Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)


Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)




James Waldroop: People in business simply have many more choices today than ever before. Just a decade ago, when you took a job, you more or less did what you were told. The old saying was that IBM stood for “I’ve Been Moved”: The company dictated the moves you made. When it came to your career, you had one area that you specialized in. That was all you did, and you more or less did it for your whole work life.

If you’re looking for a visual model for change in people’s work lives, first think of a tree: Ten or twenty years ago, you’d join a company, put down roots, and stay put. Today the image of the tree has been replaced by a surfer on a surfboard: You’re always moving. You can expect to fall into the water any number of times, and you have to get back up to catch that next wave.





Career is the term you hear most often today. A career is a line of work. You can say that your career is to be a lawyer or a securities analyst-but usually it’s not the same as your calling. You can have different careers at different points in your life.

A job is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It has to do with who’s employing you at the moment and what your job description is for the next 6 months or so. These days, trying to describe what your job will be beyond 12 to 18 months from now is very dicey.

Waldroop: If you look at the derivations of the words “career” and “vocation,” you immediately get a feel for the difference between them. Vocation comes from the Latin “vocare,” which means “to call.” It suggests that you are listening for something that calls out to you, something that comes to you and is particular to you. “Career” comes originally from the Latin word for cart and later from the Middle French word for race track. In other words, you go around and around really fast for a long time-but you never get anywhere.



Butler: You tend to make different decisions at different points in your life. In fact, you can almost chronicle the kind of choices you have to make by decade. For example, the decisions that you make in your twenties tend to be about creating opportunities. At that stage of life, the questions you ask are, “What can I choose to do that will make my world bigger?” and “What will give me more options?” In contrast, when you reach your thirties, the decisions are about establishing focus. That’s when you first realize that you’re not going to be able to do everything in your life-and that to do something well, you’ve got to narrow your interests. By your late twenties and early thirties, you’re closing in on something. If you’re doing things well, if you’re becoming more deeply involved in your career, you’re actually closing doors. That’s a very hard task, and we see a lot of resistance to that shift.

As you move into your forties and fifties, the recognition of your own mortality becomes more and more a part of decision-making. You realize that you’re not going to be around forever. Your choices become a lot more precious. The gap between your dreams and what you’re actually doing narrows, and you start living your life more directly. What you’re doing is who you are. And who you are becomes more important to you.

Waldroop: As you go from one decade to the next, the issue of loss comes up over and over. It tends to have a powerful effect on the way you make choices. It’s a simple fact of life: Whenever you choose one path, you’re not choosing another. You choose business, you’re not choosing law. You choose law, you’re not choosing business.

Some people really have a tough time coming to terms with “the road not taken.” They have a sense of grief over choices not made. That’s essentially what a midlife crisis is: You’re eliminating alternatives-for good. You have to come to terms with the fact that a whole host of options have been permanently foreclosed for you.





Butler: Everyone tries to do something that seems like the wise thing to do-but that you shouldn’t do: compromise.You’ve got two competing needs or desires-say, independence and security-and you try to find the position that’s halfway between them. Typically that doesn’t work.

An equally bad approach is to jump radically from one pole to the other, to pretend that you can forget entirely about one need and recognize only the other. When you do that, the genuine need you’re trying to deny simply goes underground and becomes stronger.




So what’s the answer? To be aware of and live with this tension. It’s a dynamic part of your personality. And if you try to come up with an easy solution, you’re only going to get into trouble. At different times in your life, you’re going to shift more toward one pull than toward the others. But the tension is never going to go away. You can’t balance them out, you can’t take an average of them, you can’t somehow live in the middle. Ultimately what’s required is to live with the tension-and to know that you have to live with it.

As hard as that is to accept, we tend to make it even harder: In this culture, most people harbor the illusion that you can be happy all the time-that in fact, you should even expect it. People spend vast amounts of energy trying to make these tensions go away, and that is utterly fruitless. It’s like trying to get rid of gravity-it’s not going to happen.

Butler: Another element is what kind of personal resources you bring to bear on these tough decisions. A lot of very bright businesspeople try to solve these decisions in their heads. They want to do the math, come up with the bottom-line solution, the right MBA answer, the decision that’s going to solve the problem once and for all. What’s it going to be? Am I going to spend a lot of time with my kids? Or am I going to start up this company and commit the 90 hours per week that it will require? It’s one or the other. What’s the answer?

But there’s a better way: Take the decision out of the abstract and the absolute, and instead deal with the immediate and the real. Look at the next two months or four months. What’s on the agenda? If you have to be on the road, can your family take the hit for the next few months? And then, in the months after that, can your family get more of your attention?

The more you can bring your decisions into the immediate and take them out of the abstract, the more you’re going to be able to stay on top of these dynamic tensions-and even be energized by them.


Even good decisions don’t always work out the way we plan. What advice do you give people to help them feel like they’ve made a good choice, no matter how their decision plays out?

Waldroop: Three things go into making good decisions-decisions that you feel you can stand behind, no matter how things ultimately turn out. First, you have to give a decision the time it requires. You can’t push it, hoping to make it happen faster or just to get it over with.


Several years ago, I worked with a man who came to a very clear picture of what he wanted in his life: He wanted to own a sports team. Once that became clear, he worked out, step by step, what it would take to reach that goal: “To own a sports team, I have to amass great wealth. To do that, I have to be an entrepreneur. To do that, I have to learn about running a business-and it needs to be in an industry where there’s a great deal of upside potential.” As he worked out the logic, it not only made a lot of sense, it also helped guide his decisions.

Third, good decisions involve courage. The enemy of a good decision is fear-fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of making a mistake. A few years back, I worked with a woman who had earned an MBA from a top school and had always done the kind of work that typically goes with having an MBA. But she was never quite satisfied. One day, she came to see me and said, “I finally decided that just because I spent $100,000 on a hammer, I don’t have to spend the rest of my life driving nails.” She blew out of her job. She even left that whole world of work. She completely changed directions. That takes courage.


The biggest decision that people face in the world of work is which career to choose. What advice do you have for people who aren’t sure what their career-or their vocation-should be?

Waldroop: Good career decisions have to be based not just on your aptitudes, but also on your “deep” interests. The most common mistake that people make in their career decisions is to do something because they’re “good at it.” It’s a story I hear all the time. Someone will say to me, “I’m an engineer, but I don’t like it.” Why did you become an engineer? “I was good at science and math, so people told me I should be an engineer.” Did you ever like engineering? “No, but it was easy.”





There’s one thing that everyone should do in the course of making a career decision: some reflection. You’re going to need some systematic way of thinking through what you know about yourself, thinking through those times in your life when you were deeply excited about what you were doing and deeply engaged in doing it. And then you need to identify the themes that were present during those times.

You may come up with a list of times in your life when you were doing apparently different things-but at each of those times, you were deeply engaged. When you analyze those times, you’ll find themes that connect them. Those are your core interests. Thinking about them in a systematic way gives you the information you need to make a good decision.

You can find Timothy Butler and James Waldroop’s model for matching your deep interests to the opportunities in the workplace by visiting the Web .