A calling

“Thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values.” I think that this is one of the best ways to relate the current work to the core values, even though the work may not seem to be the something that one would call it a calling. Perhaps a perfect job doesn’t exist in the working world, more or less, one needs to do something he doesn’t like even though one has his dream job. For me, a job is idealistic if it can provide me with daily bread as well as daily meaning of why I spend the majority of my waking hours. It is always good to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and know exactly what you are going to do and achieve every day, even though you know that you would be, more likely, exhausted or exasperated at the end of the day. The despair of spending every single hour in office doing nothing meaningful is simply terrible and it may change how a person think of himself in a long run. And therefore, it must be avoided at cost.

Have you ever heard a parable about three bricklayers? Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God. Even though they are doing the same job, the way they see their jobs makes a different in their working attitude. Perhaps for some people, a job is just a necessity of life, much like breathing and sleeping.  For others, they may view their jobs as a stepping-stone to another job. However, if you view your job as your calling, you are more likely to be happier in your life. In reality, many of us would like to be like            the third bricklayer, but instead identify with the first or second. It may be true that some of the jobs are more difficult to be viewed as “calling” as compared to jobs that can leave more impactful influence to others like teachers, doctors, soldiers etc. However, a genuinely positive and altruistic purpose in carrying out daily work may make a difference. An altruist is more likely to help new colleagues who are slow learners in learning certain skills or adapting themselves to the new environment out of altruism.  Putting it more succinctly, if you are not sure whether what you doing now is your calling, please try to think what are the possible ways of helping others through your works and how big the impact could be. On one hand, it will somehow help you to think whether you can find something you want in what you are doing now. On the other hand, it makes you keep thinking for ways to change your situation for the better and thus, you stand a better chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.

Never waste the time that we have in office, even a second. Instead of making zero progress and threading water at the same place, perhaps it is better for us to find ways to get ourselves energized and  take a step forward even though it means we need to push the boulder up the hill….we just need to do it relentlessly.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.

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