Grit(47)

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I’ll point out the obvious: there’s nothing “wrong” with having no professional ambition other than to make an honest living. But most of us yearn for much more. This was the conclusion of journalist Studs Terkel, who in the 1970s interviewed more than a hundred working adults in all sorts of professions.

Not surprisingly, Terkel found that only a small minority of workers identified their work as a calling. But it wasn’t for lack of wanting. All of us, Terkel concluded, are looking for “daily meaning as well as daily bread . . . for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

The despair of spending the majority of our waking hours doing something that lacks purpose is vividly embodied in the story of Nora Watson, a twenty-eight-year-old staff writer for an institution publishing health-care information: “Most of us are looking for a calling, not a job,” she told Terkel. “There’s nothing I would enjoy more than a job that was so meaningful to me that I brought it home.” And yet, she admitted to doing about two hours of real work a day and spending the rest of the time pretending to work. “I’m the only person in the whole damn building with a desk facing the window instead of the door. I just turn myself around from all that I can.

“I don’t think I have a calling—at this moment—except to be me,” Nora said toward the end of her interview. “But nobody pays you for being you, so I’m at the Institution—for the moment. . . .”

In the course of his research, Terkel did meet a “happy few who find a savor in their daily job.” From an outsider’s point of view, those with a calling didn’t always labor in professions more conducive to purpose than Nora. One was a stonemason, another a bookbinder. A fifty-eight-year-old garbage collector named Roy Schmidt told Terkel that his job was exhausting, dirty, and dangerous. He knew most other occupations, including his previous office job, would be considered more attractive to most people. And yet, he said: “I don’t look down on my job in any way. . . . It’s meaningful to society.”

Contrast Nora’s closing words with the ending of Roy’s interview: “I was told a story one time by a doctor. Years ago, in France . . . if you didn’t stand in favor with the king, they’d give you the lowest job, of cleaning the streets of Paris—which must have been a mess in those days. One lord goofed up somewhere along the line, so they put him in charge of it. And he did such a wonderful job that he was commended for it. The worst job in the French kingdom and he was patted on the back for what he did. That was the first story I ever heard about garbage where it really meant something.”



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In the parable of the bricklayers, everyone has the same occupation, but their subjective experience—how they themselves viewed their work—couldn’t be more different.

Likewise, Amy’s research suggests that callings have little to do with formal job descriptions. In fact, she believes that just about any occupation can be a job, career, or calling. For instance, when she studied secretaries, she initially expected very few to identify their work as a calling. When her data came back, she found that secretaries identified themselves as having a job, career, or calling in equal numbers—just about the same proportion she’d identified in other samples.

Amy’s conclusion is that it’s not that some kinds of occupations are necessarily jobs and others are careers and still others are callings. Instead, what matters is whether the person doing the work believes that laying down the next brick is just something that has to be done, or instead something that will lead to further personal success, or, finally, work that connects the individual to something far greater than the self.

I agree. How you see your work is more important than your job title.

And this means that you can go from job to career to calling—all without changing your occupation.

“What do you tell people,” I recently asked Amy, “when they ask you for advice?”

“A lot of people assume that what they need to do is find their calling,” she said. “I think a lot of anxiety comes from the assumption that your calling is like a magical entity that exists in the world, waiting to be discovered.”

That’s also how people mistakenly think about interests, I pointed out. They don’t realize they need to play an active role in developing and deepening their interests.

“A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find,” she tells advice seekers. “It’s much more dynamic. Whatever you do—whether you’re a janitor or the CEO—you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.”

In other words, a bricklayer who one day says, “I am laying bricks” might at some point become the bricklayer who recognizes “I am building the house of God.”



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Amy’s observation that the same individual in the same occupation can at different times think of it as a job, career, or calling brought to mind Joe Leader.

Joe is a senior vice president at NYC Transit. Basically, he’s the New York City subway’s lead engineer. It’s a task of almost unimaginable proportions. Annually, more than 1.7 billion trips are taken on the city’s subways, making it the busiest subway system in the United States. There are 469 stations. Laid end to end, the tracks for the subway system would reach all the way to Chicago.