Identifying what problems you like solving

From what I've seen so far, when you go into a career it's usually about solving problems. So then if you know yourself in terms of what kinds of problems you like solving will help you figure out what kind of career you'd thrive in.

For example, I call myself a 'process optimizer'. The world is chaos, yet I still try to come up with ways to establish order (although rather Sisyphean). I thrive when there's processes where I can optimize through iteration:

• When I was managing the vision science lab, I got a kick out of improving the volunteer recruitment protocol.
• When I was running visual analytics workshops, I had so much fun refining the curriculum for the next round.
• When I was managing various parts of a no-kill animal charity, I got really excited coming up with strategies to improve our donor retention for the coming year.
• Now, as someone running an academic program, I'm looking for ways to strengthen the alumni community.
• And in all these aforementioned jobs, I work on optimizing my own schedule - if I know that some months will be busier than other months, I try to move things around so that the workload is spread out more evenly in manageable chunks.

So if I'm put in a situation where 1) there's no process so I need to build from scratch, 2) there's no time to optimize processes, and 3) I don't have the autonomy to optimize my own processes, I become unhappy.

Over the past several years, I learned that I may be a good firefighter (in the figurative sense) but it takes years off my life; can't do it for long. I can also build processes from scratch but it's not something I love doing because if the requirements are unclear, that will significantly reduce your success rate (<rant> people tend to misunderstand what "requirements" means. They jump to solutions which are not the requirements. </rant> It takes a LOT of patience and persistence to eke out those requirements, and I admit that I'm simply not patient enough).

What problems do you like solving?