Quick -- what's the best job you've ever had?

Without too much effort, you can probably think of a time when you were energized and engaged by your work. You couldn't wait for each day to start, staying late wasn't a burden and you felt you were making a difference -- and that others noticed. This is your career best, the high point of your career so far.

This blessed state may have lasted a few weeks, months or even years, but it probably didn't last forever. Perhaps it couldn't last forever. Life consists of ups and downs, peaks and valleys. But suppose you could increase the frequency and intensity of the peaks and create career bests on a regular basis? The consequences would be tremendous.

"Having a career best creates an insatiable desire for more career bests," says Sallie Hightower, principal consultant with Conoco University at Conoco Inc., a Houston-based petroleum company. During a career best, "we feel we've taken ourselves out of business-as-usual, to a place where we've expanded our individual capacities while simultaneously contributing to a larger business effort," she says.

Picture yourself being so clear about your career best factors that you would instinctively know which job opportunities to pursue. By taking the following steps, you can engineer your next career best.

If you were creating a highlight film of your career to date, what clips would you include? Which experiences do you remember fondly and why? Don't just focus on the past. You may be having a career best right now. The key is to analyze why you consider the experience a career best. What's going on? Make a list. Stop reading this article until you've identified the factors that were present in your most recent career best.

After you list key factors, it may surprise you to know that they aren't unique to you. In fact, they're remarkably consistent with what other employees say. When people describe their career best experiences, they almost always talk about the following characteristics:

• Being challenged
• Having a lot of autonomy
• Seeing the impact of their work
• Learning something new
• Working with a great team of people
• Having solid management support
• Working toward clear goals
• Doing something new
• Using creativity
• Owning the whole task -- seeing something through to completion
• Feeling recognized by peers and management
• Doing the impossible

Your career best probably didn't include all these items, but you likely cited more than half. Most people think they're unique and different, but when defining what makes us love our work, we're remarkably alike. The same responses occur across nationalities, industries, job functions and job levels. Senior executives in Stamford, Conn., describe their career bests about the same way as computer programmers in San Jose, Calif., or oil field workers in Louisiana.

Your career bests are based on a universal set of building blocks. They also incorporate these three truths:

1. They tap into your talents and passions. The more than 20,000 professionals we've surveyed say their career bests allow them to use unique skills and engage their interests. Lesson: Career bests happen when you find a way to get paid for doing what you're good at -- and for what you love doing.
2. They add tremendous value to the organization. Here again, when we ask people to rate the degree to which they were adding value to their employer during their career bests, they always describe evidence of extremely high contribution. They're making a difference, and their employer knows it. Career bests create a huge windfall for the employer -- and increased advancement opportunities for employees.
3. They were most likely a product of luck rather than planning. Employees usually say that their career bests came from being "in the right place at the right time." Rarely do they say, "I took the initiative to make it happen."

This is what should be reversed. Trusting your career to chance is risky. You might end up in a fun, fulfilling assignment, but you're more likely to find yourself in a career "worst," where you hate what you're doing and you're not very good at it, either.

"It's difficult to recover from a career worst," says Ms. Hightower. "Our self-esteem gets affected. Our willingness to take risks is negatively impacted. Perhaps even our ability to trust in others is weakened."

But you can increase the frequency of your career bests by understanding the factors you need to achieve them, then making informed decisions about which job opportunities to pursue.

To know which factors create career bests, consider the following model:

Career bests happen at the "sweet spot" in the middle: the place where your talents (T), the organization's needs (O), and your passions (P) overlap. The equation, then, is: T + O + P = Career Best. That's why a career best can be described as being at the TOP of your game. Each part is critical:

Talents. These are your innate abilities and inborn strengths -- those things you naturally do well. Career bests typically draw on these abilities and push them to new heights. In some cases, career best experiences cause you to discover new talents. In nearly all cases, your talents go far beyond your "hard skills" or technical training. The total package has to include your "soft skills" as well. In fact, these additional talents often are what differentiate you from other employees.

You may consider doing a rigorous assessment of your strengths and gifts, perhaps drawing insights from those who know you best (a process known as "360-degree feedback").

Organization needs. Career bests aren't about pure self-actualization. Like it or not, your career is played out in organizations. Ignore what your employer needs and you jeopardize your ability to sustain a career best. You may have fun for a while, but eventually, your employer will ask, "What's in this for me?"

Paradoxically, your enjoyment on the job depends on your ability to contribute. Very few people score high on job satisfaction and low on job contribution. No one wants to feel irrelevant -- especially in an era of cost-cutting and economic belt-tightening. So strong is this relationship that it creates an axiom: Contribution drives satisfaction, not necessarily vice versa.

Take the case of Art Emrich, now a vice president at Kanbay Inc., a Rosemont, Ill., information technology company. He overcame tremendous challenges to achieve a career best at his previous employer, E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co. His task was to introduce an employee development program to a global workforce of more than 50,000 people.

"I had to sell the idea, design a global delivery process, deliver the workshop, train and certify other trainers, keep up with logistics, document success stories, and focus on continuously improving all aspects of the project," he says. The payoff came from seeing his work have lasting impact. The process became one of Dupont's corporate "Best Practices" and was "actively used by everyone from the CEO to entry-level employees," says Mr. Emrich. "I can look back with pride in the knowledge that my efforts will leave a positive mark on the company for years to come."

If you're feeling unhappy and disconnected at work, one of your first diagnostic questions ought to be, "Do I feel like I'm adding value? Am I a key contributor to the success of this enterprise?" Until you can answer "yes" to such queries, your odds of creating a career best are minimal

Passions. This is the connection to your heart. Career bests happen when your work fascinates, stimulates, captivates, enthralls and excites you. Unless your work engages you at a near-visceral level, you're likely to leave much of your discretionary energy at the door when you arrive -- and neither you nor your employer wants that.

"When's the last time your boss asked you about your passion?" asks Todd Cook, an independent organizational consultant in Diamond Lake, Ill. "We always talk about our talents and skills and the organization's needs. Our passions get left out."

Example: Mr. Cook once had an administrative assistant named Jackie, who had such strong skills that she was at the top of her pay scale. However, she was becoming bored, so he asked her, "What are you interested in?" Her answer: teaching.

During the next few months, Mr. Cook began including Jackie in the planning and roll-out of a new HR system. Eventually, she was certified as an instructor. Result: A career best.

"People would call and offer her other administrative jobs all the time, but they never asked her the passion question," says Mr. Cook. "She always turned them down because she was having so much fun delivering these workshops."

As the TOP acronym suggests, career bests don't occur if one of the pieces is missing. Two out of the three elements just doesn't cut it. To illustrate why, consider the following variations.

Variation #1: (Talents + Oorganizational needs) – Passion = STUCK. You've probably been here at some point in your career: highly skilled at something that no longer "floats your boat." It may have been fun at first, but you've been doing it too long. The challenge is gone.

Typical feelings associated with this situation are boredom, emptiness, perhaps burn-out. You may feel trapped or pigeon-holed in a job that you're so good at they "can't afford to lose you." Your work may make a contribution, but it doesn't charge your batteries.

Example: Think of Michael Jordan before he left basketball to try baseball. He was arguably at the height of his skills -- he'd just won his third NBA title -- but he was bored. He thought baseball would provide the change of pace he needed. But more on Mr. Jordan later.

Variation #2: (Organizational needs + Passion) – Talents = INCOMPETENCE. Perhaps this is too strong a word, but you get the idea. When your passion and the organization's needs exceed your talents, you need to do some skill building.

This situation isn't necessarily bad in the short run. If you're just starting a challenging new assignment, your skills will naturally lag your interest for a while. As you gain proficiency, you may find yourself in a career best.

If your skill level never catches up with the demands of the job, however, you're probably in a job mismatch. Unless remedied, you run two risks: First, that you'll get discouraged and lose interest. No one wants to be perennially mediocre. The second (and more dangerous) risk of "square-peg-round-hole" syndrome is that you'll be labeled a non-contributor -- not for lack of effort, but for lack of results.

Returning to the Michael Jordan example, this "(Operational needs + Passion) - Talents" equation might describe his second year of major-league baseball. He was still interested in the sport, and the White Sox organization needed him -- it had never sold so many tickets to its minor league games! But his talent wasn't up to the job. He was the greatest basketball player of all time, but was routinely striking out against middle-aged, overweight guys with bad haircuts. It didn't take long before basketball began to look good to him again.

Variation #3: (Talents + Passion) – Organizational needs = OCCUPATIONAL HOBBY. Surely you know people like this: super talented, exceptionally passionate -- and utterly disconnected from where the organization is headed.

Numerous species exist: the "lost in space" types, so narrow and deep in their technical specialty that they lose track of the real world; the "ax grinders," tirelessly working their pet (but irrelevant) issues; and the dilettantes, whose conceptual agility and wide-ranging interests allow them to dabble everywhere, with impact nowhere.

This one is tricky to self-diagnose. After all, hobbies can be incredibly absorbing. With your talents and passions in alignment, you most likely feel energized, involved, committed -- yet you may be miles from the mother ship, and it's about to cut your lifeline. The best antidote is frequent, candid feedback from others.

Take the test that follows to determine which areas are keeping you from a career best. In today's rapidly changing economy, opportunity abounds for those who are motivated and dedicated to achieving career bests. No one can create a career best for you. Don't leave it to chance.

-- Mr. Sandholtz is a managing director of Novations Group Inc., a change management and career development consulting firm with offices in Provo, Utah, and New York City. He can be reached at ksandholtz @novations.com.