00:00:00One of the mistakes that people make when they think about their calling is that they assume that people who have the calling are those who they choose their path in life according to an unusual vocation.
00:00:11So you look at an Olympic athlete or something and say, "Oh, it's an obvious calling." You know, figure skater, gymnast or something. They have an obvious calling.
00:00:19You have an obvious calling because your abilities are so acute and amazing. That's actually completely wrong.
00:00:27Being born with unusual ability is not a sign of calling because you find that people who choose their path in life according to their unusual vocational abilities, they easily and often wind up very unhappy, very unhappy with what they do.
00:00:43So that's not what you have to figure out. Calling isn't necessarily unusual talent.
00:00:55Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about lifting other people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
00:01:04I try to rely on the best that has been written in the sciences, behavioral science, neuroscience, and other areas related such as philosophy and different wisdom traditions and bringing it all together so that you can understand from many points of view the science of happiness, the art of happiness as well.
00:01:23Thank you for following the show, for using these ideas in your own life and also for sharing these ideas to other people as well.
00:01:29My objective here is not just to be a teacher of happiness, which is my day job, but to make you teachers of happiness as well.
00:01:37You don't need to suffer through a PhD to do that. You need to love other people around you and take the information that's at your fingertips.
00:01:45One of the great miracles of modern technology is that we have so much information that's before us, using the best that actually we can find to benefit other people as well.
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00:02:19I want to talk today about how to find your calling at work. People ask me this all the time.
00:02:25I teach at a business school, a famous business school where people, they want to do really well, they want to be successful, for sure, of course, we all do.
00:02:35But they want to do so joyfully. They want to find something that's their thing, something that they feel like they're meant to do.
00:02:41I mean, I talk all the time about my new book behind me here, The Meaning of Your Life.
00:02:46There's a whole chapter in there about finding your calling because finding what you're meant to do obviously is part of meaning.
00:02:54How do you do that? How do we understand the sense of calling? That's what this is about today.
00:02:59Now, when we talk about work for strivers, and I suspect that you're a striver just like me, work really hard, work really long hours, really dedicated to what you do,
00:03:09there's a lot of cautions that you face. People talk about workaholism, and I've talked about it on the show before.
00:03:16Workaholism is a real pathology. It's an obsession with work, and it's actually downstream from a different kind of addiction, which is an addiction to success.
00:03:25Success means I want to make a mark. I want to be good at what I do. I want to be admired for what I do, and when I succeed, that's when I feel like I'm completely alive.
00:03:35This obviously has neurobiological components to it. You actually get the dopamine reward you're seeking in life when you feel like you're succeeding,
00:03:45and you judge that usually by the behavior of other people around you. That's really super dangerous.
00:03:51I mean, everybody likes to be appreciated, but when you're motivated by that completely, you're going to sacrifice many other parts of your life.
00:03:58So if you're a self-objectifying person who believes that love is earned and displayed through the admiration of other people, you get addicted to success,
00:04:06you'll wind up a workaholic, and that's a problem. I deal with a lot of people my own age and younger who deal with that problem as well.
00:04:15There's an expression that you may be aware of called workism. Workism kind of turns work into a religion, maybe where work is your personality.
00:04:27I mean, you've met people like this, where all they can talk about is their work.
00:04:31It's like my work this, my work that. It substitutes for an actual human personality with interests and things that are not dedicated to the workplace,
00:04:39and it almost becomes a sense of worship, you know, what they're doing, because their heart is so completely devoted to it.
00:04:46So workaholism and workism, bad. The idea that worldly success, money, power, fame, that these are going to lead to happiness,
00:04:55that's wrong. If you follow this show, you know that that's incorrect, and that leads to a whole lot of heartache.
00:05:01On the contrary, you need to shoot for happiness, and then you will be successful enough.
00:05:06That's the truth of the matter that I hope I've provided proof of that to you abundantly after 30-some episodes of this show.
00:05:15However, it's also the case that work matters. Now, when I say work, I don't mean work for pay necessarily.
00:05:24Work means a productive endeavor using your capacities. That's really what it comes down to.
00:05:32Maybe that's raising your kids and nobody's giving you, you know, writing checks to you for that.
00:05:36Maybe it's doing volunteer work because you're retired or because you want to.
00:05:40There are a lot of ways to actually work that aren't going to, you know, pay the rent, to be sure, and those are work.
00:05:47But for most of us, it's the 9 to 5, or who knows, the 6 to 6, you know, whatever your hours happen to be, fellow strivers.
00:05:55And that's a really important source of happiness. It falls into the framework of the habits of the happiest people.
00:06:03Perhaps you know that the four habits of the happiest people are pursuing a faith or life philosophy,
00:06:10understanding things that are bigger than you so you can transcend your daily ordinary life, your family,
00:06:16the kin that are related to you that are part of your immediate or extended family, having relationships with them, friendship.
00:06:24And I mean real friends, not ideal friends. And last but not least is a healthy orientation toward work,
00:06:31work that's meaningful, work that's a calling. That's what I want to talk about today because that's what we want.
00:06:38Look, too obsessed with your work? That's a problem. But not paying attention to your work? That's also a problem.
00:06:44How do we find the balance? And the answer to that is understanding the notion of professional calling.
00:06:51So what I want to do today, and I hope I'm successful with you in the next 35 or 40 minutes,
00:06:56is giving you the information that you need so that you can find your calling if you haven't found it yet.
00:07:01And if you have or you're wondering, I'll give you some information that you can use to interrogate what you're doing,
00:07:07to see whether or not you need to do something else or keep trying.
00:07:11Okay. Now, there's a famous Zen Buddhist koan. I do this a lot. I've talked about these kinds of things a lot in the show.
00:07:20A Zen Buddhist riddle that is often presented to novice monks so that they can contemplate these things.
00:07:30I've talked about this in the past where big questions that don't have answers,
00:07:34they exercise the right hemisphere of your brain and stimulate a contemplation of mystery and meaning.
00:07:40That's why big questions that are hard to understand are so important that we should all be thinking about in our own lives.
00:07:45This particular Zen Buddhist story is actually about two monks, a junior monk, which is called an unsui,
00:07:53and a senior monk, the master monk at a monastery, which is called a jikijitsu.
00:07:58The unsui comes to the jikijitsu and says, "Master, what will be my job?"
00:08:06The master says, "Before you reach enlightenment, you will chop wood and carry water. That's your job."
00:08:14And the unsui, now he's a little bit disappointed because this is going to be a pretty hard and pretty boring job.
00:08:20It's kind of backbreaking as a matter of fact. So day after day, month after month, year after year,
00:08:26he chops wood and carries water and he doesn't complain.
00:08:29He dreams about what his life is going to be like after he reaches some stage of enlightenment,
00:08:37adequate to change his job. Maybe he'll be a pure contemplative, spending his time in prayer and meditation.
00:08:43Maybe he'll be a teacher sitting indoors without chafed hands and without aching muscles.
00:08:50Okay, a few decades go by, chopping wood and carrying water.
00:08:54And finally, he's not so young anymore, and he's judged to have attained the desired level of knowledge to be a master himself.
00:09:03And so he goes into the jikijitsu, who's now very, very old, and says,
00:09:08"I have faithfully carried out my job all these years, chopping wood and carrying water, as I worked to become a master like you.
00:09:16What will my job now be?" The jikijitsu looks at him and says, "Chop wood, carry water."
00:09:25Now, you probably understand the point that I'm trying to make.
00:09:30The point is that his mission, that his calling, is not a particular job, but to do his job in a particular way.
00:09:41That's what it comes down to.
00:09:43Now, easy to say, right? I mean, there are all kinds of things that you could do that you can't really make into your calling.
00:09:52But I hope I can make the case that there's more that can become a calling that you probably imagined in the past.
00:09:59And what it relies on is your orientation to yourself and what you're doing.
00:10:04That's something that somebody else might say, "That's a complete slog," but you do it with such love that it actually is and progressively becomes more about your calling.
00:10:15Let's figure out how to do that.
00:10:19Now, you might say to yourself, "I need to find the particular perfect job for me," but that's the first mistake.
00:10:29A lot of my students, they come out of their master's degree in business administration, and they say, "I feel like I don't know what I want to do."
00:10:38And that makes them feel incredibly insecure. And I say, "Don't worry about it. It's not your last job."
00:10:44And furthermore, you don't know what you want to do because you haven't done a lot of things yet. You'll figure that out.
00:10:51But along the way, your calling, if you have an openness, actually will find you.
00:10:57As a matter of fact, there are all kinds of cases where the same people will do the same job with a different orientation toward that job, and it'll either be a slog or a calling.
00:11:08I mean, this is as old as, well, I don't know, the Bible, for example.
00:11:12You know, everybody knows at the very beginning of the Bible in the book of Genesis when Adam and Eve have all that unpleasantness with the apple and the snake and get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, right?
00:11:23And what do they have to do? They have to earn their living by the sweat of their brow, which means that they're actually cultivating crops and planting stuff and plowing and digging and working, and what a drag.
00:11:37Really, clearly, it's a real drag. It's a slog. It's like, you know, the worst job you could possibly imagine.
00:11:43But go back a little bit. Before the fall, before the snake and the apple, when they were still in paradise, what were they doing?
00:11:51Here's Genesis. God places Adam into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
00:11:57In other words, he was doing the same thing, just in a different place with a different orientation.
00:12:03The point of all of this is, it's not the job per se, it's just that beforehand it was his calling, it was his divine calling, and later it was something that was imposed upon him.
00:12:15It was a necessary evil later on. There's a lot of that in our own lives. We want to be before the fall, not after the fall, in exactly what we're doing, but we have to understand how that works.
00:12:27Now, this is not just a Christian or Jewish thing. In Hinduism, in the Bhagavad Gita, we see by performing one's natural occupation, one worships the Creator from whom all living entities have come into being.
00:12:41That work as a calling is divine, is what it comes down to. This is almost every religious tradition, but also a lot of secular traditions.
00:12:49I've read a lot of work on how to train career counselors. Career counselors, like the ones that were telling you when you were a senior in high school that you'll never amount to anything? Yeah, me too.
00:13:01What do they teach them to do? They teach them literally to find what would be considered to be a transcendent summons. I found that in part of the literature for training for career counselors.
00:13:13It's to find what you're cosmically meant to do. It's almost religious, is the whole idea. You're supposed to do something and find what that particular thing is.
00:13:25But once again, that doesn't mean that there's a specific thing, but rather your orientation toward it. Okay, what is it? What is that specific orientation?
00:13:36That orientation is something that psychologists refer to as a subjective career rather than an objective career.
00:13:45Again, this is esoteric language because this is what we do in academia, is come up with fancy words for pretty easy ideas.
00:13:52An objective career is one that's chosen because of extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are money or power or position or prestige, anything like that.
00:14:03Subjective careers are chosen because of something that's intrinsic to you, something you're actually supposed to do, even if it's hard, even if it's not fun.
00:14:14That's what intrinsic rewards actually are. You're supposed to do it. It gives you a sense of who you are as a person, something that's really, really fulfilling.
00:14:22That even on a bad day, when you would have quit your job in anger if it were just about the money, you wouldn't if it's subjective because it's your calling.
00:14:32You didn't choose it. You kind of feel like it chose you. That's what you're looking for. That's the whole idea of subjective versus an objective career.
00:14:41It's deeper than just saying, "I love my job." It's something that I feel like I'm actually supposed to do it.
00:14:49Researchers in 2012 devised a survey about this, asking people to either agree or disagree with the statement,
00:14:55"I have a good understanding of my calling as it applies to my career," and the higher the subject scores on this, the more they actually understood the meaning of their life.
00:15:03We're made for toil. We're made for productive work. But to the extent that we feel like it's chosen for us as opposed to we chose it, it gives you life's meaning.
00:15:13That's why this really, really matters for sure.
00:15:16Now, I want to make a side point here that I think is really important. We hear all the time about work-life balance.
00:15:23During the coronavirus epidemic and before and slightly after, there was this whole thing called the Great Resignation where Gen Z in particular was just quitting their jobs like mad.
00:15:35Really, really high rates of job quitting is what it came down to.
00:15:39A lot of what I heard about as a result of that was work-life balance. We need more work-life balance.
00:15:45Maybe this new generation is actually figuring it out that they're not going to be exploited. I get that.
00:15:49I don't want to be exploited any more than anybody else does. I certainly don't want to exploit anybody.
00:15:54But here's the funny thing. It didn't take very long, even by the end of 2022, when that fad had kind of imploded and the Great Resignation had become kind of the great regret.
00:16:07You found that a lot of people who did that were struggling to get back on their feet professionally.
00:16:13It turned out to have been a real mistake.
00:16:16The mistake was this whole conversation generally about work-life balance.
00:16:20And here's the mistake. You don't need a balance between your work and your life because your work should be part of your life.
00:16:26If it's a subjective career that you're looking for, whatever you happen to be doing, it should be integrated with your life.
00:16:33You should look for work-life integration, not work-life balance.
00:16:36Work-life balance says work and life are separate things.
00:16:39And that in and of itself is a hugely problematic idea if you want to find meaning and happiness in your life.
00:16:45Now, I'm not saying you should work all the time. On the contrary, remember, we talked about workism and workaholism to start the episode.
00:16:50That's not it.
00:16:52What we need very integrally is to understand how my work makes my non-work better and my non-work makes my work better.
00:17:02That's work-life integration, where there's intrinsic satisfaction from the work and the non-work, where we're not prone to workaholism or workism, and where we can integrate the two.
00:17:13That's the idea that we're actually looking for.
00:17:17Do you have that?
00:17:20Perhaps you've never thought about it in this particular way.
00:17:23But that means, by the way, that if all you ever do is work and you neglect your relationships, you're doing it wrong.
00:17:30If you don't have any sense of leisure, where leisure is a productive thing, you're spending your time actually learning things they don't pay you for,
00:17:39deepening your spiritual life, cultivating your relationships, you're doing it wrong, is what it comes down to.
00:17:46It's all part of this seamless garment, getting done what needs to get done, where everything makes everything else better.
00:17:52So that's what we're looking for here.
00:17:55Now, and I'm going to give you, once again, as I always do, the steps to getting this.
00:18:00But I wanted to go through these points first, and another point I want to hit is that one of the mistakes that people make when they think about their calling
00:18:08is that they assume that people who have the calling are those who, I don't know, they choose their path in life according to an unusual vocation.
00:18:18So you look at an Olympic athlete or something and say, "Oh, it's an obvious calling," you know, this figure skater or gymnast or something.
00:18:25They have an obvious calling. You have an obvious calling because your abilities are so acute and amazing.
00:18:32That's actually completely wrong.
00:18:35Being born with unusual ability is not a sign of calling.
00:18:39And how do we know this?
00:18:41Because you find that people who choose their path in life according to their unusual vocational abilities, they easily and often wind up very unhappy, very unhappy with what they do.
00:18:52I've talked to childhood athlete and chess genius and savant and classical musician and baseball player extraordinaire who talk about the fact that they were never happy when they were doing it
00:19:06and they only found their calling when they finished, as a matter of fact.
00:19:08So that's not what you have to figure out is where you have extreme talent.
00:19:13Calling isn't necessarily unusual talent.
00:19:17And we know that because that's not related to the intrinsic talent.
00:19:20It might be, but it certainly wasn't for me as a classical musician.
00:19:25I'm much happier than when I was playing the French horn and I was a pretty good French horn player.
00:19:30It turned out I needed to find my calling by leaving music, as a matter of fact.
00:19:34Okay, so here's what we really care about.
00:19:37How do you find your calling?
00:19:39What are the steps?
00:19:40Number one is don't look outside you.
00:19:44Don't look at what pays the most.
00:19:46Don't look at the jobs that are most likely.
00:19:48I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't look at pay.
00:19:50Don't get me wrong. I'm not a complete idealist.
00:19:53I'm not saying that you shouldn't look at what the market is going to bear in jobs.
00:19:58But fundamentally, the work that you need to do is to figure out intrinsically what is meaningful to you,
00:20:06what is rewarding to you.
00:20:09Once again, that's in contrast to the extrinsic compensation of material benefits and employment,
00:20:14wages, benefits, prestige, et cetera.
00:20:17It's the inherent psychological recompense that you get from working and doing something.
00:20:24Now, what is that?
00:20:26That's not just fun.
00:20:28I mean, there's lots of things that I do in my job today that aren't fun,
00:20:31but it's intrinsically deeply, deeply satisfying to be doing this work on the science of happiness
00:20:36and share it with other people.
00:20:37It's meaningful.
00:20:38And what do I mean by that?
00:20:40If you're following the work here, you know that meaning has three parts to it,
00:20:43coherence, purpose, and significance.
00:20:46So what are you looking for?
00:20:47You're looking for something that gives your life a sense of coherence,
00:20:51why you're doing what you're doing, why you're organizing your life in the way that you are.
00:20:56Your work should at least partially answer that question.
00:21:00Purpose.
00:21:01Your work should give you a sense of goals and direction in your life,
00:21:04because that's where you get your purpose.
00:21:06And significance, why your life matters.
00:21:07You should feel like you're needed.
00:21:10That's what it comes down to.
00:21:11Do the work to figure out what you can do that satisfies those criteria.
00:21:18Now, that holds true for life generally and not just for your work, to be sure.
00:21:22And I'll put in some links to articles that talk about this that are pretty interesting.
00:21:27The relationship between intrinsic rewards and job satisfaction, all this kind of stuff,
00:21:32if you want to read the science on this.
00:21:34But you get the idea.
00:21:35Have you done the contemplative work to actually figure out what gives you a sense of meaning?
00:21:40Or have you just looked at market signals?
00:21:43What's actually best?
00:21:45The smartest thing to do, the most -- you know, it's funny because on this point,
00:21:50how many universities have gotten completely obsessed with STEM fields?
00:21:54I got nothing against STEM fields.
00:21:56You know, I have a son who's a STEM guy.
00:22:00Absolutely.
00:22:01Loves it.
00:22:02My dad was a Ph.D. biostatistician, accomplished mathematics professor.
00:22:07Brilliant and all that stuff.
00:22:09Okay, fine.
00:22:11But the truth is when we push everybody into that,
00:22:13we're pushing everybody into extrinsic rewards or a lot of people into extrinsic rewards
00:22:18because they're thinking about what the market will bear as opposed to intrinsically
00:22:21what will give them sense of psychological recompense.
00:22:23I know why we do it because we're trying to be really practical.
00:22:26But that's led to a lot of really, really unhappy people who could have done something beautiful,
00:22:31like, I don't know, being a skilled cabinet maker.
00:22:33Instead they go to college and they become an unhappy banker.
00:22:37Don't let that be you.
00:22:39Okay, that's step one, doing the work.
00:22:41Step two, focus on fascination.
00:22:47I do a lot of work on the biology of emotion and how the limbic system works.
00:22:53And I talk about the basic negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness,
00:22:57and on the basic positive emotions.
00:22:59And it's pretty settled what the basic negative emotions are,
00:23:03but emotion researchers, they disagree on the positive emotions.
00:23:07Joy is always one of them, for example.
00:23:10But people disagree on surprise and delight, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:14One that I find really interesting that shows up in a lot of the lists is interest.
00:23:18Interest is a positive basic emotion.
00:23:20I really think that this is true.
00:23:22We are homo sapiens.
00:23:24We're a learning species because it leads to our fitness.
00:23:28And so the result is that we get a neurobiological reward for learning something new.
00:23:34That's why it's so fun when you learn a new skill, when you learn a new fact,
00:23:38and you actually want to share it with other people
00:23:40because it's a source of neurobiological reward, as a matter of fact.
00:23:46You find a caveman.
00:23:48Your ancestor found berries on a bush out someplace and they're like, "That's awesome."
00:23:53I love that.
00:23:54Why?
00:23:55Because that actually, that kind of learning, that kind of curiosity would lead to greater fitness,
00:23:59more likely to survive and pass on your genes.
00:24:01And still today, people love actually learning about stuff.
00:24:04Focus on what's most interesting to you.
00:24:07Why?
00:24:08Because your calling is highly correlated with that positive effect,
00:24:12with that positive emotion that you're feeling.
00:24:15And what you want to find your calling and to stay engaged in something that can be your calling,
00:24:20you need to be getting interest.
00:24:22People are interested in different things.
00:24:25People tell me the stuff that they're interested in and I'm like, "Wow, really?"
00:24:28I'm not a golfer, for example.
00:24:30I find golf deathly boring.
00:24:33But I talk to people who love golf and, man, they are super into it.
00:24:36They're not faking it.
00:24:38They're not doing it because they want to just hang out with their friends.
00:24:40They talk about their putter and different golf courses they play.
00:24:44They dream about golf.
00:24:46They're really, really, really into it and I have to have a lot of humility
00:24:49to recognize that my interest isn't somebody else's interest.
00:24:52I'm interested in other stuff.
00:24:54I'm super interested in Bach, high baroque music.
00:24:58I'm really interested in it.
00:25:00I know a lot about it.
00:25:01I literally own recordings of every single piece that Bach ever wrote where the manuscript still exists.
00:25:09Every single one.
00:25:10More than a thousand pieces published by Bach.
00:25:12I own it.
00:25:13You're like, "Gosh, that's so boring."
00:25:15Not to me.
00:25:16So the whole point is if you want to find your calling,
00:25:19relate what you can make your living doing as much as you can to what's most interesting to you.
00:25:25And that will be a great gear toward calling.
00:25:28There's a bunch of research out there, by the way,
00:25:30that compares people who look for fun most in their work and people who look for values most in their work.
00:25:39What you find is people who take jobs because they're the most fun jobs,
00:25:42they tend to not stay with their jobs very long and they tend not to be very engaged.
00:25:45People who follow their jobs for values, they do a little bit better.
00:25:49But the people who do the best are people who look for work that's fascinating to them.
00:25:55So what is it to you?
00:25:57I figured out that I wasn't fascinated by playing music in an orchestra, even though I love music.
00:26:03I found that I was fascinated by behavioral science, the stuff that I'm doing now.
00:26:07I can't get enough of it.
00:26:08I can't get enough of it.
00:26:10And that's how I know it's my calling.
00:26:13I see this -- it's so different between different people.
00:26:17My kids are all into really different things.
00:26:19I have a kid who's a data scientist who does work in AI at the very cutting edge of large language models,
00:26:26and he talks about it all the time.
00:26:28And I have another son who was a sniper in the military
00:26:32and then came out and did construction management.
00:26:34He talked about that all the time, and neither one wants the other's job.
00:26:38One doesn't want to actually sit in a bush at 123 degrees for three hours with a tarantula on his arm behind the scope of a rifle.
00:26:45And the other one doesn't want to actually be trying to learn the inner guts of large language models
00:26:50to write software for companies.
00:26:53To each his own, man.
00:26:55But they're both happy, and they both feel like they've found their calling at different points in their career by exploring that.
00:27:01And thank God that we talked to our kids about that.
00:27:04You can also find a lot of interest in things you didn't know you'd find interest in.
00:27:10Again, I had no idea. I wanted to study math and stats and economics and psychology and neuroscience.
00:27:15I had no idea when I was a musician.
00:27:18But it can be more prosaic than that as well.
00:27:21A great friend of mine, musician, who was having a hard time finding a living,
00:27:25he wound up taking a job as a waiter, and he wound up getting really, really interested in that,
00:27:30and really interested in kind of the restaurant business itself.
00:27:34And he wound up talking about the restaurant industry all the time,
00:27:37and that turned out to be his calling because of interest, per se.
00:27:42That's number two.
00:27:44Number three, serve others.
00:27:49This is it, because you're going to have bad days.
00:27:52And the way to actually keep interest is when you feel like people need you.
00:27:56The essence of dignity in life is to be needed.
00:27:59The essence of despair is to be superfluous.
00:28:02This is one of the reasons that our welfare system in our country is often so demoralizing.
00:28:06It's not because it's not enough money or too much money.
00:28:09It's because we're horrible at treating people at the margins of society like assets to develop.
00:28:15We treat them like liabilities to manage.
00:28:18And nobody deserves to feel unneeded.
00:28:21You would never treat your kid as unneeded, even if they're a big drain on your pocketbook.
00:28:26Being needed is the essence of dignity.
00:28:28And so therefore, if you want to be needed, go serve other people.
00:28:31And this is what will keep you engaged in your calling over the long haul,
00:28:35is truly serving other people.
00:28:38Researchers have found that the highest satisfaction in morale in workplaces
00:28:42is where there's a strong culture of helping and reciprocity between employees, for example,
00:28:47but also between employees and clients.
00:28:53One of the ways that you can raise your own job satisfaction is by increasing your commitment to service, as a matter of fact.
00:29:02I've seen this a lot.
00:29:03I remember one time I was doing a television show in New York with a live studio audience, a happiness thing,
00:29:09and a guy says, "Give me some advice on my job. I feel like a cog in a machine.
00:29:14I'm doing data entry. I sit in a cubicle farm. I don't feel like my work really matters at all.
00:29:20I don't know how to serve my clients because I don't think they even really need me.
00:29:23Tell me how I'm going to find my calling or how I'm going to find my sense of service."
00:29:28And I said, "Well, tomorrow at 2 o'clock in the afternoon -- I know I've given this example before. Bear with me.
00:29:35Go to the break room and make a fresh pot of coffee and bring a cup of coffee to the guy in the next cubicle
00:29:40and say, 'You look like you could use a cup of coffee,' and you'll become that guy.
00:29:46You'll become that guy that actually serves other people."
00:29:48And weirdly, I promise you -- because I've seen the data and studies, but this follows common sense as well,
00:29:53as always, as it should -- that you will like your job better because you're serving other people in the context of that job,
00:30:01even if it's not directly related to your job activities.
00:30:04Now, maybe you need to find a new job, too. I'm not saying that you're going to be there for the next 40 years.
00:30:09I'm saying that right now that you're going to find some relief and you're going to find a greater sense of the calling
00:30:15that comes from serving other people.
00:30:20If I could have given this advice to my younger self, I most definitely would have.
00:30:26I would have found more meaning in what I was trying to do.
00:30:29I would have appreciated the intrinsic reward.
00:30:32I would have looked for different ways that I could serve my fellow musicians or offered up the work that I was doing,
00:30:39the music that I was playing for the people that were enjoying it, as opposed to simply trying to do it for myself.
00:30:44That would have lightened my daily load, as a matter of fact.
00:30:49It would have felt more like a calling.
00:30:52Be that as it may, you can do that today, and I can still do that today.
00:30:59One way or the other, Woonsui, you need to chop wood and carry water
00:31:06and do that in the spirit in which it truly becomes your calling because of what you're making it,
00:31:13not inherently for what it is.
00:31:17I hope that's helpful.
00:31:18I hope that's actually helpful to you.
00:31:19If you're on the job market, for example, or you're ready to change jobs,
00:31:22you're doing it for the first time, you're graduating,
00:31:25or you're simply trying to take what you've been doing for a long time
00:31:27and making it a more meaningful experience to you.
00:31:31Let's take a couple of questions before we finish.
00:31:33One from Susie Friddle.
00:31:35The source is the SEEK Conference, which actually I attended and spoke at with my wife, Esther,
00:31:41at the beginning of 2026, first thing of the year, January 1st, 2026, as a matter of fact.
00:31:47How can you be a good influence on someone without letting them be a bad influence on you?
00:31:52Yeah, I know.
00:31:54That's basically a question of how can you be a missionary if this were a religious context?
00:32:00How could you be a missionary to the unsaved where you save them and they don't unsave you?
00:32:07That's what it comes down to.
00:32:09The truth of the matter is we're trying to be a good influence on people in our way all the time.
00:32:14They'll lift them up to make them better.
00:32:17But when they need that, it feels like there might be a sense of danger
00:32:22because the contagion might go the other way is what it comes down to.
00:32:26Now, to begin with, the orientation of a missionary, secular or religious, don't get me wrong,
00:32:32is sharing and giving.
00:32:34It's sharing and giving.
00:32:35It's like, "I want to bring something better. I want to bring something better."
00:32:38You don't go into the relationship with the idea that it's going to be a 50/50 transaction
00:32:45of ideas, beliefs and values.
00:32:48That's not how it is.
00:32:50You're going in with the idea that you're actually sharing and giving.
00:32:53But you also ask the people that you're working for for good things.
00:32:59You're looking for a way to actually get good things from other people.
00:33:02And you can absolutely find that.
00:33:06When you give a homeless man on the street a sandwich, you can ask him for his prayers
00:33:14and he can give them to you.
00:33:15Just because he's a homeless man on the street doesn't mean you don't need his prayers.
00:33:18Actually, you do, I believe.
00:33:20And that's an example of asking for what's truly good.
00:33:22So go into the relationship with sharing and giving
00:33:25and make sure that you're asking for what you truly do need as a person.
00:33:28And that should solve a problem.
00:33:31Thanks, Susie.
00:33:35Here's a question that comes in on the email address at officehours@arthurbirks.com.
00:33:41I just got fired.
00:33:43Father of two, sorry about that.
00:33:45Yeah, it happens, I know.
00:33:46I recently got contacted by a former colleague with a potential job opportunity.
00:33:50So somebody he used to work with with a potential job opportunity.
00:33:54He started a new firm and his client is expanding into the market where I live.
00:33:58It's the same job that we used to do in the old days when I was starting out.
00:34:03Is it possible my next career move means retracing a path back down the spiral?
00:34:08I love that.
00:34:09Nice.
00:34:10Here's the answer.
00:34:11No, it's not going to be the same thing.
00:34:13It's funny because when people move back to their hometown after many years away,
00:34:17they're like it's a different place.
00:34:19No, no, no, it's not.
00:34:20You're different.
00:34:21That's what it comes down to.
00:34:23So if you worked with somebody when you were 25
00:34:25and they offer you to do something similar when you're 40,
00:34:28the 40-year-old you is a different person.
00:34:30That means the circumstances are going to be different.
00:34:32If this is the right thing to do and you feel at this point in your life
00:34:36it's the best option and even better if you can make it into a calling,
00:34:40I promise you it won't feel like a step backward because you're a different person.
00:34:44You're a more effective person
00:34:46and you will make it into a different kind of experience and a better one at that.
00:34:51Last is from Nadia Rotondo over the email.
00:34:55How can we help 12-year-olds build the discipline of happiness
00:34:59in a way that feels motivating rather than forced?
00:35:01Easy.
00:35:03Model it.
00:35:04Be the person you want your kids to become.
00:35:07That's it.
00:35:08I don't care what you tell them.
00:35:09You can talk to them in Swedish, and they don't speak Swedish,
00:35:13and it won't matter.
00:35:14What they see is what they'll do.
00:35:16The way for you to create happiness discipline is to practice happiness discipline.
00:35:20The greatest gift that you can give to your kids or anybody else
00:35:24is to work on your own happiness.
00:35:26I mean, by the way, if that sounds selfish, remember,
00:35:28nobody wants an unhappy mom.
00:35:31Nobody wants an unhappy husband.
00:35:33Nobody wants an unhappy boss.
00:35:35We don't.
00:35:36We want happy people around us,
00:35:38and so working on your own happiness is a gift to other people,
00:35:41and it's the model of the people who are following you
00:35:43are going to follow most assiduously, most carefully.
00:35:47That's how to do it.
00:35:48Thank you, Nadia.
00:35:49Well, we're done.
00:35:51Time to sign off.
00:35:52It's been another week.
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00:36:19Thank you.
00:36:20Thank you.
00:36:21Thank you for watching and paying attention.
00:36:22Follow me on all the social media platforms
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00:36:34I hope this has been helpful to you in finding your calling,
00:36:38and I'll see you next week.