The Importance of Being Called

‘Another day, another dollar.’

Waiting for the train to arrive one morning, I overheard a man on the platform saying this to himself. He was going to work, and had a clear sense of why — to earn money!

No question about it: making a living is one of the most important reasons for work. Paying expenses and providing for our needs is a strong reason to work at a job that pays.

But there can be a possibility that the money we earn becomes the only reason we work. It gets to a point where, if we didn’t need to earn money, we would stop working altogether. For many of us, this is a planned goal of ours!

Thanks to progressing living standards and increasing life spans, it’s now reasonable to expect to reach a point where we no longer need to work. The name we give this is retirement.

Interestingly, our understanding of that word, ‘retirement,’ has changed in a significant way over the past decades.

Back in the 1930s, when a person retired, it was understood that while the bills were still there to be paid, that person was probably no longer able to work to do that. The word ‘retired’ was more so used to indicate an inability. The fact that people were retiring — unable to work but still having expenses to meet — helped motivate the start of the Social Security system.

Today, the meaning of the word retirement has changed. Now it indicates that a person has enough money to no longer need to work. They can live off savings. Whether they’re capable of working for pay or not, that’s no longer the issue.

This new meaning of ‘retirement’ becomes clearer in light of books like Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and the broader phenomenon of early retirement. We’re no longer asking ‘Am I able physically and mentally to hold a paying job?’ Now the question has become ‘Do I have enough money saved up to support me as long as I’ll live?’

This new understanding and emphasis brings several good things with it. It leads us to think bigger. It encourages us to think strategically, taking account of our life and needs. And it also challenges conventional thinking and opens up possibilities we may never have considered.

But there are also potential drawbacks within the framework of retirement-by-saving. Perhaps the greatest one is the possibility of over-focusing on money to the point that we lose sight of any other reason to work. When that happens, it really is ‘another day, another dollar’ — nothing more.

What can help us benefit from the new opportunities in front of us while avoiding the potential pitfalls?

Whatever it is, it will need to be bigger than the issues at hand — money, or work, or retirement. We need something that’s capable of including them all, that can hold them together in balance.

More Than A Paycheck

For years, my friend Alisha worked in sales analytics for a large company. But as she started volunteering for a local nonprofit, she fell in love with the people there and the mission of the organization. Eventually she left her job, and now works full-time for that nonprofit while raising her own salary.

Another friend, Jim, was employed in a well-paying computer programming position, but left to be a stay-at-home dad for his three kids. As they’ve gotten older, he now teaches part-time at a small school.

The stories of Alisha and Jim show that there’s more to work than meets the eye. There is the check we get at the end of the month; but also much more.

One of the basic things our work accomplishes is it shows what we think is important. We spend time on what we value, so when we’re spending most of our waking hours doing something, we’re saying that that work really matters!

We could think of it from another direction. Say you have a day off. You can spend it any way you choose. Isn’t it true that what we do on our day off shows what’s important to us? The way we spend our time is a sign of the value we place on things.

Taking this back to work, the time we spend there is a statement of value. By our work, we show what we think is worthwhile. We show what we think is important and good to do.

We’ve probably all had the experience of working with someone who thought their job was very meaningful. And on the other hand, each of us has likely also had a co-worker who didn’t think this way. Think about it for a moment: with which of these people was it more enjoyable to work alongside?

Meaning matters, and finding meaning at work is one of the most important places to have it.

Meaning comes from building a match between our values and what our work accomplishes.

If you are interested in a recipe for work you can’t wait to be involved in, here’s a strong start:

What matters most to you?

What matters second most to you? Third?

Now, is there work you can do that supports these three values? If so, welcome to work you’ll love!

One fun aspect to this exercise is that there’s no constraint on the values we might pick — they could involve learning, or fun, or peace, or any other value under the sun.

The point is that when we look into what matters to us, we’ll probably find there are things we put above money. It’s not the be-all and end-all that we can sometime make it out to be. Hence the stories of Jim and Alisha.

Bob Buford liked to say that early on in our career, we tend to focus on success — winning in our work, earning a lot, and achieving in tangible, measurable ways. Then, somewhere around midlife, we may well transition to being more concerned about what he called significance.

What Buford tapped into in his own career, and what thousands of others have found too, is that work for reasons bigger than money is the most satisfying work there is. It’s the sort of thing which, if we were able, we’d gladly do for free.

The happiest people at work are putting forth their best effort for something more than pay. They’ve succeeded in connecting what they care about with what they do.

And the wonderful thing is, this is available to everyone. Our calling leads us there. It puts us on the path to fulfillment because it points us to the things we believe matter most.

An Adventure to Live

Here’s something wonderful about our calling: it doesn’t minimize or dismiss any of the aspects of our work. Wiser than we are, our calling is never down on earning money. It never teaches us to ignore responsibilities. And at the same time it’s also much more bullish about our dreams than we are.

This is so important because there are two mistakes we might fall into when it comes to our work.

The first mistake is to consider our work only from an economic perspective. This involves discounting anything that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached. Our calling tells us loud and clear that this view is missing something — something significant.

The other mistake is in the opposite direction. It involves neglecting and discounting the way our work really does need to pay the bills. The fact is that money is not only something most of us need to earn to live, but it also helps us as a foundation. It can become a platform for enabling wonderful opportunities later on.

Our calling gets it. It is fantastically clear-eyed about the value of money, and also the importance of our passions. Our calling teaches us to strike a dynamic balance between our various values. It keeps all of life in mind and sees past our biases and shortsightedness to the bigger, better picture.

What would it be like to take up full-time work with the sole condition that you had to love the work itself? Or what if you had a shot at an unbelievably well-paying job that, in a few years’ time, could set you up with financial support for years to come?

Each one of these adventures would likely lead to others as well. And I think that’s where our calling wants to lead us: from one adventure into another, never knowing what will come next, but building in the direction of our dreams and welcoming what appears on our doorstep in the process.

The beauty of our calling is that it puts money, passion, and values all in their proper place. In doing this, it gives us an adventure to live.

Everyone is called, but not everyone knows it and responds. The opportunity in front of us is to listen, learn, and follow our calling into something better than we could create by ourselves.

This is what’s in front of us, and each day, we get the chance to give our response to this offer. What would a fitting response be today to the offer of your calling?

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