The Secret To Finding Meaningful Work
“We have entered a new age of fulfillment,” writes the philosopher Roman Krznaric, “in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.”
For most of human existence, he says, people were too busy trying to survive to “worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their talents and nurtured their well-being.” But now as material wealth has grown, people are going up the and seeking fulfillment.
While Krznaric is more hopeful than grinning and bearing, he’s careful to note common career-planning pitfalls, like valuing salary above all else, worshiping prestige, or clinging to a notion of passion.
Instead, Krznaric says, grow a vocation. He drops a quote attributed to Aristotle–“Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation”–that reminds us of something productivity master Bob Pozen once told us: You need to not only know what you’re best at, but what skills your organization, your industry, and the world are looking for.
In this way, a vocation is not something to be found like a pot of gold at the end of the career-quest rainbow, but a process to be cultivated.
Krznaric puts it succinctly:
A vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment–meaning, flow, freedom–but that also has a definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.