I talked last week about passion and why it’s foundational to finding your calling. Today I want to talk about how your values fit into the picture, and how they, too, can help you find your calling.

Bottom-line values

However much the whole idea of values (much less the language) has been co-opted by both religious and political arenas (areni?), we’re all living by values regardless of our religious or political affiliations or non-affiliations.

Honesty. Compassion. Justice. Objectivity. Beauty. Authenticity. Courage. Humor. Love. Teamwork. Respect. We can argue all day and all night about what they mean, but I’ll bet that every one of us has a group of values that are especially central for us, and that’s because at the end of the day, the values we live by are an expression of the kind of world we want to live in.

What world do you want to live in?

And that’s the key question: What kind of world do you want to live in?

It’s worth taking time to sketch it out. What does it look like? How do people relate to one another? How does this world deal with difference and nationality and all those other things that sometimes divide us? What’s prominent? What doesn’t even make the cut?

Once you know what kind of world you want to live in, you can ask yourself this: Which part of this is most important to me? Which part feels so central, so necessary, so absolutely true, that I can’t imagine a good life without it?

What world do you live in?

How does the world you want to live in compare to the one you do live in? How much of that central-to-a-good-life thing is in your actual life right now?

These questions can function like compass points as you explore your calling and work to translate your calling into action: Does this get me closer to or further away from the world I want to be living in?

Think implicit

Chances are, the values you sketch out aren’t necessarily going to be the things you actually work on explicitly. But if they’re important to you, they need to be there implicitly. Knowing what they are — articulating them and seeing how they play out — will help you get closer to what it is you want to do next.

I talked on Wednesday about why skills and talents aren’t enough to get you to your calling. Today, I want to talk about why passion is important — and how you can start to engage with it to figure out what would be fulfilling to you.

But first, a point

A career is not synonymous with a calling. Now, you may have no need for a calling, and that is all fine and good.

When we get to the point of looking for our calling, we’re usually focused on the fact that we’re dissatisfied with our careers. But a career is not a calling — no matter how virtuous it might appear to be.

Really, a career is a series of jobs. They may be related to one another, and they may be related to your calling, but a career is fundamentally focused on job titles, promotions, and how well positions build on one another to “add up to something” — usually the corner office or the full-professor position or whatever else counts as the pinnacle.

A calling, on the other hand, will certainly find an expression in jobs and careers, but it goes beyond that. A calling is a felt expression of our deepest selves, and that means it can’t fundamentally be restricted to the workplace. Rather, a calling is about who we are in the world and how we want to live. That’s why it’s important to focus on our passions.

Entertainment is not passion

Talking about passion is often precarious, because the word has lost some of its precision. But just as we distinguish deep joy from pleasure, I want to distinguish passion from interest.

That is, in common language these days, we talk about having “a passion for” all kinds of things. Shoes. Mad Men. Travel. A rousing conversation. But these aren’t likely to lead you to your calling.

Don’t get me wrong — they’re all wonderful things. And the things that catch our interest and give us pleasure are sometimes expressions of our callings. But our calling is something deeper and less concrete than a simple interest.

Rather, your passion is the thread that runs underneath the things that interest you, the things that catch your attention, and the things that you find compelling.

A framework for thinking about your passion

Laurence G. Boldt suggests, in Zen and the Art of Making a Living, that to start getting at our passion, we ask ourselves what question (probably existential) our life is the answer to.

Who am I? What is the nature of beauty? What is evil? What does it mean to be good? How can humans truly communicate with one another?

The big questions of our lives are, well, big. They’re the kind of questions we probably won’t ever completely work out the answers to. But when we tune into them, when they’re at the center, they speak to every part of our lives, and they do so with power and grace.

This is indeed practical

I bet some of you, right now, are thinking that’s not practical, that it won’t get you another job or help you figure out what the hell to do next.

But it is and it will.

If your passion is the thing that moves you, that compels you, that, on some important level, obsesses you, then building your career out of your passion makes it far more likely that you’ll find that career fulfilling. It’s far more likely that you’ll be happy, that you’ll be motivated, and that you won’t find yourself, two years down the road, asking “what next?” again.

In other words, starting with what seems esoteric may be the shortest way to get from here to where you want to go, however impractical it looks on the outside.

Identifying your question

That doesn’t mean figuring our question out is easy or straightforward. It’s going to take some time and some dedication. But here are three ways to get started.

Journal. Write about the concept of the question, write about the questions that fascinated you as a child, write about the funny family story about that question you asked the minister at dinner that one time, write about the things that are important to you now. Ask your subconscious what the question is and keep writing.

Gather a few of your favorite things. Just because it hasn’t been conscious doesn’t mean your question and your passion haven’t been guiding your life. Write down your favorite novels, your favorite movies, or your favorite music — what do they all have in common aesthetically, thematically, emotionally? There’s a clue. Write down all the hobbies you love, all the dreams you’ve ever dreamed, all the things you’ve ever been passingly in love with. What are the common threads? How do all of these things fit together? There’s another clue.

Ask your friends. Just your close ones, of course, but they might be able to see and point to the themes of your life more easily than you, being in the middle of them, can. And if some of the answers feel off, be curious about what’s off — and what might be more right.

It’s a step

Identifying your passion or your question isn’t, of course, the end of the journey. But it’s an important foundational step towards aligning your life with the things that matter most to you.

If you spend any time at all poking around the web looking for resources on calling, it can start to seem unbearably repetitive.

“Make a list of everything you’re good at.” “Write down everything that’s easy for you to do.”

If finding your calling were that simple, no one would have to search the damn web for help, because they would be long done with that process.

What’s wrong with talent and skill?

In most of these cases, pointing people towards “talent” and “skill” is a shorthand for pointing people to their truest selves. The idea is that if you’re good at something and it’s easy for you, then it must be  a “natural” thing that will bring you joy.

Unfortunately, it’s a problematic shorthand.

It confuses talent with training. We’ve all been trained in various skills for many years. After going through graduate school and earning a PhD, if you can’t read critically, manage not to horribly embarrass yourself on a regular basis in front of a bunch of students, and make a semi-coherent argument, something is terribly wrong in Denmark. That doesn’t mean public speaking, critical reading, or argumentation has anything to do with your calling, even if you’re able to pull them off much more successfully than your non-academically trained friends. It doesn’t even mean you like any of those things. It only means you’ve been well trained.

It limits us to what we’ve already done. If you’re at the point at which you’re questioning your career and your life, focusing on the skills and talents you already have will likely land you with more of the same — without considering what skills and talents you might develop if you had the inclination and the idea.

It focuses on career to the exclusion of life. So much of the non-religious vocational advice out there rests on the assumption that your work and your life are two entirely different things. But it’s that very separation that has many of us cranky and unfulfilled. If we want to be living our values or our ideals, why does that stop at 8am when we start work?

Let’s think more broadly

Skills and talents certainly matter, but they’re only one piece of the calling pie. If I can’t find a note on the flute to save my soul, my dream of being first chair in the local orchestra is unlikely to work out. If I’m a world-class flautist because my parents pushed me and I really don’t give a rat’s ass for the music, then it doesn’t matter how skilled or talented I am — fluting is not my calling.

So what might the other pieces of the pie be? Here are a few:

• Passion. What motivates us, what gets us moving? What obsesses our hearts and minds?
• Values. How do we want the world to be, and how do we want to contribute to that?
• Our ideal life. What do we want our day-to-day to look like? What supports our whole life?

And they’re certainly not the only ones.

I’ll be talking more about these on Friday, but let me ask you this — what else do you think influences your calling beyond talent and skill? What else makes it truly your calling and not just your career?