Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's
needs. -- -Frederick Buechner-
7 Lessons About Finding the Work You Were Meant to Do
--by Kate
Torgovnick May, syndicated from ideas.ted.com
You don’t “find your calling,” you fight for it — and other lessons from people who found their passion (sometimes late in life).
Whether
it was during a career aptitude test or in a heart-to-heart chat after getting
laid off, chances are someone has talked to you about how to “find your
calling.” It’s one of those phrases people toss about. But StoryCorps founder
Dave Isay takes issue with it … specifically, the verb.
“Finding
your calling — it’s not passive,” he says. “When people have found their
calling, they’ve made tough decisions and sacrifices in order to do the work
they were meant to do.”
In
other words, you don’t just “find” your calling — you have to fight for it. And
it’s worth the fight. “People who’ve found their calling have a fire about
them,” says Isay, the winner of the 2015
TED Prize. “They’re the people who are dying to get up in the morning and go
do their work.”
Over
a decade of listening to StoryCorps interviews, Isay noticed that people often
share the story of how they discovered their calling — and now, he’s collected
dozens of great stories on the subject into a new book, Callings:
The Purpose and Passion of Work. Below, he shares 7 takeaways from the
hard-won fight to find the work you love.
1.
Your calling is at the intersection of a Venn diagram of three things: doing
something you’re good at, feeling appreciated, and believing your work is making
people’s lives better. “When those three things line up, it’s like
lightning,” Isay says. He doesn’t suggest that a person has to be a surgeon
saving lives to feel like they have a calling; think of the diner waitress who
talks to customers and makes them feel loved. How do you find this overlap? “You
have to shut out all the chatter of what your friends are telling you to do,
what your parents are telling you to do, what society is telling you to do,”
Isay says, “and just go to that quiet place inside you that knows the
truth.”
2.
Your calling often comes out of difficult experiences. What lurks in that
quiet place will be a defining experience — quite possibly a painful one. Isay
points to an interview in Callings with
24-year-old teacher Ayodeji Ogunniyi. “He was studying to be a doctor when his
father was murdered. He realized that what he was really meant to do was be a
teacher,” says Isay. “He says that every time he walks into a classroom, his
father is walking in with him.” This theme of people turning their hardest
experiences into a new path runs throughout the book. “Having an experience that
really shakes you and reminds you of your mortality can be a very clarifying
event in people’s lives. Oftentimes, it leads to changes,” he says. “We spend a
lot of time working, so it can really change your priorities in terms of work
life.”
3.
Calling often takes courage and ruffles feathers. Elsewhere in Callings,
we hear about Wendell Scott, who became the first African-American NASCAR driver
in 1952, and kept on driving despite threats against his life. From scientist
Dorothy Warburton who dealt with extreme sexism as she conducted research to
break the stigma around miscarriage. From Burnell Cotlon, who opened the first
grocery store in the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina because he wasn’t
about to let his old neighborhood’s spirit fade. Calling, says Isay, very often
starts with taking a stand against a status quo that simply isn’t acceptable,
and then dedicating your work to changing it: “It’s work ignited by hope, love,
or defiance — and stoked by purpose and persistence.”
4.
Other people often nudge you toward calling. Sharon Long had worked odd jobs
most of her life. As Isay tells it, “Her daughter was going to college, and as
the bursar was helping them with financial aid forms, she said quietly to
herself, ‘I wish I could’ve gone to college.’ The bursar responded, ‘It’s not
too late.’” Sharon enrolled in an art program, and on her advisor’s suggestion,
took forensic anthropology as her science. “The advisor suggested it for no
other reason than he thought it was the easiest science course for the science
requirement,” says Isay. “But the minute she sat in that class, it was boom —
this is what she was meant to do.” Isay tells this story to illustrate how
calling, while very personal, is also relational. “People bump you this way and
that way,” he says, often without realizing it. “When people find their
callings, they want to honor those people who helped them get there.”
5.
What comes after identifying
your calling is what really matters. The old ‘finding your calling’
phraseology makes it sound like a calling is a pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow — you find it, and the story’s over. But Isay stresses that your calling
is an ongoing process. “Understanding what your calling is — that’s very
different than the blood, sweat and tears of actually doing it,” he says.
Pursuing a calling may require going back to school or apprenticing; it may
require starting a business. Often, notes Isay, it leads a person into a line of
work that’s in service of others. “This book is basically a love letter to
nurses, teachers, social workers — the people who don’t often get celebrated for
the work they do,” he says.
6.
Age is irrelevant. I say found his calling when
he was 21 and interviewed a man who’d been part of the Stonewall riots. “The
minute I hit record, I knew that being a journalist and interviewing people was
what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “I feel very lucky
that lightning struck when I was very young.” But collecting stories for the
book reminded him that a calling can be discovered at any age. The book includes
an interview with someone who knew they wanted to be an NBA referee at age 15,
and another who worked as an accountant for 30 years before discovering his
passion for slicing lox. “Doing the work you’re meant to do is one of the most
satisfying, remarkable experiences that a person can have,” says Isay, “so never
give up.”
7.
Calling often doesn’t come with a big paycheck. Another trend Isay sees in
stories of people who find their calling: they often involve leaving a
high-paying job for one that’s lower-paying but more satisfying. “The message we
send to young people is that you want to do as little work as you can to make as
much money as you can — that’s the dream,” says Isay. “But the wisdom in the
StoryCorps archive is that there’s another, much more rewarding dream of taking
risks and working very hard to live with integrity.” In the end, that’s the
lesson he took away from writing this book. “There are no millionaires, no
billionaires, no celebrities, nobody with a big Twitter following,” he says.
“Just stories can teach us a lot about lives fully lived
Be The Change: Find a quiet place, away from the
chatter of society, friends, or family telling you what to do, and contemplate
what it is that makes you come alive. Is there a way to engage in that activity
in service to others? Additionally, consider ways in which you can enrich the
world right now in your present circumstances, even if as simple as adopting a
positive attitude with the people you encounter and helping them feel
appreciated.
