Calling, career, vocation, job. The four types of work. They all mean different things, and work can be made up of several of them. Teaching is a good example of work that can be a vocation and a calling.
A calling is doing the thing you love most. I'm not sure you would even call it work anymore and you would probably have a sneaking suspicion that you're being payed too much to do it. You don't read about it all the time, however yesterday I read a very high profile case in the Sydney Morning Herald, about Dr Kawashima, the creator of Brain Training for the Nintendo DS.
Dr Kawashima says some odd things we don't normally associate with a 9 to 5 job, he says, 'my hobby is work,' and on holidays, 'If I had such spare time, I want to do my research.' The good doctor has a career, a vocation and a calling.
Finding the right calling doesn't sound like an easy thing. In fact, it sounds like something that you would be lucky to find straight away. It would definitely be odd to define your entire life by decisions made when you were 18, 22 or even 40 years old. But it's damn easy, and it's what so many of us end up doing.
It's easy to fall into careers and then follow them out of habit, history and comfort, but the question is, do you want a job, a career, a vocation or a calling?[
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