My day job. Personal projects get a little more heart, but "success" to me is usually intrinsic, not extrinsic. I'm probably a little weird when it comes to motivating factors, but not alone.
There need to be more jobs where the interest alignment in work is 100%. Disney animators, Nintendo programmers, audio programming, SpaceX engineers, ML/AI, bioinformatics, ... Rockets, chemicals, machines, visual toys, solving moonshot things, ...
Less plumbing and glue code. Less adtech. Less studying and optimizing trivial human interactions that nobody will remember.
be careful what you wish for, though. in the entertainment industry, for people like actors and directors, the pay cut is only at the early stages, and unions limit how deep it goes even then. for video games, though, it's an absolute nightmare. interest alignment in work, in that case, can turn into a recipe for suffering.
Some of these jobs can involve crunch time, low pay, and other forms of employee abuse, since people are willing to suffer for the sake of their passion. Sometimes boring work is the healthier option.
Would add: prestige law and government jobs; trying to be an actor; working at Amazon; working as a chef/cook at most restaurants, esp fancy ones--the list is quite long of "passion jobs" that pay poorly and involve all sorts of abuse people wouldn't put up with at other jobs.
Seriously, for some of the things you mentioned, I suspect the key is to NOT be highly focused on the career path which pays the most. I kind of doubt that audio programmers are paid as much as Sharepoint developers, but I would hope they have more fun.
Sometimes people call it a niche field, but I think they are typically just over focused on imagenet.
But "anything I do for work" was my first thought when I saw this post.
What it comes down to is that there's only so much I can do to help my work's projects succeed. There's just too much out of my control. Decisions have already been made; contracts are already being signed; the clients believe they've done enough testing.
I can pick up the slack, go above and beyond, and do other people's job. But the project can still fail to get user buy-in, fail to make any notable impact, fail to make or save money, or just outright fail for reasons I can do nothing about.
That doesn't mean I don't try. I just don't care if these projects succeed. If we did what we could and learned things we can carry forward, I'm satisfied.
I don't have enough data to say it's a good idea, but so far I'm liking it.
Among the other factors, which are:
"Does this job allow me to have time to do side projects?"
"Does this job provide the funds for my hobby?"
I took my current job (in communications) in order to get better at outreach, marketing, etc. for when I work for myself since that's what I was the weakest at as a freelancer. I'm also interested in tech ethics so I took a job in politics so I could become more familiar with how the sausage is made.
Now I'm looking for a swe job so I can get more experience working in teams of devs since most of the tech work I've done has been solo work.
I'll let you know how it worked out in 10 years?