I think you are dead on; you need to find a job you enjoy. When I was a student I was lucky enough to do 6 co-op terms (internships). During this time I learned that your actual productivity is not being measured. The majority of your performance is measured relative to other coworkers, and simply the perception on how smart and hard you work. On one co-op term, I was highly regarded, but only doing what I considered 2 hours of work per day. However, I was doing all they expected of me and continually asking for more work, so they thought I was fantastic. I was able to do this by working smarter, not harder. Another co-op term at a small company I was doing 6+ hours of work (again, from my perspective) and I did not get a good review at all. This was because I was doing about half the work of the other programmers there, who were very senior and experienced developers. Additionally, there were no opportunities to work smarter, I just had to churn out a lot of code in a very confined way.

So, I quickly learned that a) your employer is judging your work on their perception of performance, not what you think b) in order to excel, you need to be in a position to work smarter

All of this brings me to the conclusion that in order to succeed you need to be set up for success.