A Calling Isn't Found. It's Built.
In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues surveyed 196 employees at two organisations — ranging from clerical staff to professors. Then they pulled a subset: 24 administrative assistants, same job, same pay, same rank. The assumption was that calling would be rare among them. One third described their work as a calling. The same as everyone else.
A calling is not a job title or a rare personal gift. Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin and Schwartz (Journal of Research in Personality, 1997, n = 196) found that roughly one third of people at every occupational level perceived their work as a calling — regardless of salary or rank. The orientation is not discovered; it develops through how a person actively engages with, reflects on, and reshapes their role.
"Find your calling" is advice that tends to paralyse rather than help. Find it where? What does it look like when you do? Most people treat a calling as something pre-existing — already out there, waiting to be stumbled upon. Psychologists who have studied the question for three decades see it differently. You don't find a calling. You build one.
Three orientations — and one surprise
In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski — then a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania — published a study with Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin, and Barry Schwartz in the Journal of Research in Personality. They surveyed 196 employees across two organisations, spanning a wide range of occupations from clerical to academic. The researchers proposed three distinct orientations toward work.
Job: work is a means to an end. The money allows you to live the life that matters, which happens elsewhere. Career: work is a ladder. What drives the person is advancement — title, status, the next rung. Calling: work is part of who you are. It's done for its own sake and carries a sense of contribution to something beyond the individual.
Across the full sample, the distribution was nearly even — roughly one third in each group. Interesting, but not startling.
An administrative assistant with a calling and a professor without one. In the data, it was the assistant who came out ahead on life satisfaction. Calling turned out not to be a job description.
The surprise came from a subset: 24 administrative assistants in a single department. Same title, same pay grade, same position in the hierarchy. The reasonable prediction was that calling would be uncommon among people with no obvious path to advancement. The distribution was identical to the full sample: about one third in each category. Job rank and salary explained nothing about which orientation a person held.
The assistants who perceived their work as a calling reported the same levels of work satisfaction and life satisfaction as researchers and professors in that same category. The difference was not in what they did — it was in how they related to it.
A calling is a process, not a discovery
In 2009, Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy published a conceptual paper in The Counseling Psychologist spelling out what a calling actually consists of. Three components: a beyond-the-self sense of purpose (meaning that reaches past personal gain), goal-directedness, and a prosocial motive. The critical point is that none of these are given from birth. They develop through engagement.
This cuts against the logic of searching. Subsequent longitudinal data supported what researchers call the a posteriori hypothesis: a calling doesn't precede employment, it emerges within it. Across multiple studies, engagement in work and clarity of professional identity reliably predicted the emergence of calling over time — not the other way round. You work seriously first. The sense that this is yours follows.
How it develops: job crafting
Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton described the mechanism in the Academy of Management Review (2001) — job crafting: the active, ongoing reshaping of one's role from the inside. Not changing jobs. Changing the relationship to the one you already have.
Three directions:
- Tasks: gradually shifting toward what you find meaningful, and away from what you find hollow — within your existing role.
- Relationships: building richer connections with the people for whom your work actually matters.
- Meaning frame: redefining what your job is fundamentally about. A hospital cleaner who thinks of herself as part of the care team rather than simply a person with a mop is not engaging in self-deception. She has changed what she is actually doing, in the way that counts.
People with a calling do this habitually, often without thinking about it. That is what sets them apart from colleagues without one — regardless of what the org chart says about either of them.
One important limit
Duffy and Dik's review of the calling literature in the Journal of Vocational Behavior (2013) recorded a consistent finding: having a calling without the space to live it is associated with elevated stress. If an environment systematically dismantles what a person is trying to build — meaning, relationships, a sense of identity — reframing won't fix it.
Put simply: a calling is a resource when there is room for it. When there genuinely isn't, the signal is about the environment, not about you.
What to do
- Stop looking for a calling as an object outside yourself. Ask instead: which tasks in your current role do you approach differently from the job description — with more care, more attention, more of yourself?
- Try job crafting: take one dimension of your work — a task, a relationship, or your sense of what the job is for — and deliberately reshape it. Run it as a two-week experiment, not a motivational exercise.
- If there is no sense of meaning in your current work at all, take the career interest assessment: it shows which types of activity draw you in most strongly. Sometimes the problem is a fundamental mismatch, and crafting isn't the answer.
- Your orientation is not fixed. Wrzesniewski showed it is shaped by context. Where you are right now is not a verdict.
Common questions
Can you have a calling in an ordinary job?
Yes. Wrzesniewski et al. (Journal of Research in Personality, 1997, n=196) found that roughly one third of people in any occupation — from clerical workers to academic staff — described their work as a calling. The orientation showed no correlation with salary or rank.
How is a calling different from a hobby or passion?
Dik and Duffy (The Counseling Psychologist, 2009) identified three components of calling: a beyond-the-self sense of meaning, goal-directedness, and a prosocial motive. A hobby is enjoyment for its own sake. A calling carries the additional sense of doing something that matters beyond yourself.
What if you don't have a calling and that doesn't bother you?
That is entirely normal. About one third of Wrzesniewski's sample viewed work as a job — a source of income — with no pathology attached. The question only becomes pressing when you want more meaning but don't know where to look. That's where a career interest assessment is most useful.
Sources
- Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, careers, and callings: People's relations to their work. Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 21–33. doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1997.2162
- Dik, B. J., & Duffy, R. D. (2009). Calling and vocation at work: Definitions and prospects for research and practice. The Counseling Psychologist, 37(3), 424–450. doi.org/10.1177/0011000008316430
- Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011
- Duffy, R. D., & Dik, B. J. (2013). Research on calling: What have we learned and where are we going? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 83, 428–436. doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.006
This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute professional career counselling.
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