Today is Monday, my blog day. I am trying to keep to a schedule and post a blog entry every Monday. Last week I got off track a bit as I was a) recovering from the flu, and b) meeting my dealer to pick up my Girl Scout Cookies. Priorities!
I have been reading Dan Miller's 48 Days to the Work You Love and my homework for today, day six of my 48 day odyssey, is to discuss my new understanding of the difference between a job, a career, and a vocation. Since today happened to be Blog Day, I thought this would be a good forum! I'll try to keep it interesting.
Basically, a JOB is the thing you do to bring in income. A job could also be a chore that needs to get done - this does not produce income, but has important rewards as well (a clean house, etc). On average, people stay in a job for 3.2 years - that doesn't seem very long at all! It would seem that many people will hold many, many jobs throughout their lifetime. I tend to think of people staying in their jobs for years, if not decades, looking at my parents and their friends as models (turns out I was thinking of careers; see below).
I decided to look at my own employment history. I started by painting fences for my dad - I have no idea how old I was. I distinctly remember painting over the spiders on the fence because I didn't want to touch them, and removing them from the fence would require physical contact. I was perhaps not the most conscientious fence-painter. Clearly, this was just a job and not my vocation. I was also not clever enough to Tom-Sawyer the job and get someone else to do it for me! I moved on up the ranks, from fence-painter to paper-grader to waitress to research assistant to researcher to medical student to resident to practicing physician. No stint longer than four years, and until medical school, none longer than a year and a half. Maybe I'm not so far off the national average, after all!
A CAREER seems to be a little more than just any job. This is a job with staying power. When I think of a career, I think of someone staying in the same job for decades, advancing professionally along the way. However, in our changing work environment, sometimes people have two or more careers over their lifetime. Dan Miller mentions that the word career comes from the Latin for "cart" and the Middle French for "racetrack". The dictionary gives us "to run or move at full speed, rush wildly". No wonder I was tired!
A VOCATION, on the other hand, is a calling. This brings in ideas of destiny and purpose. Prior to my rethinking these issues, I assumed that very few people had a true vocation in life. Most people I knew had jobs and/or careers that paid the bills. They worked to, or beyond, the point of burnout, then retired. It would seem that if one's job is truly one's vocation, work would be so fulfilling that burnout would be rare, and a traditional "retirement" less attractive. If we're just working to get to some magical "retirement day", when we can finally relax, stop careering, and start living, then where's the pleasure in that? I thought for a long time that I didn't necessarily deserve pleasure in my working life, then I started meeting people who truly loved their jobs. I wanted to be like them!
Medicine would seem to be one of the true vocations, wouldn't it? And for many, I believe it is. Helping people is a noble calling. But I think it's also possible to misinterpret the voices in one's head, and label it a calling. I heard the voices that told me I wanted an amazing education in the human body and its workings, as well as the voices that told me helping people would be nice. I knew I didn't want to work in a lab, doing bench research. So that seemed to point to medicine. And I did love the education! Ah, to be a student forever... But once the education turned into a day-to-day experience of sleep deprivation and stress, I became more and more miserable. I must have thought I deserved to be unhappy, because I did nothing to change this for ten years! Now, I am finally reconsidering things, and trying to figure out other jobs or careers that could help fulfill those same goals. I'm having to take the traditional-career blinders off and look all around me for other options.
Dan Miller also points out that your job can be one part of your vocation, but everything you do should be related to fulfilling this calling. Your family life, leisure time, etc. I've been working hard on personal development for a few years now, which led me to this pesky quitting-the-career-that-was-making-me-miserable event in the first place! It's amazing how working on one part of your life will cause shifts in every other part. Now I'm considering my vocation and how to make it happen in a way that will bring me fulfillment and pleasure. I know now that if I'm going to listen to some of the voices, I have to listen to the others - the ones that warned me that ob/gyn is not a good career choice for someone who loves to sleep, for example.
What is your vocation? Are you fulfilling it? Are you happy? These are questions that deserve to be asked and answered. I ignored that last one for years, but it's never too late!
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