a woman named Christine who grew up very close to her mother. One day, when she was a junior at the University of Michigan studying engineering and planning on a career as an engineer, her mother was hit by a truck as she crossed the street and was killed. “She was killed by an idiot. Someone who was being irresponsible and stupid,” Christine said. “I just felt so hopeless after; nothing made sense. She was gone now. How? And I’m torn between this anger and this part of me that wants to let go and live my life. Move forward….I hate humans so much. At the same time, you have to live your life.”
Eventually Christine abandoned engineering and became a pastry chef. “After an event like that, you think about your life and who you are and what you want to do. Ninety-five percent of the decisions I make are now influenced by the fact that she died. So, yeah, pastry.”
Sometimes it’s a problem that burns at your conscience. If you work in a normal office doing some sort of organizational job, you’re probably not going to be thrust face to face with gigantic social problems. But if you get a job as a teacher in a school on an Indian reservation, you will see injustice face to face. Your soul will burn with a yearning to make things right. Your course in life will be clear.
I know a man named Fred Wertheimer who has spent his life trying to reform the way political campaigns are financed. Fred hates the way money corrupts politics, but he loves his problem. Every day I get mass emails from him linking to some news story on campaign finance reform. I want to unsubscribe from his email list, because it’s clogging up my in-box, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings because telling him I don’t care that much about his problem would be like telling him I don’t care that much about his child.
“One’s mind has to be a searching mind,” Thomas Bernhard writes of the person looking for a calling. “A mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure.”
Over time, a commitment to addressing a problem often eclipses the love of the activity that led someone to tackle the problem in the first place. For example, there comes a time in many careers when people face a choice between helping a small number of people a lot or helping a large number of people a little. A woman may have gone into education because she loved teaching. But then midway through her career she is asked if she’d be willing to be a principal or an administrator, a position that would take her away from her treasured classroom and involve a lot of boring administrative and difficult personnel tasks that she doesn’t love.
Some people turn down this “promotion.” They decide they’d rather be line workers than managers, teachers rather than principals, writers rather than editors. The thing other people call “impact,” or working “at scale,” is overrated. But in most of the cases I’ve been around, people take the promotion. Their new job as a principal (or editor, or manager, or what have you) will be a lot less fun, but it will be more rewarding. They went into their vocation for the immediate aesthetic pleasure of some activity, but over time, they realize they are most fulfilled when they are instruments for serving an institution that helps address a problem. They have found their vocation.
At that point a feeling of certainty clicks in. When that happens, you aren’t asking, “What should I do with my life?” Instead, one day you wake up and realize the question has gone away.
MOMENTS OF OBLIGATION
The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.
Simple questions help you locate your delight. What do I enjoy talking about? If it’s motorcycles, maybe your work is mechanics. When have I felt most needed? If it was protecting your country as a soldier, maybe your vocation is in law enforcement. What pains am I willing to tolerate? If you’re willing to tolerate the misery of rejection, you must have sufficient love of theater