, linear, transitory and spiral.
What makes Brooks' framework compelling is that it aligns closely with what psychological research has long shown. That is, career satisfaction depends less on job titles and more on whether the path actually suits your motivational system, tolerance for uncertainty and identity.
These four paths are not strategies to optimize success, but patterns of meaning-making. And once understood, they make the question "Which career should I take?" feel far more answerable than it first appears.
1. The Expert Path Career Path
The expert path is defined by depth, specialization and long-term commitment to a single domain. Progress in this path is typically measured by increasing mastery within one specific role, rather than movement across roles. Often, professionals like surgeons, academics, craftspeople, engineers and artists will follow this trajectory, as their goal is to refine a narrow skillset over decades.
This path will resonate most strongly with individuals who maintain identity-based motivation: when people fuse their sense of self with a role. And according to a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, individuals who experienced strong identity continuity at work reported higher resilience and lower burnout. This held true even when they had periods of high demands.
People suited to the expert path tend to derive satisfaction from competence rather than novelty. This means that they enjoy repetition, but only if it leads to refinement. They're patient with slow progress and tolerate delayed rewards well, as they recognize the pursuit of perfection will take time. Importantly, they feel unsettled in environments that constantly demand reinvention or lateral movement.
These individuals will feel misaligned with careers that pressure them into frequent role changes in the name of "growth." Deep specialists experience greater stress when asked to repeatedly reset their learning curve. For them, fulfillment is derived from becoming unmistakably good at something specific.
2. The Linear Career Path
The linear career resembles the traditional ladder that most envision when thinking of careers. They enjoy the rhythms of step-by-step advancement, in which they increase their amount of responsibilities over time along with their status. They prefer progress that is visible and externally validated. This means that promotions, titles and compensation will often matter deeply to them.
Individuals with this kind of promotion-orientation are usually energized by gains, milestones and upward movement. In turn, they will exhibit greater engagement and persistence in their jobs if their organizations provide them with clear criteria and timelines for advancement.
Those well suited to the linear path will likely feel restless if their growth at a company begins to stall, even if their work itself feels comfortable or satisfying. Notably, this doesn't necessarily imply that they're competitive in a hostile sense, but rather that they're forward-oriented. Success, in their minds, may only feel real if it can be tangibly measured — be it with a salary increase, a bonus, a new responsibility or a new title.
Problems can arise, however, when they pursue linear advancement without regard for personal values. Extrinsically motivated success will typically lose its emotional payoff over time if it lacks internal meaning. This means that, for linear-path individuals, the risk lies in confusing movement with fulfillment.
When advancement aligns with values, however, this path can be deeply satisfying and psychologically stabilizing.
3. The Transitory Career Path
The transitory path is characterized by frequent change across roles, industries or functions. Unlike the traditional career ladder, in which experience is accumulated and built up over time, transitory careers involve more dramatic resets. Variety is not a side effect of motivation here; instead, it is its fuel.
A 2016 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that novelty need satisfaction predicted life satisfaction independent of other basic psychological needs. In other words, people who feel satisfied by novelty are more likely to report well-being when environments provide frequent new experiences.
People drawn to this path often feel most alive during transitions, as they have an appetite for change. Because of this, they're excited more by learning than by mastery, and they're often quick to adapt to new environments. Routine, even if it offers them safety and security, can feel increasingly suffocating to them over time; they'd much prefer being a beginner again than being bored.
Transitory individuals often feel misaligned when they force themselves into rigid structures for the sake of stability. They are likely to disengage much faster in highly standardized roles than, say, their liner-path counterparts. Often, their dissatisfaction is often misread as lack of commitment, when it is actually a mismatch of psychological needs. For these individuals, a non-linear career is not a liability; it is a basic requirement.
4. The Spiral Career Path
The spiral path sits somewhere between the ladder and transitory paths. People who follow this trajectory are likely to change roles or fields every several years. However, each of these moves will build upon the last. They still accumulate their skills over time, but they prefer to evolve their identity instead of resetting it.
Individuals flourish in this path due to the experience of integrative identity development. As a 2025 study published in Journal of Adolescence shows, identity smoothing and integration during life changes — including job transitions — relates closely to life satisfaction.
Those suited to the spiral path are people who enjoy learning new domains, but without having to start from zero every single time. They're pattern-seekers who are drawn to roles that allow transfer of insight. For this reason, they may feel constrained in purely expert paths and underutilized in transitory ones; a big but meaningful change every once in a while is just right.
The main risk here for this kind of individual is impatience. Spiral careers reward long-time horizons, but cultural narratives often frame success as needing to be rapid or linear. However, people who can tolerate ambiguity during periods of transition will ultimately report stronger meaning when they eventually reach something coherent. For spiral-oriented individuals, the question is not whether change is coming, but whether it is cumulative.
Choosing Your Career Path With Clarity, Not Pressure
Most people enjoy elements of more than one path; few careers remain absolutely fixed over a lifetime. Regardless, psychological research is clear on one point: that chronic dissatisfaction is most likely to emerge if someone pursues a career structure that doesn't reward them with the right motivational currency.
Arthur C. Brooks' framework offers us a new way to think about careers, which respects both human variability and long-term well-being. From a psychologist's perspective, its value lies not in prescribing a path, but in helping people recognize what actually drives them.
You won't find career satisfaction by chasing the "right" job, but by aligning your efforts with your idea of meaning. When that alignment is clear, decisions become less anxious and far more sustainable.
Your destined career path might align with that of your historical personality twin. Take the science-inspired Historical Figure Quiz here to know who it is.
Your career path can affect your well-being. Take the research-informed Well-Being Index to know if your job and abilities are aligned or misaligned.