“Ok, I know I’m lucky to have a job, but I want my dream job, my calling. How do I know I’m not just wasting my life away?”
This was a line I stole from one of my latest conversations with my younger cousin, the last time she was in town visiting. Jo is your typical millennial, highly educated, highly opinionated, and highly adamant about living life to its fullest.
How many times have you said this to yourself? Or heard a girlfriend lament over “slaving at this 9-to-5 that was never her calling anyways?” Or even rolled your eyes at yet another “corporate prisoner” about leaving their job and pursue their calling (right before the electric, gas and cable bills all come due at exactly the same time)?
This job vs. calling battle has been raging in most professionals’ minds forever. Now more than ever, especially among millennials, corporate sisters and brothers are stuck between the safe rock of their consuming 9-to-5 and the hard place of their dreams. More than ever, they ask themselves if they should keep the job, or go for the dream…Which one will prevail? Or should the question be, which one do you really want?
What you really want and need is also the foundation of your happiness in life. The problem comes with knowing what THAT really is. Is it the safety and security of a predictable paycheck, or the adventure and thrill of entrepreneurship? Is it a bit or both, or maybe winning the Powerball and moving to Bali (ok, I digress again…)? Whatever THAT is, knowing it, but really knowing it, in the sense of applying it to your life (the real one, not the one you’re imagining as you sing happy tunes under the shower), may just the be the ultimate test…
How do you even know what your calling is? Is it just a gut feeling inside? Something that pulls you to it and doesn’t let you go until you’ve actually fulfilled it?
In his column entitled A Wall Street Job Can’t Match A Calling, writer Michael Lewis draws the difference between job and a calling. According to him, a calling is “an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it — often to the detriment of your life outside of it.“He also writes that a job “will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work“.
So despite all the “job hating” and lamentations over earning a paycheck vs. pursuing your calling, why are so few of us really working in our calling (hence the lamentations and “job hating” in the first place)? What makes the calling appear so untouchable that we must fall back on the comfort of the job?
Well, bills have to be paid, shoes bought, and (some shred) of sanity saved…which requires a paycheck, which the calling doesn’t always provide. Just ask the many struggling entrepreneurs out there…
And it’s not like you can pull the “Burger King” card and “have it your way” either…You can’t exactly have both the job and the calling at the same time. While the job you may pick seemingly allows for more security and financial means to pursue what you love outside of work, it hardly ever is a calling. Because you don’t pick the calling, the calling picks you, wraps itself around you, and shows you parts of yourself you didn’t even know existed. Except the calling doesn’t work on regular hours and some sense of work/life balance. It takes over your life and requires undying commitment from you.
If you’re sighing deeply as you read this, here’s something that may bring you relief (or send you looking for more chocolate): your seemingly safe job is not really safe (ask anyone who’s been laid off before), and neither is your calling. The only safety you can muster in this life lies right next to your heart: it’s what you have inside of you, what makes you who you truly are.
So, if like so many professionals out there driving to work dreaming about sitting on Oprah’s couch and talking about achieving their dreams, you’re also stuck between the cubicle and the dream, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- What do you think is your calling, and if it were to happen today, would it really make you happy?
- Are you committed to do the extra work and provide the extra commitment required to pursue your calling?
- Or would you rather have a great career which allows you to live an exciting life outside of work?
- Do you have, or will you find, the appropriate support system to pursue either?
And the most important question of all, that we often forget as we get shuffled left and right by the wind of our obligations and deferred dreams:
What makes you, or would make you, truly happiest?
Whatever it is, if it’s not part of your life now, you may want to consider ways to get it…
Do you have a job but would rather work on your calling?
To Your Success,
The Corporate Sis.
