The Gallop World Poll assesses the following 14 areas within its core questions, which are used to measure the World Happiness Index published by the UN.

1. Business & economic,

2. Citizen engagement,

3. Communications & technology,

4. Diversity (Social issues),

5. Education & families,

6. Emotions (Well -being),

7. Environment & energy,

8. Food & shelter,

9. Government and politics,

10. Law & order (Safety),

11. Health,

12. Religion and ethics,

13. Transportation and

14. Work.

All top countries tend to have high values for all six of the key variables that have been found to support well-being: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.

While the above key areas may or may not be in the specific weighted order of priority in the index, of which details could be available on their websites, what is worth noting is that choosing a career effectively also means choosing a lifestyle. And this is extremely critical in nature as it has a high potential to determine the happiness quotient for your life. 

What do we mean by this? Let’s begin with a very basic profession, let’s say a tailor - he or she has a profession. What is the lifestyle that the tailor lives and what is it that he or she perceived at or before that they chose the career. Now let’s change the name of the profession to a fashion designer and suddenly the perception, as well as the scope changes. Let’s think of an engineer. There is so much of competition in this profession this day. We have heard of students changing their choice of engineering stream from computer science to electrical engineering  based on admission criteria. So whatever happened to the ‘love’ of computer science?

We reiterate, there is nothing right or wrong about any specific career path. What is important however, is that we knowingly tread the path, conduct a realistic analysis of skills sets, understand the dynamics of pursuing a career path and then move ahead accepting the same wholeheartedly. We believe this has potential to embed trust and confidence in the child, thus enabling total commitment and efforts from within to achieve his or her life goals.