It’s been attributed over the years to everyone from American author Mark Twain to Chinese philosopher Confucius. No one actually knows who said it first,but whoever it was,they were lying.
Not everyone will find work that completely fulfils them,and that’s perfectly OK.Louie Douvis
Of course,it sounds good on the surface,but it’s now morphed into a rallying cry for those who mistakenly believe in the idea that you have to find a higher purpose in your job. Because the truth is,not everyone will find work that completely fulfils them,and that’s perfectly OK.
Researchers usually categorise how we view work into three categories:a job,a career and a calling. A job is when you work primarily for financial gain. People who consider work as just a job tend to angle their lives outside the workplace,viewing it primarily through the lens of what they can do with the money they earn from it.
A career is when work gives you satisfaction from learning and advancement. You might have an interest in being promoted,getting more training to help you perform better,or you might enjoy being part of an environment where you learn and progress.
Lastly,there’s a calling,which is often framed at the ultimate level to aim towards. It’s positioned as a rarified state where you are so intoxicated by the value of you’re creating that it never feels like hard work.
Sometimes a job is just a job,and nothing more.
These three categories are often presented as a pyramid,with a job at the bottom,career in the middle,and a calling at the apex of the triangle. Unless we can find our calling,even the layout tells us,then we’re all failures sentenced to slog away every day as penance for not searching hard enough for work that we truly love.
This positioning is a lie,and a dangerous one at that too. It centres work as the primary driver of meaning in our lives,a way of thinking that is thankfully fast changing.
Many people are now reevaluating the priority of where work fits,and discovering that they’re not as motivated by spending the most productive years trying to reach the top of the pyramid.
Sometimes a job is just a job,and nothing more. Of course,work should provide at least some amount of meaning in our lives,but you’d be surprised at how little that can be.
One of the most interesting insights into this came from a 2009 paper in theArchives of Internal Medicine looking at burnout rates among doctors in a large medical centre in the US. Doctors generally have a large amount of autonomy to choose where to spend their time,such as caring for patients,research,education or administration.
For the study they asked doctors to track how much of their time they spent doing aspects of their job they personally found meaningful,and compared that to their rate of burnout. They found that doctors who spent just 20 per cent of their time on the areas that gave them meaning were a lot less likely to burn out compared to those who spent less time.
Fascinatingly,the researchers also discovered a ‘ceiling effect’ which showed that even if the doctors spent more than 20 per cent of their time on meaningful tasks,the effect on their levels of burnout remained the same.
In other words,it doesn’t matter what type of work you do,you just need to spend around one-fifth of your work time doing something you find meaningful to get the maximum benefits.
This blows up the idea that we all need to strive to find a calling that’s going to fulfil us every hour of the working day. Instead,you just need to be aware of what areas you get meaning from,and consciously decide to lean slightly more into them.
If you do that,it doesn’t matter whether you have a job,a career or a calling,we’ll all get the same amount of benefit from it. In fact,it’s about time that we rewrote the original quote. “Find a job you don’t hate,” it should go,“and you’ll still work many days of your life.”
Sure,it mightn’t be as catchy,but at least it’s truthful.
Tim Duggan’s new book,Work Backwards,is out now. He writes a monthly newsletter,OUTLET,that gives One Useful Thing Literally Every Time,at
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