I recently grew up, and even more recently figure out what I want to do with my life career-wise. Given the recency, hopefully this essay will be a little more helpful than others of its kind in helping you choose a career.
The big secret missing ingredient for me was: have one, involuntary goal.
For relatively smart, relatively lazy folk like me, the world has too many possibilities to get excited about any of them. I imagined being a firefighter and getting paid to work out and play video games in between playing small time hero. I thought about joining the army, programming computers, stripping, doing porn, being an startup entrepreneur, a lawyer, an inventor or a stock trader. I'm mentally and physically capable of any of those things, but none of them were things I felt compelled to do.
All I really wanted was to get laid more often, play video games, look good, and otherwise feel great, and even those things I only wanted in that they were the most frequent whims. School and career were just something annoying on the side that I had to do to buy my way towards those things and/or not get yelled at.
That level of motivation got me through an easy bachelor's degree with crummy grades, and into a job I didn't care about. After a few years I got really bored and bit depressed and my motivation at work completely disappeared to the point that I got fired. I think many if not most people with a similar demographic to me end up like this, but manage to force themselves to do enough to not get fired because they have a family or more fear or something. It sucked. Hopefully you can avoid it.
Having one goal changed all of this because now there is no moment of the day during which I don't know what I should (ideally) be doing. I'm still human, which means I often waste time (writing this essay) or break to have fun, but I know what I should do all the time. I have purpose. I can finally take workaholics and otherwise productive/prolific people as role models without feeling like the whole idea is stupid. I finally understand what big shot celebrities are talking about in motivational speeches when they share the stories of how they earned the careers and companies they built.
The one goal has to be involuntary though. I couldn't just pick something at random because that wouldn't stick. I tried that before and a few months later I'd get bored and then get excited about something else. My goal today isn't something I chose out of a list of possibilities. It's something that, after finding it and learning about it, I must do it. It's so important to me that it's instantly obvious that no other long term goal will compare to it.
The only way I know of to find an involuntary goal, is to learn about different things in hopes of finding it. If there's a faster more systematic way to discovering your goal, I certainly didn't find it. Start reading about new inventions and new ideas. Find out about how the world works, and hopefully, eventually, you'll see something that not enough people are doing, not enough people care about, something so important that its current state is unacceptable and if you want it done you must do it.
That is your one goal. Once you find it, life will still be hard, maybe even a little harder, but suddenly the effort will be worth it.
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