because I think it illustrates a few common features of the process of finding a vocation.
The thing everybody knows about finding a vocation is that it’s quite different from finding a career. When you have a career mentality, the frontal cortex is very much in charge. You take an inventory of your talents. What are you good at? What talent has value in the marketplace? Then you invest in your abilities by getting a good education. You hone your professional skills. Then you survey the job market to see what opportunities are out there. You follow the incentives to get the highest return on your investment of time and effort. You strategize the right route to climb upward toward success. You reap the rewards of success: respect, self-esteem, and financial security.
In the vocation mentality, you’re not living on the ego level of your consciousness—working because the job pays well or makes life convenient. You’re down in the substrate. Some activity or some injustice has called to the deepest level of your nature and demanded an active response. Carl Jung called a vocation “an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths….Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: He is called.”
At first the summons is often aesthetic. Annie Dillard once asked a friend how he knew he was meant to become a painter. “I like the smell of paint,” he replied. It wasn’t some grandiose sense of fate. It was the aroma that came out of putting paint on canvas. Some people just like working on cars or fiddling around with numbers or making pastry or speaking in front of crowds.
For still others, the call can come from our historical circumstances. All of us are stationed at a certain place in a certain moment, and the circumstances throw concrete problems before us that demand to be answered. Václav Havel found himself living under the tyranny of communism. Gloria Steinem found herself living under the weight of a male-dominated society. These are just a few of the famous examples, but millions of people have found their vocation in fighting collectivism, racism, sexism, and other wrongs.
When the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl was about thirteen, a teacher of his declared that all of life is nothing but a process of material combustion. Frankl leapt up and declared, “Sir, if this is so, what then can be the meaning of life?” Intensely preoccupied with this question at a young age, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. As a young therapist, he set up suicide prevention centers around Vienna, and invented methods to give people on the verge of self-destruction a way to find meaning in their lives.
Then came World War II and the Nazi occupation. Frankl found himself thrown into a concentration camp. He realized that the career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me? Frankl realized that a psychiatrist in a concentration camp has a responsibility to study suffering and reduce suffering. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,” he realized. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.” The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here? Frankl went on to work as a psychotherapist in the camp, reminding despairing prisoners that the world still expected things of them. They still had responsibilities and purposes to pursue.
Vocations invariably have testing periods—periods when the costs outweigh the benefits—which a person must go through to reach another level of intensity. At these moments, if you were driven by a career mentality you would quit. You’re putting more into this thing than you are getting out. But a person who has found a vocation doesn’t feel she has a choice. It would be a violation of her own nature. So she pushes through when it doesn’t seem to make sense. As Stanford professors Anne Colby and William Damon write, “When an issue is less central