Border Collie

You need a job the way other people need sleep. Given a real problem you are relentless, precise, and faster than everyone expected; given nothing to do you deteriorate within about a day. This is not ambition in the career sense — it is closer to a physical requirement. What you want from other people is not reassurance but a task worth doing and enough room to do it correctly, and you would rather be handed a hard brief than a compliment.

Two things go wrong. The first is that you cannot tell the difference between rest and waste, so you fill every gap and then wonder why you are running on empty. The second is that your standards are visible from outside even when you say nothing, and people feel measured around you. You rarely mean it as judgement; you simply see the gap between how a thing is being done and how it could be done, and your face does the rest. The fix is unglamorous — say the appreciative part out loud, because nobody can hear you not criticising them.