Should you do a job you love?

On careers, callings, and stories about work (+ new job design programme launch 🚀)

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; and in the interregnum a great variety of monsters appear.” — Antonio Gramsci

I

ON A HOT SPRINGTIME AFTERNOON in Hell’s Kitchen in 2023, a few months after me and Corina had left London to become full-time working travellers, I was sitting across from Luigi, a co-founder of Amorino, the popular gelato franchise with branches in over 22 countries. Luigi had taken me out to lunch to mark the end of the work we’d just completed together: he’d sat through two lengthy interviews to discuss his work—and I was due to write a small book about it; the man, the career, and the impact he had made.

Luigi and Amorino were part of a writing project that was serving a very important function for me at the time: it was an attempt to see if I, like so many others seemed to be doing, could earn an income from combining the things I loved; namely, travelling the world, meeting interesting people, and producing writing online. I figured that I might be able to invent a new type of city guide, told from the unique perspective of local restaurateurs like Luigi, and self-publish a whole series of them, or sell them to Condé Nast or Lonely Planet. The idea was prompted by the fact that I had recently been laid off from my copywriting job with a logistics firm because my boss found my newly changing time zones unworkable.

It was certainly no fun being on the other side of the world, having committed to a highly experimental new lifestyle, and being made unemployed so unceremoniously. But then again, it was certainly not a job I loved. I wrote sales pages nobody ever saw, for a mission I didn’t care about, for a man who trusted people so little he insisted on drip-feeding tasks instead of giving me anything real. Getting sacked was a punch in the stomach. But when I finally caught my breath, I realised it had freed me to confront important questions those golden handcuffs had kept me from exploring: What if my pay check could come from my passions? Will I ever have a better opportunity than this to pursue work that truly matters to me? What would it be like to do something not because it paid the bills or made me look good, but because it was something I felt genuinely called to do?

Lounging with Luigi in New York, sipping coffee, sharing tiramisu, I knew I was on the right path. Luigi looked at ease in his success, his baseball cap, his rough stubble, his cheeky smile, and his lively preoccupation with his store window displays. He had a beautiful family, a loyal terrier, nice shoes, deep knowledge of his domain, strong opinions about New York’s Mayor, visions for his retirement, a boat on the Hudson, sailing lessons planned, a skiing holiday on the horizon. Here was a guy who’d clearly answered his calling, and built a life that was genuinely his own because of it, a life that was worth writing about. And here I was too, feeding off him both energetically and quite literally, sensing that my very proximity to Luigi, and the privilege of witnessing him sharing his story, was both evidence of and reward for having crossed the threshold into a life that was genuinely mine too.

Which is why, as we were hugging and saying goodbye, the parting piece of wisdom Luigi offered to me came as such a shock. “So, Harrison,” he concluded, “in the end, I’d recommend doing a job you do not love.”

He explained that doing a job you love can become all-consuming and make you neglect your relationships, your hobbies, your health, and even yourself, in the sense that you can start to develop into an asymmetrical person. I really didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I felt a little exposed in the way that you do when a worldview you have is suddenly challenged. And I felt embarrassed to be having this revelation so publicly. I even felt a bit desperate at the horror of the possibility that the path I’d chosen might be the wrong one!

But on the other hand, something told me there had to be more to it than what Luigi had laid out. Partly, I could feel how much more rewarding it was pursuing work I loved. Even though I could not say for sure where any of it would lead, let alone whether it would make me a living, those nourishing feelings counted for a lot. And partly, I think I was old enough to sense that this was one of those lessons that I could only learn by living it, not by taking advice. Luigi had the benefit of hindsight. We all have to walk our own path. And my path was already apparent. It was either give up on my dreams before I’d even tried, never discovering if any of them were possible, or keep on pushing out, into the fog, having faith that I’d discover something more remarkable than any pre-laid path could give me.

I couldn’t figured out how to reconcile my desires with Luigi’s warning. What role had his particular perspective on work played in Amorino’s success? Had he always felt that way? What were his beliefs about work that I clearly didn’t share? I had the feeling there were nuances I couldn’t yet see.

II

Last week, as part of my coaching training in Positive Psychology, our supervisor Robert shared an ambitious scientific study¹ about people’s relationship with work. The study proposed three distinct orientations people have towards their work, experiencing work either as a Job, a Career, or a Calling. Here are the definitions:

People who experience their work as a Job are only interested in the pay check and do not seek or receive any other type of reward from it. The work is not an end in itself, but instead is a means that allows people to acquire the resources needed to enjoy their time away from the Job. The major interests and ambitions of Job holders are not expressed through their work.

By contrast, people who experience their work as Careers have a deeper personal investment in their work and mark their achievements not only through income, but through advancement within their organisation. This advancement often brings higher social standing, increased power within the scope of one’s occupation, and higher self-esteem for the worker.

Finally, people who experience their work as Callings find that their work is inseparable from their life. A person with a Calling works not for financial gain or Career advancement, but instead for the fulfilment that doing the work brings to them. The word ‘‘calling’’ was originally used in a religious context, as people were understood to be ‘‘called’’ by God to do morally and socially significant work.

Using a sophisticated multi-question survey, the study asked numerous workers in different professions how much or how little they identified with these orientations. And the vast majority of respondents could easily decide which bucket they were in.

But arguably the most interesting finding concerned the participating group of administrative assistants. There were 24 of them in total. They all had the same pay, the same level of seniority, and did the same work at the same desks. Yet they were pretty evenly distributed across all three buckets:

• 9 assistants saw their work as a Job

• 7 assistants saw it as a Career

• 8 assistants saw it as a Calling

This is really significant because it suggests that the active ingredients in our orientation towards work are not in the work itself, but in us.

The paper does not provide an explanation for this, so I’ve been reflecting on my own life for clues.

One hypothesis I have is that the administrators who saw their work as a Calling were more predisposed than others to appreciate work in this way. It’s possible. But I’m not altogether convinced that tells the full story.

Another possibility is that they had experienced a difficulty or loss beforehand, and the process of rebuilding their lives gave them capacities to appreciate work—like gratitude and purpose—that they didn’t have before.

For me though, the most likely explanation is that people develop a greater capacity for finding their Calling if they’ve done a lot of different kinds of work, in the process figuring out what they’re good at (or bad at), what they enjoy (or dislike), and what particular problems they prefer to work on (or avoid). In other words, there might be something about the diversity of your work experience and the resulting contrast—between industries, between projects, between problems and people—that gives you accumulated evidence to see your Calling more clearly.

The work I do today as a coach feels as much a Calling as anything I’ve done and, tellingly, I did make my way to it through a variety of work experiences.

Some of it humbling, like when I got sacked from a coffee shop at the age of 27 for slacking off because I couldn’t handle the pressures of a hospitality-based role.

Some of it sobering, like when I learned the months of effort I’d put into selling Tupperware door-to-door (remember the Kleeneze catalogue?) was in fact a pyramid scheme making others rich while I was just their puppet on a string.

Some of it demoralising, like working for over a decade as an electrician on cold, dangerous construction sites being verbally abused by supervisors with no managerial training, and having my wages managed through a convoluted system of third-party payroll companies that routinely paid me late, deducted more tax than I owed, charged me a fee for the privilege, and could not be brought to justice because they were based offshore.

In light of all that, I can tell you precisely why I thrive in certain jobs and not others. And I know it has improved my ability to imbue the work I do today with meaning.

So it’s possible that you must find your Calling by first going through a whole heap of OK jobs, dead ends, and downright dreadful work. Your Calling might be a recognition rather than a revelation.

But no sooner was I revelling in the clarity of this Job-Career-Calling framework, patting myself on the back for being a heavyweight Calling-seeker, than Robert proceeded to pull the rug from under our feet. He quietened the group and said he wanted to underline something very important: that we have a problem in our culture of glorifying Callings and demonising Jobs. It’s as if, in our post-materialist world, finding your Calling is the minimum requirement and anything less will get you burned at the stake.

But this is a narrow and unhelpful mindset. Jobs and Careers give people legitimate ways to create meaningfulness in their lives outside of work, and both are perfectly principled ways to live.

Moreover, what if your Calling consumes you and leads to neglect elsewhere, as Luigi warned?

And even more importantly, not all Callings are necessarily enjoyable or challenging (two hallmarks of satisfying work), while a Job or a Career could be both.

If, as coaches, we truly care about our clients’ growth, it’s important for us to be aware of what orientation they have to their work, meet them where they are, and respect them, not judge them, or try to coach them towards a Calling that they do not want.

In fact, coaches of all people are particularly prone to this kind of Calling-worship. They, almost by definition, will see their own work as a Calling (guilty as charged), and it follows that the types of people they pull into their orbit are also that way inclined.

Coaches therefore have a hard time understanding Job-holders and Careerists. Well, not so much Job-holders; it’s easier to make sense of them, since there are many jobs that need doing, and not everybody has the privilege of thinking beyond a Job.

But it’s the people in the middle—the Careerists—that really get coaches stroking their chins. “Who,” they ponder, “are these people that only seem to care about power and advancement?”

In any case, Robert was emphatic about not valorising one orientation at the expense of another, but instead embracing work in all of its tripartite glory. I have to say it has really made me stop, for the first time since hearing Luigi’s words three years ago, and think about the stories I am telling myself about work.

III

It turns out the notion of “story” has a particular significance when it comes to finding meaning in work. The scientists who have done the most to understand, measure, and explore meaning interventions to help people create more of it are Frank Martela and Michael Steger. In a 2016 landmark paper², Martela & Steger were the first ones to point out that their field was conflating three separate questions in the study of meaning:

1. “Does my life make sense?” (Coherence)

2. “What am I trying to do?” (Purpose)

3. “Does any of it matter” (Significance)

By Coherence, they mean our ability to tell a convincing story about our lives, and to understand where we are in that story. An absence of Coherence, by contrast, is a life characterised by uncertainty and incomprehensibility.

Purpose is about the presence of regimes, plans, paths, clear long-term goals and our momentum towards them. A lack of Purpose, on the other hand, is likely to leave us feeling pretty aimless and reactive.

Finally, Significance is obviously about whether the thing we’re doing is something we care deeply about. If it isn’t, then chances are it’ll soon start to feel worthless and futile.

As I’m sure you can imagine, when all three hallmarks show up strongly in our work—when it’s coherent, it’s purposeful, and it matters to us—we are bound to feel shed-loads of meaning and the satisfaction that accompanies it.

However, it is interesting to think about scenarios where one hallmark is missing. Consider the following:

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In one scenario, you could have a legible story about what you’re doing, plus plenty of purposeful structure to guide you, but you may still feel like it’s all pretty pointless. For example, a person who finds themselves stuck on a culturally pre-described path (study → career → family → retire). It could also be someone stuck in a line of work that brings out only a sliver of who they are. They feel that their voice, their talents, and their potential are being wasted.

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In another scenario, you could have a legible story, and your work could feel genuinely significant, but you find it hard to articulate a longer-term purpose. This could be work that is organised around rituals or caretaking responsibilities, or it could be that you’re volunteering for a cause whose mission you care about but you can’t say where it’s ultimately leading.

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In a third scenario, your work could have goals and direction, and you could care deeply about it, but you may lack a cohesive story to situate and ground it. This is common when you’ve entered, willingly or otherwise, a period of disruptive transition (illness, divorce, job loss). When the old script has been torn up and a new one hasn’t been written yet, even the strongest pillars of Purpose and Significance can feel hollow.

Take the example of nursing. Under normal circumstances, nursing is work that people can readily find coherence, purpose, and significance in. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the most chaotic moment when nobody, not even governments, knew what was going to happen next, health organisations saw a sharp rise in nurses needing psychological support. What was lacking for nurses in that moment was an intelligible, let alone predictable, story about the new game they were playing and what role they had to play.

Another group of people I’ve often seen struggling with incoherence are those who are in the liminal space between one work orientation and another. For instance, someone who has worked for years in corporate and has left to pursue a creative-entrepreneurial business of their own (Career > Calling). As a creative career coach, I tend to meet many people in this situation. And it’s tough. That liminal space, whilst certainly punctuated by moments of revelation and delight, is on the whole a surprisingly difficult gauntlet - full of confusion, disappointment, loneliness, and self-doubt.

Two things you can do to support people here is, firstly, stimulate their thinking about how they might construct a new empowering story about who they are becoming, with questions such as, “Who might you want to share this evolving story with, and what would you like them to understand?” Alternatively, if it’s too soon for new stories, you can help them establish some familiar structure and comforting order in their life whilst they wait for the story to emerge.

Of all the hallmarks of meaning that can be missing, I suspect it is a lack of coherence that causes people in transition the most distress. Whereas a lack of purpose or significance are things that can be dealt with practically or postponed temporarily without too much agro, an inability to make sense of why you are doing what you are doing is an altogether different challenge. And one that carries a frustrating irony given that coherence is never more elusive than in the moments you need it most.

But I think people should persevere through the discomfort. I think the uncertainty is the point, the price you must pay for reorienting your relationship with work. As Luigi and Robert, in their own ways, warned, it’s a mistake to think of some orientations as inherently better than others. But the challenge we have in our culture today is the strong prevailing wind that makes us lean towards Callings as the highest aspiration. For that reason, we should be extra careful, for it is only once Jobs, Careers, and Callings are perceived as having equal value that we can be sure we are making our choice for the right reasons.

IV

At one level, the uncertainty of incoherence seems to be a necessary step in making the transition from one work orientation to another. At another level, finding the orientation that works best for us is not, as the paper suggests, a one-time fix. It’s actually a process that we may need to engage with throughout our lifetime as our perspective and priorities change. Does being young or ambitious lend itself to one orientation more than others? Is there something about maturity and wisdom that steers you towards a particular orientation?

These are questions that the studies don’t answer. But they got me thinking about Luigi and his advice not to do a job that I love. His Job looked to me from where I was sitting like a textbook Calling. But now I wonder whether he may’ve began that work as a Calling, and as it got more serious and his priorities changed, it began to feel more like a Job.

And then, paradoxically, could it be that as it became a Job, he came to see that he was no longer so consumed by his work and had more time for the things outside of it? – like his family, his health, his relationships and his hobbies. Could it be that it was the transition from Calling to Job that ultimately made him see the value in a Job that he’d previously missed?

Part of me still believes that, personally, I am best off pursuing a Calling, just because of how much more excited, creative, and satisfied I feel with my work compared to when I had Jobs. But then again, I haven’t had children yet. I still have 30-odd years of work left in front of me. I cannot say I’ve ever fully experienced a Career for long enough to reap the benefits of that orientation.

Today, I am coaching professionally; it’s my sole income. To people who see themselves in Jobs or Careers, they may look at my work and think that I’m fully living within my Calling. But the truth is, I still feel in transition. Some days I wake up and have to remind myself of the story that I’m in, and what chapter it is. Sometimes I worry about loneliness, because my Calling has always seemed synonymous with a path of my own making which, by definition, rarely includes team mates. I wonder whether there’s something either in my disposition or in the stories that I have about work that are holding me back as much as liberating me.

When I think back to that lunch with Luigi and the orientation I had then, and compare it with where I’m at today, some things seem clearer:

I think my journey from Job to Calling was justified because I was so unhappy in the Job. So many parts of myself were not being used. But I think that extreme contrast, that psychologically disruptive transition, caused me to myopically focus on Callings as the only legitimate type of work. This is reflected in the extent to which the work I do has become part of my identity; it’s the first thing I tell people about myself when I meet them for the first time. It’s hard for me to separate my life from my work. I’m satisfied. I feel authentic. But I sometimes struggle to find joy in things outside work. And it has caused tension in my relationship with my wife too. One of the things I’m taking away from this essay is the need for a less judgmental mindset about work orientation, and more curiosity about what Jobs and Careers can offer that Callings cannot.

Another takeaway is that I do believe, even more staunchly now, that if we can, we should explore as many different types of work as possible (especially when we’re younger, but any time really) so that we have a greater understanding of the variety of relationships we can have with work and can make more informed decisions about what’s good for us.

Lastly, my biggest insight is to be aware of the temporal dimension of our work orientation. Instead of this being a one-time choice, with a one-time fix, and guaranteed lifelong satisfaction, our relationship with work is a relationship we must manage our whole lives.

We should embrace the fact that experimenting with orientations is going to necessitate a period of storylessness that may be even more difficult to live with than purposelessness and meaninglessness…but that ultimately it’s worth it.

As the ancients said, the obstacle is the path, new beginnings are often disguised as painful endings, and it’s only by tearing up an old story that a new one can be written. I just wish they had more to say about how to live inside the time of not knowing.

Thanks for reading.

—Harrison 👨‍🎨

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New job design programme launch 🚀

Hey 👋 If the question of how to find your way into work that’s genuinely yours is particularly alive for you right now, I’m launching a small group coaching programme on 22 April 2026 for creative professionals who want to approach that goal strategically. It’s called Screw the Job Boards. There are just eight places available. If you’d like to know more, check this out.

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Related topics

1. Amy Wrzesniewski, Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin, and Barry Schwartz (1997). Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work. Academic Press.

2. Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531-545.