The work has to mean something
Set a Sagittarius Mercury to work on the 6th house and the daily job is assessed against what it is for. Given a purpose you can believe in, you work harder than anybody; without one, your competence is intact and your output quietly is not.
This is the most reliable predictor of how any job of yours will go, and it is almost never discussed at interview. Ask what the work is actually for before you ask about the terms.
The process defeats you rather than the task
You can do the hard part and then lose an afternoon to the form, the tracking system, the four-stage approval. It is not incapacity; detail without visible purpose simply does not hold your attention. Batch the administrative work into one fixed block a week and do it badly but completely. Spread through the days, it does not get done at all.
Colleagues get your honest assessment
Asked what you think of the plan, you say what you think of the plan, in front of whoever is present. It makes you valuable in a culture that has stopped telling itself the truth and hazardous in one that has not asked. Check who is in the room before the honesty, not after — you can keep every word and simply choose the audience.
A settled job starts to feel like a small room
Even good arrangements begin to press on you after a few years, and the restlessness arrives before there is anything wrong. That has cost you situations that were working. Build the horizon into the job — the course, the secondment, the project in a new area — rather than solving it by leaving. Most of what you need is movement rather than change.
You teach the job while you are doing it
Your instinct with any task is to explain why it works that way, so newer colleagues learn the reasoning rather than the steps. That produces people who can improvise rather than people who can follow. Ask to make it formal if the workplace allows, because this is the most valuable thing you do daily and it is currently happening in the margins.
The job is not supposed to be the whole answer
You ask work to supply meaning, and no ordinary employment can carry that load, which is why a series of good jobs have each eventually disappointed you. Move some of the weight elsewhere: the project outside, the study, the thing you do that nobody pays for. A job asked to be a purpose fails; a job asked to be a job frequently turns out to be fine.
You will trade money for interest, knowingly
Given a choice between the better-paid role and the more interesting one, you take the interesting one, repeatedly, and mostly you are right. Just make the trade explicitly rather than by instinct, and put a floor under it. A decade of interesting work with no accumulation behind it removes exactly the freedom that let you keep choosing.
Your body keeps score of the point of it
Two jobs with identical hours will leave you in completely different physical condition depending on whether you can see the point of either. Purposeful work costs you almost nothing; work you cannot justify to yourself produces broken sleep, heaviness and a dullness that exercise does not shift. Read that as evidence rather than as an attitude problem, particularly when everything about the position looks entirely reasonable written down.
Aim at the part where the reasons live
You are wasted on execution and valuable wherever the question is why: training, strategy, advocacy, the role that explains the work to the people who have to do it. Move deliberately in that direction rather than accepting the operational job because it was offered. The competence that gets you hired is not the capability worth selling here.