Thinking About Work

Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski is a psychologist who has done some interesting research on the idea of work orientations. She came up with three of them.

Her idea can be summarized in a single question: Right now, do you feel your work is a job, a career, or a calling?

I want to talk about what each of these feels like based on my own experiences, in the hopes that it might help you answer the question—if your answer doesn't feel obvious already.

A Job

This felt very contained.

It was a box I opened when I got to work and a box I closed when I left.

It did what it needed to for a while.

At one point in my life—after graduating from university—it felt like something I had to do, and so I did.

There were moments of all the emotions that I would come to experience in the latter two categories, but I would say the overwhelming emotion I felt here can be best described as, "meh."

A Career

This is where my notion of containment started to change a little.

The box didn't stay closed after I left work. In fact, I would be reading, writing, and in general thinking about things that I could put back in the box the next day.

I distinctly remember feeling a sense of, "Oh this is what I do now."

This is when I first started to experience the desire to climb some kind of ladder.

This was when I could start calling what I was doing, my craft.

Shifting from something I had to do, to something I got to do.

A Calling

Here, the box doesn't even exist anymore. I'm finding ways to make connections to work all the time, everywhere.

Strangely, the desire to climb a ladder vanished too. In fact, if anything, there's a desire to slide back down the ladder. I've written before about the idea of growing down—this is the best description of what growth feels like here.

A new feeling in this orientation is also how I think about time. In a job, I would think in days and weeks. In a career, months and a few years. Now, I'm thinking in decades.

It's not something I have to do, or get to do, it's something I want to do. For a long time.

It's more than a craft now, it's closer to an identity.

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Where are you?