I had just finished making a speech about choice about the importance of finding work that you can feel excited about when one of the audience members shared this story.

Her soon-to-be college graduate son is in the job market. With a background in accounting, he is finding the job market pretty attractive and has received a number of offers. But none seem quite right.

At one company, the interviewer pressed to find out just how he felt about the offer: On a scale of 1 to 10, how are you feeling about working here?

This ever-frank Gen Y reported that his answer was maybe an 8.

The interviewer asked the young man to meet with him again in a week, adding, and I hope youll be up to a 10 by then.

A week later, the candidate admitted, no, still about an 8.

While making his parents a bit nervous, the candidate kept looking for a company that would be his 10+.

At one of the career fairs, he found a company that really excited him he loved what they did and everything he heard about what it was like to work there. There was a problem: they were not hiring accountants all their openings were for engineers. Undeterred, he approached the company, described his passion for being part of their organization. Eight interviews later, he has a job offer in hand and is headed into an environment that hes pretty sure offers exactly what he wants from work.

Clearly the company recognized the benefit of choice as well. For individuals, finding work you love is good for youbut its also critically important to the success of the organization, paying huge dividends in terms of engagement and associated benefits such as innovation, customer service, and collaboration. The company was very smart to snap up a candidate who had a passion for their organization.

The ever-prescient Peter Drucker alerted us to the growing importance of choice in his 2000 essay on what he saw as this centurys revolution in human affairs. In few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first timeliterallysubstantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choice.

Finding what is engaging for you is a very personal quest. What causes people to feel engaged differs significantly from individual to individual. We are excited and intrigued by different values. Some of you care deeply about social connections and friendships you can form. Others care about the opportunity for creative expression. Still others want to make as much money as possible in as flexible, low-commitment a way as possible. Some of you want to give back to others or make a lasting difference in the world.

We also like to work in very different ways. Some people prefer open-ended tasks, others highly structured tasks. Some like to work on teams, and others, independently. Some need and enjoy a great deal of day-to-day guidance. Others work best when left alone to solve an ambiguous challenge.

We are excited and attracted by different career paths and goals. Some people have high tolerance for risk and love the rush of a high-risk, high-reward environment. Others crave the steady dependency of a well-structured, long-term climb up the career ladder.

You certainly deserve to find work that you love. While I recognize that it often doesnt seem possible given the practical realities of todays job market, try expressing your genuine enthusiasm for working with an organization even if it doesnt appear to have an opening. Hopefully theyll be as smart as company is this young mans story. Like the quest to find a great life partnerand the pity of settling for a lackluster marriagedont settle for a work relationship that is just so-so.