I was incredibly lucky. 
I got offered a job teaching chess full-time at a private school in the UK. (I relish playing, teaching and organising chess.)
As the school had many boarding pupils, senior management said that I should also help out by running a couple of activities at evenings and weekends. I asked what subject. “Anything that interests you.”
And that’s how I wound up teaching chess, roleplaying and computer games! 
For years, I really didn’t.
Today, I’m teaching high school government and economics, and having the time of my life.
Count me also very lucky.
Pediatrician. Absolute interest and absolute love of my work and current work circumstances.
Most of my day is face-to-face with patients and their families, solving genuine problems, and having fun. Teaching when we choose to. I’ve personally experienced no decrease in that as part of modern medicine. I do have some tools that I did not have before.
I am also part of having built a large and growing physician-owned medical group and have the privilege of serving in a clinical leadership role. What we’ve built has delivered measurably better care to both our individual patients our patient communities over time. Oh some frustrations to be sure and in many ways it is a work in progress, likely always will be, but I find the building a model that works (and that I am part owner of) in the modern medicine era as interesting and as challenging as the clinical work.
I do feel sorry for the docs having to work employed by hospital systems and for those getting squeezed out of existence trying to stay afloat in smaller private practices. Although the pressures of that are not as great on the peds side as for others.
I’m a free-lancer, and work on extremely varied projects. Currently I am: 1) Writing press releases on scientific research for my research institute; 2) Writing proposals for and serving as an adviser on natural history films; 3) Serving as an adviser for several on-line educational projects in biology; 4) Working on several exhibits and visitor centers, including a coffee museum; 5) Conducting bird surveys of seabirds on offshore islands in Panama; 6) Working on a Spanish translation to a field guide to birds; 7) Writing funding proposals for scientific research.
Some of it is what I would do for recreation anyway, like bird surveys. Some of it is fun, like working on TV shows and designing exhibits. Some of it is tedious and boring, like writing grant proposals. But overall it’s extremely interesting.
I’m a lawyer, and I love my job. I’m lucky that my work mostly involves appellate litigation, so I get to do all the fun and interesting parts of practicing law (research, crafting legal arguments, and addressing novel legal issues) without the drudge work of trial court practice (discovery, arguing with opposing counsel about procedural minutiae, etc).
I also like the fact that my work, however small the impact, is affecting the development of law and justice. We have a civil society because people who disagree can settle their disagreements through courts instead of using violence, and I’m glad to be a part of this important adversarial process.
Dentist, I love my work. Enjoy everyday helping folks out. Not much better the doing a job you love.
I still enjoy the problem-solving aspect and encountering bizarre diseases I’ve never seen before.
But mainly I’m in it for the free soup in the docs’ lounge.
Yeah, I work for a charity giving free advice to people who can’t afford to pay for it. So that means people that have no voice, the effectively disenfranchised. Homeless people, people with mental health issues or just very low income. I advise on housing, benefits, employment, consumer, legal, immigration and debt.
It feels good helping people who would otherwise have no one to help them, and sometimes that means going up against government or big business.
Coder. I love my work. Always have, and I think always will. You feel like a deity, creating something tangible almost purely from your thoughts.
I don’t understand non-enthusiastic EEs. EE is a tough subject to get a degree on, and if you have no enthusiasm for it, it is probably one of the most mind-numbingly boring ones. As is computer science, really. I always pitied people who have no aptitude for programming but went into it anyway.
I love what I do - I get to take the best parts of using large amounts of data, programming, statistics and modeling, and creativity to define and solve high-impact business problems. Strategy and analytics with a heavy dose of data science, basically.
It’s like all the best parts of consulting with none of the worst, and I’m fortunate enough to get to pretty much define my role and the problems I work on, and doubly fortunate to get the resources I need to keep tackling bigger problems.
I currently work at a huge company just on the bubble of being Fortune 100, and it’s been a revelation after so many years doing startups or consulting.
What I thought would be all stuffy bureaucracy and procedures and amoral do-everything-to-please-the-shareholders profiteering that I thought would be SOP at such a big company hasn’t been like that at all.
Not only is it a great place to work, it’s genuinely customer-centric with a real mission to try to do good for them, and that’s reflected from the highest leadership down. It is consistently rated in the best places to work, and I can see why - although I still think I would love doing what I do at a different company, the fact that it’s so nice at my current company definitely helps.
On the unmotivated EE’s, I agree it’s a shame and a puzzle that they would go through a degree of that complexity not actually liking the work, but there’s lots of other options that degrees like that open up. I know a number of EE’s-by-degree just on my immediate team who are now Analysts, who are quite happy in their current non-EE roles.
Retired from 36.5 years of bomb and bullets. Everything from .22cal to toxic chemicals to missiles, to nukes. Worked with folks in R&D, production, demolition, storage, transportation, mission planning. My college experience had engineering and process management which I actually applied. Had multiple deployments to the desert beginning with the original Desert Storm. Living conditions were absolute crap much of the time but the challenges were daily - and at all hours. Worked with young specialists up to briefing 3-Star generals. Best work environment ever. I had incredible experiences all over the world.
Every day was alive until I was crushed by a micro-manager with a Doctorate in something unrelated to the ammo field telling me how to do my job.:mad:
I am a full stack web programmer meaning I do everything from the database to the HTML. I love it. I love when people ask for something and I build it. I love when there is a bug and I fix it. I love when something needs a solution and i invent it. I love learning something new and applying it and it works.
I also love that I do nothing mission-critical. I don’t save lives or even businesses. It’s not important work but it has its place.
I do wish I went to trade school and learned car or small engine repair. I think I’d get the same satisfaction out of it.
Instead I went to journalism school and realized I wasn’t cut it for it, and turned my web hobby into a career.
What dofe said.
How so? Don’t most docs in general practice do that sort of work? 
I love what I do (environmental science), but it took me a long time to get here. I only started to feel the passion once I got out of the “dues paying” phase of my career.
I’m wondering if my passion is recognizable to others, though. I think it’s evident when someone really gets to know me, because chances are they’ll get to witness me “geek out” on a pet topic. But I don’t do the stereotypical “tree-hugger” things. I don’t go camping. Don’t go kayaking or mountain biking. I love the outdoors, but I’m just as happy walking the urban streets as I am hiking in the mountains. I have always worked in water resource management, and yet I prefer to vacation in semi-arid locations (as opposed to going to a lake or beach house, like a lot of my coworkers do). I care about the environment, of course. But truth be told, my passion isn’t the environment. It’s data analysis.
I kind of stumbled into what I am doing now. I am the floater at a preschool-- that means I’m the unassigned assistant teacher. There’s someone absent almost every day, so i go to that classroom, and if it happens to be a day when no one is absent, sometimes there is a crowded classroom, because a parent asked for an extra day, and if there are no classrooms, then I can help with administrative paperwork or something.
When I first asked them if they needed a sub, I was thinking I’d work one or two days a week, and it would be good resume building, as I was trying to go back to work after being home with my son. They liked my work a lot, and I ended up being there almost every day. So they created a full-time position for me-- actually, 32 hours a week.
I find child development fascinating, and I like working with children. I also really like being the unassigned teacher, because I get to be with the one-year-olds one day, and the pre-k another day.
If I had my choice, I would not have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, and would still be a sign language interpreter, but this is a very nice second career. The first thing I did after interpreting was work in supported living for disabled people, and I enjoyed that. I left it when I had my son. I didn’t expect this job in the preschool to become full-time, but it has really turned out nicely, and I am quite happy.
FWIW, I love to tinker with stuff, and used to own an old car (61 Falcon), but I’m lousy at higher math, so I could never be an engineer.
Oddly, the one other guy in my entire AIT (military) school who had a college degree had an engineering degree, but he wasn’t any better at math than me, and was actually poorer at some of the lower math like the basic algebra we had to do. I got the sense that he had become an engineer because it sounded impressive, and he thought it was a way to make money.
I spent the good share of my life as a truck mechanic and never had any real interest in mechanics. Thankfully the bulk of those years I spent as a foreman so I was able to spend the bulk of my time on troubleshooting issues which I did enjoy doing.
I have a EE degree, own a soldering iron and still play with Nixie clocks and Arduino projects. However, my chief focus was computer programming, which I did for a very large corporation until I got laid off after several decades. While there I was really into learning and exploiting language features, and bringing what I’ve learned and sharing best-practices with others in my work group. The last area I worked with was more “do this by the book” instead of showing any creativity, which was frustrating.
BUT - after getting laid off, I eventually found a community college faculty position teaching Computer Science (permanent, full time). I’m back exploring languages and technologies and find that I just love teaching. Many of my former coworkers have said to me, “You’re lucky, that’d be my dream job.” I agree, it’s a dream job for someone who’s really into the technical aspects of the field.
The hardest part of teaching is seeing students who are in the program but who don’t show the same level of interest and enthusiasm as I had (and that my former coworkers all seemed to have). I am very pleased when a student says they’ve been working on an assignment all weekend and here’s how they’ve extended it to make it better. That’s what employers are looking for.
Ain’t that the truth!
Plan to run my gardening business into my hundreds, so - sure.