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January 12 - January 28, 2023
Amy Wrzesniewski
adults who felt their work was a calling missed at least a third fewer days of work than those with a job or a career.
Likewise, a recent survey of 982 zookeepers—who belong to a profession in which 80 percent of workers have college degrees and yet on average earn a salary of $25,000—found that those who identified their work as a calling (“Working with animals feels like my calling in life”) also expressed a deep sense of purpose
Studs Terkel,
Not surprisingly, Terkel found that only a small minority of workers identified their work as a calling. But it wasn’t for lack of wanting. All of us, Terkel concluded, are looking for “daily meaning as well as daily bread . . . for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
conducive
“A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find,” she tells advice seekers. “It’s much more dynamic. Whatever you do—whether you’re a janitor or the CEO—you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.”
Joe Leader.
There are 469 stations. Laid end to end, the tracks for the subway system would reach all the way to Chicago.
So, interest was the seed of his passion.
“On my days off, I went down to the laundromat to do the laundry. You know those big tables for folding your clothes? Well, all the women used to laugh because I’d bring my engineering drawings and lay them out and work on them. I really fell in love with that part of the job.”
“I began to feel like I was making a contribution to society,” he told me. “I understood I was responsible for moving people every single day. And when I became a project manager, I would walk away from these big installation jobs—you know, a hundred panels or a whole interlocking [of signals]—and I knew that what we’d done was going to last for thirty years. That was when I felt I had a vocation, or I would say, a calling.”
Michael Baime
But it wasn’t until I returned home and had a moment to reflect that I realized what had happened. I’d glimpsed the possibility that a child’s connection with a teacher can be life-changing—for both.
Philip and I had nothing and, yet, we had exactly what we needed. We had purpose.
Writing this book made me realize that I’m someone who had an inkling about my interests in adolescence, then some clarity about purpose in my twenties, and finally, in my thirties, the experience and expertise to say that my top-level, life-organizing goal is, and will be until my last breath: Use psychological science to help kids thrive.
David Yeager
Matt Bundick
They both worked ferociously hard, putting in eighty-hour weeks, sometimes with their infant children in carriers strapped across their chests, scrubbing the bathroom tiles in their customers’ buildings as if they were their own.
“It’s not about the cleaning,” Aurora explained, her voice tightening with emotion. “It’s about building something. It’s about our clients and solving their problems. Most of all, it’s about the incredible people we employ—they have the biggest souls, and we feel a huge responsibility toward them.”
Bill Damon,
“In data set after data set,” he told me, “there’s a pattern. Everyone has a spark. And that’s the very beginning of purpose. That spark is something you’re interested in.”
Next, you need to observe someone who is purposeful. The purposeful role model could be a family member, a historical figure, a political figure. It doesn’t really matter who it is, and it doesn’t even matter whether that purpose is related to what the child will end up doing. “What matters,” Bill explained, “is that someone demonstrates that it’s possible to accomplish something on behalf of others.”
Purpose requires a second revelation: “I personally can make a difference.” This conviction, this intention to take action, he says, is why it’s so important to have observed a role model enact purpose in their own life. “You have to believe that your efforts will not be in vain.”
Kat Cole
One time early in Kat’s waitressing days at Hooters, the cooks quit in the middle of their shift. “So,” she told me matter-of-factly, “I went back with the manager and helped cook the food so all the tables got served.”
“First of all, I was surviving off tips. That’s how I paid my bills. If people didn’t get their food, they wouldn’t pay their check, and they certainly wouldn’t leave a tip. Second, I was so curious to see if I could do it. And third, I wanted to be helpful.”
The next thing Kat knew, she was training kitchen employees and helping out with the back-office operations. “Then one day, the bartender needed to leave early, and the same thing happened. Another day, the manager quit, and I learned how to run a shift. In the course of six months, I’d worked every job in the building. Not only did I work those jobs, I became the trainer to help teach all those roles to other people.”
“My passion is to help people,” Jo told me. “No matter at business, or away from business, if you need somebody to come over and build something, or help out in some way, I’m that person who wants to be there for you.
“When I am around people,” Kat wrote, “my heart and soul radiate with the awareness that I am in the presence of greatness.
“job crafting,”
Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future.
I practiced doing the most difficult problems under time pressure—mimicking the conditions under which I needed to produce a flawless performance.
This seminal experiment proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
Aaron Beck,
learned optimism.
Despite their earlier trauma, they kept trying maneuvers that would bring relief from pain.
It was those resilient dogs that led Marty to study the analogous I won’t quit response to adversity in people. Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.
performance. Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up.
These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems.
For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have
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In one study, elite swimmers, many of whom were training for the U.S. Olympic trials, took Marty’s optimism test. Next, coaches asked each swimmer to swim in his or her best event and then deliberately told each swimmer they’d swum just a little slower than was actually the case. Given the opportunity to repeat their event, optimists did at least as well as in their first attempt, but pessimists performed substantially worse.
“What has been your greatest disappointment?”
“Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’ ”
Marty Seligman
The foundational insight of Beck’s new approach was that the same objective event—losing a job, getting into an argument with a coworker, forgetting to call a friend—can lead to very different subjective interpretations. And it is those interpretations—rather than the objective events themselves—that can give rise to our feelings and our behavior.
Cognitive behavioral therapy—which aims to treat depression and other psychological maladies by helping patients think more objectively and behave in healthier ways—has shown that, whatever our childhood sufferings, we can generally learn to observe our negative self-talk and change our maladaptive behaviors. As with any other skill, we can practice interpreting what happens to us and responding as an optimist would.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is now a widely practiced psychotherapeutic treatment for depression, and has proven longer-lasting in its e...
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Wendy Kopp,
For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done. To test whether that was true, we decided to measure optimism and grit before teachers set foot in the classroom and, a year later, see how effectively teachers had advanced the academic progress of their students.
