Calling, vocation, career, job

Meaningful Work, Part 3

I knew since I was about 15 that someday I would be a high school English teacher. And someday when I grow up, that will certainly come true. In the meantime, I have to satisfy myself with second best - being a tenured professor teaching management and finance. I wanted to be an English teacher for a couple of reasons. The first is that I love stories. I’ve always loved to read, and I love a great plot. Great stories not only pass the time, they transport you and can even transform you. I also love words, and the sound of words. When I my wife and I compare how we experience songs, she hears the drums, the beat, and the instruments. I can barely hear the drums except when they are completely in your face. This also explains why I cannot dance. What I do hear are the lyrics - that is first and foremost how I experience music. Everything else is background. I think it is also from having grown up attending church. I grew up Catholic, and although I admit I didn’t necessarily pay attention to what the priest was saying most of the time, I did pay attention to how he was saying it. I remember listening to an interview with a poet who grew up attending black churches in the South and how he talked about how his ministers spoke with mighty tones. A New England Catholic priest did not speak like that, but there was subtlety in the way things were said that made the words different and sacred. I came to love reading poetry in high school after I discovered not all poetry had to be rhymed and metered, but could instead follow a natural language rhythm. I wanted to be an English teacher because I wanted to share my love of language and story in a way that might help other kids come to love them the way I did. But mostly I wanted to be a teacher because I hated high school. I chose English because it was the only subject I was decent at, and the only subject I liked. I figured if I could become an English teacher, I might be able to make high school suck a little less for kids like me.

What do I mean by “kids like me”? I was an unremarkable kid passing through an anonymizing schooling process. Mostly I felt unseen, like many kids do. Worse, the system makes you feel unworthy of being seen. It’s an unremarkable story, and yet it keeps getting told because we haven’t changed the concept of high school in more than a hundred years. School reform is a topic for another post. What I want to say here is that I had an English teacher who did see me. I showed him some of my creative writing when I was a sophomore and he read it and encouraged me. I look back now and, although I don’t have the document I shared with him then, I know it was crap. It was crap because that’s all 15-year olds are capable of. But it showed a spark. He fanned that spark with his attention, and his attention not only encouraged me to write more and try to get better, it made me felt believed in. I felt like maybe I had some sort of possibility in a time when most of the signals I was getting were pretty negative. I wasn’t a popular kid, I wasn’t much of an athlete, and I was a B/C student. I basically went through my days feeling pretty bad about myself except for when I got to talk to him about writing or poetry or philosophy or whatever. I wanted to be a teacher because I loved language and words and stories, but I also wanted to fan sparks in the hearts of kids and help them know they were seen and believed in. And honestly, it’s the latter part that was most important, as you might have gathered by now, since I still haven’t gotten around to teaching English.

Something else I knew, when I had my epiphany that I would someday be a high school English teacher, was that to be the kind of teacher I wanted to be, I needed to have some life experience first. I knew that I didn’t want to be a 22-year old teacher because I didn’t think I would be able to have the impact I wanted to have. What those experiences needed to be, I didn’t know. Just that something was going to be between graduating from college and returning to teach. As I’ve already alluded, I still haven’t gotten around to teaching high school English, so that “something” is still ongoing, but now it includes getting to teach for a living, even if it is not English. That “something” I was going to do turned out to be a career in the Army. I was very blessed to have the chance to earn my PhD while I was in the Army and have the Army pay for it. In exchange, I was committed to teaching for the Army when I was done, which was a great deal from my perspective.

I know I’ve told this story here before, but I will repeat it in variation once more because it is a defining part of my identity: when I was applying for the PhD program, my boss sat me down in his office and reminded me of the career cost I would incur by taking time out to go to a PhD program (3 years) and then teaching. The bottom line was I was likely not to get promoted to colonel (O-6) from lieutenant colonel (O-5) because, although the Army was paying for the PhD, promotion boards did not regard either the time in school or the time teaching for the Army as being worthy of promotion. Having worked with me, he was sure I would go on to be promoted to colonel if I stayed in operations. But becoming a teacher was a career killer. When I reassured him I was aware of the cost, and it was what I thought I was meant to do, he agreed. He told me he had seen how much I relished opportunities to teach - whether it was Excel and Access classes I had developed for the analysts that worked for me and other leaders, or the weekly journal club I hosted - he agreed teaching was a calling for me. So I went to school, and on Sep 10th, 2010, I stepped up to the podium for the first time to teach my first class, 18 years and some change of “something” after I had graduated from college. 

I am very lucky that my life worked out in such a way that I could pursue my calling. There was a lot of hard work and sacrifice, too, but certainly luck in the form of timing, and luck in the form of support from bosses, colleagues, and friends. 

What does it mean to have a calling? I found a very good paper on the topic by Dik and Duffy (2009) in which they define a calling as

“... a transcendent summons, experienced as originating beyond the self, to approach a particular life role in a manner oriented toward demonstrating or deriving a sense of purpose or meaningfulness and that holds other-oriented values and goals as primary sources of motivation.”

They also offer a definition of vocation, which is identical to a calling, except it strips out the “transcendent summons, experienced as originating beyond the self”:

“A vocation is an approach to a particular life role that is oriented toward demonstrating or deriving a sense of purpose or meaningfulness and that holds other-oriented values and goals as primary sources of motivation.”

Practically speaking, the two concepts are the same in practice, only differing in the origin of the drive. Both calling and vocation, as defined by Dik and Duffy, have as their object a prosocial goal. People who experience either a calling or a vocation are pursuing activity in service of others. It is in the service to others that the calling/vocation is answered. I don’t think of God as directly calling me to be a teacher, but I do feel like there has always been something pulling me there. So perhaps I am somewhere between calling and vocation, but I’m not sure it really matters. 

Across the literature I have read on this topic, what specifically a calling/vocation looks like is highly subjective and variable. A person can experience almost any kind of work as a calling/vocation, and they will often explain their work differently if they perceive it is a calling/vocation vs. a job or career. We often think of high-status jobs as being potential callings - medicine, law, clergy - but there is documentation of people with lower status jobs such as hospital housekeepers talking about their work as a calling. In particular, it is their interaction with patients and their families, and their ability to help them, that transforms their work from a job to a calling. 

The careers literature generally regards a job is as perceived as a means to an end. A person with a job works to earn money so that they can do other things with their life. There is relatively little identification with the job, and if one were to win the lottery, one would probably stop doing it to pursue more meaningful activities. A career is a series of jobs that have a through-line that generally leads to promotions, status, and greater income. A career is pursued largely for extrinsic rewards as well, but the identification may be stronger since it includes status. A calling/vocation can be well-paid and have high status (some physicians practice medicine as a calling, not just a job or a career), but the differentiating point is that the primary source of motivation is prosocial service. That is why a physician and a housekeeper can both feel they are living out their callings - both are caring for the sick and afraid - they are putting themselves in service of an other.

Unfortunately, not everyone finds a job that is a calling. Some people may hold a job or pursue a career in order to finance their calling. It’s common for artists to have day jobs to support their calling. Stephen King was a high school janitor before he became famous; William Faulkner was a mailman. Some other fun examples are here. Your calling may be to be a mom/dad, or something else that doesn’t pay and doesn’t qualify as “work” in the formal sector. 

As I said, I’m lucky I found my calling. I may never get around to being a high school English teacher, but I think that will probably be ok. I still love stories and words and I get to sneak a poem into class every now and then. Along the way of those 18 years, I realized that what I actually teach matters less to me than just getting to teach. I loved literature, and thought I wanted to teach English because that was where I first felt the power of a teacher who conveyed belief in me. But a good teacher can convey that belief and that sense of empowerment while teaching any subject. What I learned along the way is that my mission, my calling, is to empower people to be better versions of themselves. Now I do get to try to fan the sparks of curiosity in students’ hearts, and sometimes those sparks catch in unexpected ways. It’s very rewarding to have a student come back years later and talk about where they went on their own journey of exploration after having discovered something in one of my classes. But I think I have the most effect when students feel a little more empowered as a result of having spent time with me. Even if I can’t teach them anything, even if they don’t remember any of the formulas or concepts that I taught them, I can at least give them that. 

A person with a calling who wins the lottery will likely show up for work the next day, maybe even doing the role for free. According to the literature, people who experience their work as a calling/vocation get a deep sense of meaning from pursuing it. They also tend to report not only greater job satisfaction, but greater overall life satisfaction as well. I can’t really imagine a day when I will willingly cease doing what I do. There may come a day when I don’t do it for UNH, and maybe don’t do it for pay, but I will keep doing it. I think that is common for people who have found their calling.

Whatever you do with your life, it seems one of the important elements of finding meaning is to be of service. That is something to consider. 

Dik, B. J., & Duffy, R. D. (2009). Calling and vocation at work: Definitions and prospects for research and practice. The counseling psychologist, 37(3), 424-450.

Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, careers, and callings: People's relations to their work. Journal of research in personality, 31(1), 21-33.