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A favorite Zen Buddhist story of mine—such a favorite, I confess, that I mentioned it once before—tells of a novice monk who, on his first day at the monastery, stands before the head monk to receive his work assignment. “Before you reach enlightenment,” the master, or jikijitsu, says, “you will chop wood and carry water.” Dutifully, the young monk, or unsui, does as he is told: Day after day, month after month, year after year, he chops wood and carries water. It is backbreaking work, and many times he dreams that, after he attains enlightenment, his life’s calling will be to become a teacher himself. Or perhaps he will be a pure contemplative, spending his time in prayer and meditation. Either way, his work will involve sitting indoors, without chafed hands and aching muscles.
After decades at the monastery, fulfilling his duties through arduous study and labor, the monk—now not so young—is finally judged to have the desired level of knowledge: He has risen to the level of Zen master himself. Standing before the aged head monk, he asks, “I have faithfully carried out my job all these years, chopping wood and carrying water, as I worked to become a master. What will my job be now?” The jikijitsu smiles and replies, “Chop wood, carry water.”
This time of year, the most common question I get from my students who are starting out in their career is about this idea of work as a calling. My response is the same as the Zen story’s lesson: Don’t wait for your life’s calling to find you with the perfect job; turn whatever job you find into the way you seek that calling.
You don’t have to be a career-obsessed go-getter to believe that work should be about more than financial success or just a necessary evil to pay the rent. In Genesis, God places Adam “into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” In other words, even in the original paradise—before all the unpleasantness with the snake and the apple—God designs the first human, made in his image, to work, not lie about. The Bible makes no mention of Adam’s daily labor being easy or fun, but clearly it is meaningful; working in the garden is how he lives in the image of his Creator. Hinduism has a very similar teaching: “By performing one’s natural occupation, one worships the Creator from whom all living entities have come into being.”
Despite their ostensibly secular orientation, career counselors are taught to help clients find their “transcendent summons” to a particular career. This is because clients demand an ineffable sense that they are supposed to be doing this job. Psychologists have conducted in-depth studies of this desired sense of career calling. Writing in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2005, two researchers at Boston University distinguished between “objective careers,” which they defined as jobs chosen for entirely practical reasons (such as a paycheck), and “subjective careers,” which were selected for a sense of calling. They argued that subjective careers deliver greater satisfaction, even during difficult periods. Think about it: On a really bad day, you might quit your job in anger, but even on the worst of days, you don’t quit your calling, because you didn’t choose it—it chose you.
The definition of success in an objective career generally revolves around money, power, or prestige. In a subjective career, the definition of success is much more profound than these worldly rewards. That goes deeper than just “I love my job,” as a matter of fact. Researchers demonstrated this in 2012 by devising a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with such statements as “I have a good understanding of my calling as it applies to my career.” The higher the subjects’ scores on these questions, the researchers found, the more those people felt meaning in their life. This is not to say that their life’s purpose was work per se; that would be plain workaholism. Rather, their work was a vehicle for that purpose, not an impediment. And a sense of purpose is precisely where meaning begins.
You might conclude, then, that the luckiest people in the world are those who are sure of their calling. You might look at a terrifically gifted athlete or an amazingly talented musician, and assume that they’re blessed to be born with this knowledge. That assumption would be wrong, however, because children who choose their path in life according to an unusual vocational talent can easily wind up quite unhappy. I speak partly from personal experience: For a dozen years, I pursued a career as a classical French-horn player, which I was sure was my calling from the age of 8. By the time I was 28, being a musician felt less like my vocation and more like a prison sentence.
The secret is not finding the perfect job but making your work, whatever that happens to be, your calling. This involves three steps:
1. Look within.
The first step is to home in on what economists dryly call “intrinsic compensation.” This is in contrast to “extrinsic compensation,” or the material benefits of employment, such as wage, benefits, and prestige. Intrinsic rewards include the inherent psychological recompense you get from working. Although you do need extrinsic rewards to pay the rent, intrinsic rewards are what give you meaning. Researchers have consistently shown that when people are intrinsically motivated, they like their job more, work harder, and stick with it longer than when they are only extrinsically motivated.
The intrinsic-reward step holds true for life more generally, not just for your work: Studies on students, for example, have shown that when they do puzzles out of purely intrinsic motivation—in effect, for fun—they persevere at them longer than students who are set the same task with only the extrinsic motivation of achieving a performance goal, such as course credit. Similarly, you may have noticed that your relationship with your partner is better when you do nice things for each other purely out of love, rather than for some purpose such as avoiding a fight or winning favor.
2. Focus on fascination.
One intrinsic reward that especially corresponds to calling is interest. Interest is a basic positive emotion that has a clear evolutionary root: Ancient humans who were motivated to learn were surely more inclined to prosper from exploration, and were therefore more likely to pass on their genes than incurious troglodytic layabouts. So seek a job that is intrinsically interesting to you. Interest is highly personal, of course: One of my sons is an obsessed data scientist; the other talks nonstop about his work as a construction manager. Neither one of them can imagine wanting to do what the other does—or what I do, for that matter.
Understandably, you might be in a particular work situation out of necessity, and would note that you don’t have the luxury of being fascinated by what you need to do for a living. That is fair, and no job is interesting all of the time. But even a job taken out of sheer desperation may have some interesting facets. A musician friend who’d taken a temporary job in food service while auditioning for a position in symphony orchestras told me that he’d managed to make his work interesting by focusing on how people around him behaved, as if he were an anthropologist, and keeping a journal at night of what he observed.
3. Be that person.
A second, important type of intrinsic reward can be found in service to others. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that researchers have found the highest satisfaction and morale in workplaces where a strong culture of helping and reciprocity exists. They have also shown that an impulse to assist your co-workers will raise your own job satisfaction. In other words, if you avail yourself of opportunities to help others, your job will become more satisfying—more like a calling, in fact.
Helping others at work can take many forms. One young man, seeking my advice, said he feels like a drudge in his cubicle farm, surrounded by people who got no more meaning from work than he did. I advised him to look for ways to engage, unbidden, in small acts of kindness throughout the day. For example, I said, bring the guy in the next cubicle a fresh cup of coffee after lunch, and notice his happy reaction. Write an email of appreciation to someone for no extrinsic reason. Being that person, I reasoned, would surely change for the better how he sees his role in the workplace.
When, in my 30s, I finally broke away from music and went back to school in order to change professions, I had a gnawing fear that I was simply a chronic malcontent who would wind up as dissatisfied a social scientist as I had been a miserable French-horn player. I needn’t have worried—because what I do now truly feels like my calling, and it’s a deep source of satisfaction.
But something else occurs to me: I now see that if I could have shown this column to my younger self, I might have found much more meaning as a musician. I could have appreciated the intrinsic reward of playing some of the greatest music ever written. I could have shown more interest in learning about that music and the people who wrote it. I could have found ways to lighten the daily load of my fellow musicians through small acts of kindness and consideration.
To find a calling is not about the actual work of chopping wood and carrying water. The sense of calling comes in how we make the act of chopping wood meaningful, and in how we serve others by the water we’re carrying. That is the path to true enlightenment.
The post How to Make Your Work Your Calling appeared first on The Atlantic.
