Follow your bliss. Pursue your passion. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Do these messages sound familiar?
You might hear about weekend workshops that will help you discover your true calling so that you can drop everything and chase it. Or a friend tells you that your passion is simmering below the surface, and one good dose of a psychedelic drug can unlock it.
But for those of us who never felt particularly called to anything, all of it can be a letdown. You wonder what’s wrong with you, and conclude you’ll be a hot mess forever.
If you ever felt punished for not having a calling, this one’s for you. Rather than brush it off as the realm of cult leaders and artists, we’ll position it against competence, reframe calling into something accessible, grounded, and useful.
Why We Default to Technical Skills (and Miss the Signal)
A calling is different from competence. When you imagine doing something new, it’s natural to look at the abundance of skills you’ll have to acquire. You start with your incompetence, and it’s all uphill from there. But you know that with the right environment and resources, you can figure it out. That’s the work required for competence.
For a calling, we need to ask some deeper questions.
An Inquiry of Curiosity
So how do we define a calling in a modern world where we still have to pay the bills?
Instead of asking for divine inspiration to tell you what your calling is, ask where your curiosity resides.
- What do you find yourself trying to improve even when you don’t have to?
- What topics do you consistently learn about?
- What broken systems, or issues frustrate you to no end?
I’ll start.
Improvements: When I make some kind of craft object, I start with one and then immediately decide I’m going to make 10 more. With each repetition, I’ll make some small technique change so that by #10 it comes together easily.
Learning: When I have spare time, I’ll happily fall down an ancestry research rabbit hole. I love the discovery process, correcting details, and piecing together someone’s life.
Frustration: I am frustrated that people stay in toxic jobs and burn out because they believe that’s the only way to get healthcare. It drives me continually to look for and share other solutions.
You may discover several items in each category.
Frustration vs. Heartbreak
It’s easy to escalate frustrations to what breaks your heart. You can tell the difference by paying attention to how you feel when you identify each one.
Let’s say you’re frustrated by the public transit in your city. You can list 50 possible improvements and would love to meet with public transportation commissioners to talk to them about it. Your energy is directed toward solutions, and you’re amped up. Excellent.
Then you consider the current state of political polarization. You want it to change, but the thought of actively working with others on the problem makes you want to crawl under the bed. This might be your hint to look elsewhere for a calling.
Your next chapter requires energy – not the nervous, angry kind, but the hopeful kind. When you pursue something that you can back up with your values and your standards and still have energy to move forward, you’re on to something.
Naming Your Personal Values
I believe that personal values are foundational for designing a meaningful next chapter with staying power.
If you already know your top 3 values, write them down. If not, find an online values list and ask yourself a few questions:
- How do I behave when no one is watching?
- What do I protect?
- What do I refuse to compromise on?
Values that you demonstrate through daily behavior will feel more true.
Mine are Belonging, Creativity, and Autonomy.
Which Skills Are Coming With You?
You’re coming into all of this with many hard-earned skills. Even if the profession you used to have no longer exists (looking at you, Flash developers and SEO experts), most of your jobs were scaffolding anyway.
You have skills in storytelling, or people management, or problem definition.
For this part, list all of your hard and soft skills without worrying whether they are marketable or not.
Now go back and cross out the skills you never want to use again. I used to be great at creating statements of work for new projects, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Off the list it goes.
Some people worry that they will betray themselves or their families by leaving behind the expertise that they spent years developing. My hunch is that whatever you learned, however esoteric, will show up in some way in what you do next.
A Simple Path to Calling
Now we can radically simplify things.
Calling = value + interest + skill
Let’s see what shows up if we turn this into a Venn diagram. Draw 3 circles that overlap a little.
One circle gets your values. Next one gets your interests. Third one gets your skills.
Before we get to overlaps, pause for a minute. It’s story time.
Flash Developer Who Likes Rocks
Let me tell you about Marco, who used to be an incredible Flash designer.
He built interactive websites back when the internet felt like a playground. He could take something complicated and make it visual and exploratory. Then Flash died. And with it, a piece of Marco’s identity.
After a few years as a VR designer, he got laid off. Today, Marco is very into rock formations. He watches documentaries about canyons and cliffs. Nerds out on how layers form, how time shows up in stone. And one of his core values is creativity. An analytical or dev job is not interesting. He wants to make things.
Marco is not interested in going back to school to become a geologist, and he can’t go back to Flash.
So instead, he asks, “Where do people who study rock formations struggle in ways I might understand?”
Geologists love the science but often struggle to explain simply what happened over millions of years. They want to show non-experts scale, time, and change. Museums need exhibits. Researchers need visuals. Environmental groups need stories people can feel.
What was Marco the Flash designer actually good at? Design and visual storytelling.
So the intersection of his Venn diagram isn’t “become a geologist.”
The intersection is: help experts make the story of the Earth visible and engaging.
That’s the move. Find a few problems you’d willingly spend time on, using skills you still enjoy using. The intersections of your Venn diagram might be questions, rather than answers.
Calling Doesn’t Come First: You Do
Finding your calling is not a cosmic assignment. You can stop pressuring yourself to suddenly wake up and know the single thing you must do between now and your demise.
Start with what you already have: your values, interests, and what you’re great at that you want to keep doing.
The call is coming from inside the house.
Burn the map. Build what fits.
Want help with this? Book an Own Your Edge session with me.
