Passion vs. Paycheck

The idea of being driven by a calling goes back centuries. It was the language used to describe religious people who were called to the priesthood — called, in effect, by God. Today, millions of people in secular professions yearn to be similarly galvanized by their work. This week, researcher Jennifer Tosti-Kharas explores the immense power—and the downsides — of finding a job that gives you purpose.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Hey there, Shankar here. We're dropping this episode on September 22, 2025. That's 10 years to the day since we first launched Hidden Brain into the world. Welcome to the first episode of the Hidden Brain Podcast. I'm Shankar Vedantam. You may know me as A lot has changed since we started this podcast, but for us, one thing remains steadfast. Week in and week out, we love making this show for you. It's been our calling. So today, we mark this anniversary with an episode about just that: callings, and how finding one can change our lives.

• 0:39Shankar Vedantam?

  If you've been listening to Hidden Brain for many years, please come to my live tour. I'll be in Baltimore on October 11, in Washington DC on October 12, and in Los Angeles on November 22. More dates are coming in 2026. I'll be sharing seven key insights from the first decade of the show. For more information and tickets, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. Again, that's hiddenbrain.org/tour. Hope to see you there, and here's today's show.

• 1:14Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:19Shankar Vedantam?

  In 2005, an intense man with a receding hairline and glasses stood before thousands of young graduates in Palo Alto, California. He wore dark robes with a hood of cardinal red.

• 1:34Shankar Vedantam?

  "Truth be told," he joked, "I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation."

• 1:43Shankar Vedantam?

  The speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University's commencement that year didn't just transfix his audience. It would transfix countless other audiences in the years to come. His central message was simple. As he put it, "Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life."

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

• 2:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Finding a vocation, the inventor and entrepreneur said, was no less important than finding a soulmate.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

• 2:30Shankar Vedantam?

  And what if you hadn't found something you loved? What if the work you did paid the bills but didn't complete you? The iconoclastic leader of Apple Inc. Had very definite advice for the recent graduates.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

• 3:04Shankar Vedantam?

  The idea of being driven by a calling goes back centuries. It was the language used to describe religious people who were called to the priesthood, to a life of service and prayer. You were called, in effect, by God.

• 3:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, millions of people in secular professions yearn to be similarly galvanized by their work.

• 3:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, the immense power and the downsides of pursuing a calling.

• 3:52Speaker 02

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• 4:21Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Have you ever looked up from your work in the middle of the day and asked yourself, is this all there is? Am I really doing what I was meant to do? What are the thoughts and images that go through your mind at times like this? Who do you compare yourself to? What do you wish you were doing instead? At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti-Carras studies how we find meaning in work and ways we can derive more satisfaction and purpose in our professional lives. Jennifer Tosti-Carras, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Shankar.

• 6:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Jen, I want to start with a story of a stockbroker in the 19th century. What do we know about Paul Gauguin's life as a middle-class breadwinner in 19th-century Paris?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so before he was the celebrated, world-renowned artist that we know today, Paul Gauguin was a workaday stiff. He was a very reluctant stock trader. He hated this job, which required him to sort of, you know, dress up, put in long hours in the office. And he had this sort of, let's call it a side pursuit, maybe not quite a side hustle, but he certainly had this interest outside of work, which was art, and both making art and collecting art.

• 6:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Perhaps you know someone like this, whose days are filled with work they detest. Perhaps you feel this way yourself and wonder how your life could have turned out differently. In 1882, the stock market crashed, and Paul Gauguin lost his day job. He started to look for work that would pay the bills.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  He was in a situation that so many people do find themselves, where essentially to try to make a living, to try to support your family, I mean, truly in a subsistence way, he was casting about for any job he could find.

• 7:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Even as he was struggling to make ends meet, Paul Gauguin kept returning to his passion. Art was his refuge, his calling. Would he ever be happy if he kept ignoring it?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  This is part of the power of this story in the sense of what if then, to escape this drudgery, I made a radical break? Sort of if I'm not fulfilled here, might I be better fulfilled or more fulfilled elsewhere? And in a way, that's a lot closer to my passions. Paul Gauguin took a move that a lot of us wouldn't. So after trying various attempts to move in new cities, he left everything, truly chucked it all, upended his life and moved to Tahiti and pursued his art full-time.

• 8:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Paul Gauguin's life after he moved to Tahiti has been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny among modern biographers and art historians. In Tahiti, then a French colony, he lived for years with a 13-year-old girl. He impregnated a 14-year-old. Such behavior would be both illegal and disturbing to people in many parts of the world today. But in the 19th century, the legal age for sexual consent in France and French colonies was 13.

• 9:00Shankar Vedantam?

  When Paul Gauguin died in 1903, he was still relatively unknown. Jennifer says that changed after his death.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  So we know now posthumously, he was extremely successful. And again, he's one of those names that if you know, if you can name a few painters, famous painters, he's one, likely one of them.

• 9:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. So we remember Paul Gauguin today not for his acumen as a stockbroker or his skill as a sales rep, but for his art. And his paintings, of course, hang in the world's preeminent museums today. Do you think at least in death, he would say that his gamble paid off?

• 9:40Speaker 03

  It would be hard not to say that, again, given the level of fame, notoriety, perhaps infamy, but you know, that he's, that he's enjoyed. So Paul Gauguin was so influential, not only on his peers, so people like Vincent Van Gogh, but on, you know, generations of artists to come, not least of which was Pablo Picasso. So art historians have drawn a direct line from the oceanic iconography and styling. You know, it's not completely naturalistic.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  It's somewhat abstract representation of form in Gauguin's Tahitian figures and the work of Picasso and Cubism. So in terms of his impact on art today as we know it, it's been massive. And therefore, it's very hard to look and say that this gamble didn't pay off. In fact, absent this huge risk to chuck it all and move to Tahiti, we would not have the art that I love going to the MFA in Boston and looking at this giant, famous, maybe one of the most iconic Gauguin paintings, which hangs proudly there.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  And we would not have this beautiful art that everyone appreciates and loves to look at.

• 11:13Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about another person who had a giant effect as a result of her work and also influenced a number of people who came after her. This is the scientist Marie Curie. She was a physicist who was famously devoted to her work. Talk about the impact she had, Jennifer.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Her impact today is widely felt in the use of radiology and medicine. She's completely changed the way we think about radioactivity, evident in so many domains of modern life. Yet, on top of that, perhaps in a way that we wouldn't say Gauguin was, Marie Curie was a groundbreaker. So she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She was not only that, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice and in separate disciplines, so in physics and in chemistry. Similarly, her sort of all or nothing, all in commitment to doing the science, I think, really sets it apart.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  So this is similarly someone who was somewhat obsessed with her work, put a great deal into it. And for her, it wasn't about, you know, fame or recognition. She famously gave away her Nobel Prize money to students who needed it. But she, you know, she was a towering figure who we recognize today.

• 12:36Shankar Vedantam?

  And it's also clear, Jen, that, looking back, we know that she paid an enormous price for her success as a scientist. In fact, many people believe she died as a result of her pursuit of the study of radioactivity.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think that is really the ultimate symbol of us being willing to sacrifice everything for our work, is the willingness to potentially die as a result of the work or related to the work that we're doing, whether it's directly from the work itself or as a result of not taking care of ourselves because we are doing, we are pursuing work that we love.

• 13:20Shankar Vedantam?

  So as I was preparing for this interview, Jen, I came by a clip from an American pioneer. She was born in poverty in Mississippi to a single mom, but she always felt like she was cut out for great things. I want you to listen to this clip from Oprah Winfrey.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Sometimes the calling is right in your own neighborhood. Sometimes the calling is something that was just a whisper to you. And when you begin to honor that whisper and to follow that, you end up being the best that you could be.

• 13:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Now Oprah, of course, went on to become a billionaire. You know, people have begged her to run for president. So we've looked at a painter in the 19th century, a scientist in the 20th century, and a television star in the 21st century. Do you hear common threads in these stories, Jen?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  So absolutely. I think the common thread here is this notion that work can be a calling. It can be more than just a paycheck. It can be a source of personal fulfillment, of doing great things in the world. And as we talked about, a really deep sense of immersing yourself in the doing of the work. It does show the power, I believe, of viewing one's work as more than, if you will, just a job, but as a real possibility to contribute both to yourself and to the world at large.

• 14:52Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the psychology of vocations and how we can all find greater meaning in our work. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:20Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. Quince focuses on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather.

• 16:47Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:21Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford's commencement in 2005, he told a story of why he dropped out of college. "It was pretty scary at the time," he said, "but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made." Dropping out allowed him to drop in on classes that interested him rather than classes he was being told to attend. He said, "I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the $0.05 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it, and much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition

• 18:06Shankar Vedantam?

  turned out to be priceless later on."

• 18:11Shankar Vedantam?

  At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti Kara studies the nature and meaning of work.

• 18:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Jenny, you say that the notion that we can find meaning and pleasure in work is relatively recent. How recent?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  The idea of work as a calling goes way, way back to the Protestant Reformation, where the idea was work could be a calling, and specifically, that calling was to the ministry, to the clergy, to serve God directly. Now, work as a secular calling started to gain a foothold around the time that we started having knowledge work, so kind of 80s, 90s, where I have a project I can own, I can really invest myself into. And so therefore, I really feel like it's more than just my job. It's me. I'm actually putting me into it. I would say that the time

• 19:08Speaker 03

  of this Steve Jobs commencement speech, 2005, is right around the time of peak calling. And if you look at Google N-grams for "find your calling" or "find your passion," it really follows this. We see this like, you know, meandering line, very low, starting to uptick in the early 1980s, and then reaching this, you know, kind of insane asymptotic almost peak in right around the early 2000s. And so, you know, while this idea has deep roots, we don't assume this is a calling from... A higher power, but that the experience of the calling is very, very

• 19:52Speaker 03

  personal, very deep, and very sort of connected to this sense of self.

• 19:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So your own research has explored the effects of having a calling. You've examined the happiness levels of people who have found a calling. Are these people more engaged and satisfied with their work, Chip?

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are. So I conducted, along with my co-authors, Chassa DeBrow, Hannah Weisman, and Danny Heller. We conducted about a 20-year survey, quantitative survey, of results on what it means to experience work as a calling. And we found very strongly that people with strong callings report greater satisfaction with their work and their life, and with engagement at work, and some behavioral indicators of better performance, lower absenteeism. And these are sort of consistent findings across studies about how and why experiencing work as a calling matters.

• 20:52Shankar Vedantam?

  So Steve Jobs argued that having a calling allows you to work hard because you're working with passion. Do you find that? Is that borne out by the evidence? Are people with a calling, do they have a higher propensity for hard work?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  In a study with Chassa DeBrow and Heather Capus, we looked at this very question of do strong callings lead to greater effort? And we found empirically that they do. So when you have a stronger calling, you will expend more effort on calling-relevant tasks. So not just any task, right? It has to be sort of, so if my calling is toward my work domain, and then I'll put in more effort at work. The mechanism through which this happens is through enjoyment of that work. So stronger calling means I enjoy the work more, therefore I will work harder at it.

• 21:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So this is the idea that if you love what you do, then you'll never work a day in your life. It's that idea.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Exactly right.

• 21:52Shankar Vedantam?

  So other research finds that people who have a calling are more resilient. They're able to better withstand setbacks. So why would this be the case, Jen?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so a calling could almost be like a deep reserve of resilience, of connection to the work. This sense that even if things are not going well in work, that somehow my connection to the work that I'm doing, my belief in my ability to do it can help me to overcome a setback.

• 22:27Shankar Vedantam?

  You conducted a study of officers serving in the US military and compared people who felt a calling to those who did not. Tell me about the study and what you found.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this was with Marco D'Arenzo and Ned Pauley. We conducted a survey of military officers. So they were mid-career, sort of junior officers, but with supervisory experience. They had about 10 to 12 years of service on average in the military. And we specifically looked at their perception that they had hit a career plateau, which is just what it sounds like. So rather than this sense that I'm on the typical career upward trajectory that is desired, that I have leveled off. Basically, this subjective sense that I'm not learning and growing and developing in my current career. And we found that the stronger their callings toward the military, the less likely they were to perceive

• 23:22Speaker 03

  that they were at a plateaued space in their career. That in turn drove their commitment to staying in the military as an organization.

• 23:32Shankar Vedantam?

  So Steve Jobs told us that following a calling helped him be more creative. Is there any evidence that that is the case more generally?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Stronger callings mean you're just more deeply connected to that domain. You might want to learn more about it. You might want to spend more time doing it. Employees with strong callings might expend resources that other employees who don't feel as strongly just simply aren't as willing to expend. So this notion that... Like Steve Jobs, like Oprah, like everyone else we talked about, a calling might mean an engulfment or immersion in the work that leads to breakthroughs. I will say we need more research to support these conclusions, but the notion that experiencing a strong calling has leads people to do

• 24:25Speaker 03

  great work or their best work is very well founded.

• 24:33Shankar Vedantam?

  So in your own career, Jen, you started out as a management consultant. What was that work like for you?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I so I was an undergraduate business major and getting a job as a management consultant at a big firm in New York City was like a dream because I was making more money than seemed reasonable. I was working with smart, very interesting people. Consulting work is project based, so it doesn't get boring. You're always moving around, new organization, new setting, sometimes a new city. There was travel. I was young and unencumbered. It was all very glamorous, getting hotel points and all these kinds of things, frequent flyer miles. But despite all these sort of objective reasons for me to love the work,

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I never felt like consulting was certainly my calling or even frankly, something I wanted to stay in. And I also noticed this real gender gap. And this has gotten, I think, somewhat better, probably not all the way better, but somewhat better within consulting firms. But it was this classic thing where you would see a lot of predominantly male partners who had, you know, families, kids at home. But the female partners, few as they are, were primarily single, no children. And I'm just thinking both, is this the life that I want? But also, is this the work that I can really see myself doing,

• 26:06Speaker 03

  traveling potentially four or five days a week? And ultimately, I decided that it was not and that I needed to do something else.

• 26:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So you eventually left the consulting firm and you became an academic. Do you feel a calling when it comes to being a teacher and a researcher, Jim?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do feel a calling and I feel so fortunate to be able to study these questions that I've wondered about, you know, my whole life, really. Like, why do people spend so much time at work? Why does work define us to the extent that it does? When we go to parties and someone says, "What do you do?" We know what that means. That means, "What do you do for a living?" It doesn't mean, like, "What do you do in general?" Right? In the US and in the Northeast, which is where I've mostly lived, what you do is who you are. I wanted to understand always more about that. So being able to study that and to talk to real people and find out more about how this resonates with them, I mean, that is the best.

• 27:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. I have to say that, you know, I almost didn't need to ask you the question of whether you are, whether you feel like you are pursuing a calling, because I can almost hear it in your voice as you're talking. I can hear your enthusiasm for what it is that you do. And I feel like that's often the case, that when you come by people who have a calling, it's almost as if they are jumping out of themselves to tell you how wonderful it is, the thing that they're doing. And what they are doing could be quite obscure and could have no interest whatsoever to you, but their enthusiasm, in some ways, rubs off on you.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  I think that's absolutely right. I would go so far as to say, it probably wouldn't be a surprise to people working in an organization to hear from each person how they feel about their work. I think there would be something intangible that you could sense about their engagement with the work, maybe their obsession with the work, how they feel about the work that would come through.

• 28:14Shankar Vedantam?

  It can seem like a slam dunk. Steve Jobs was right. All of us should find and pursue our callings. But human nature, as you know from listening to the show, is endlessly complicated. What serves us well in one domain can be an impediment in another. When we come back, the downsides of callings. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 31:19Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As you're listening to this episode, do you feel like you're hearing a description of yourself? Someone who has found what they were meant to do? Someone with a purpose and a passion that transcends them? Or do you feel envy of people who have found their calling? And wonder whether you'll ever find something similar? If you have stories or questions about having a calling that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please go to a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line, "Calling." That email address again is [email protected].

• 32:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Sigmund Freud said, "There are two sources of human happiness. There was love, and there was work." Close, intimate, personal ties with other people are essential to flourishing. Friends, families, and lovers make life worth living. But equally, he argued, work that shows we are making a difference in the world can be a source of enduring satisfaction.

• 32:32Shankar Vedantam?

  At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti-Carras has found that this is true. Meaningful work is a source of happiness. Along with a philosopher, Christopher Wong-Michaelson, she's the author of the book, "Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work."

• 32:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Jen, the idea of having a calling is so celebrated in our culture that it might come as a surprise to many people that callings can have downsides. But you and others have found that there can be drawbacks to pursuing a vocation. For one thing, pursuing a calling seems to distort our judgment. You've looked at this idea specifically in the context of musicians. What do you find?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I agree, first of all, that this is startling to people because we have so encoded this cultural message of do what you love, the money will follow, find your calling, love your life. These are literally book titles that seem so obvious. You know, I find my calling and the rest is gravy. But the reality looks very different and musicians are fascinating to study because this is both a quintessential arts field, right? We would imagine to see a lot of callings, a lot of passion toward music. It's something, you

• 33:54Speaker 03

  know, a lot of us do pursue in some way or another. But yet, it's a very fraught profession because we know that not everyone will make it as a professional musician who might want to, in the same way with sports, arts, lots of different fields operate like this. So I've done a series of studies and there's a series of interesting studies that have been done by my co-author, Shasha De Brow. She is not only a professor at the London School of Economics, but she is a professional bassoonist. So she knows this world very,

• 34:31Speaker 03

  very well. So she has been studying musicians over a long career span, so 11 years and counting. And she started studying them when they were in a program for talented high school students who were talented at music, and she assessed their level of calling toward music, then saw, years later, do they pursue music professionally or not?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Maybe not surprisingly, the stronger the calling, the more likely people are to pursue music professionally down the road. But that one of the drivers of this is not their actual ability or talent level, as we might think, but their perception that they're talented. And that actually, with strong callings, people tend to have overinflated perception of their own ability level. So they think they're better than they are. And that leads them then to pursue this pretty risky career path. So that started this idea that strong callings

• 35:40Speaker 03

  might lead to a sort of a career tunnel vision, where you truly can't imagine that you won't make it because I love it so much. You know, how can I not be the one to break through when this is my passion and this is my calling?

• 35:56Shankar Vedantam?

  What happens when people who have a calling get feedback or guidance from others that in fact they're not as good as they think they are?

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do not listen to that feedback. So Shasa and I have studied this specifically in the context of musicians. And so what we found was the stronger musician's calling toward music, the less likely they were to follow the advice of their private music teacher if that music teacher discouraged them from going into music. They would basically say, thank you very much. I disagree. I'm doing it anyway. And lest we think this phenomenon is limited to or specific to musicians or the context of music or the arts, we replicated this exact finding in a sample of business school students who said the stronger their callings toward business,

• 36:52Speaker 03

  they would not accept the advice of a trusted mentor. We left this one more open, a trusted mentor, who discouraged them from going into business professionally. So there does seem to be something about strong callings. And it would be very easy to say, well, why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't we have a sense that we are like, I want to do this and nothing's going to stop me and no one or nothing can dissuade me? In fact, a lot of these archetypal, you know, calling stories like we shared earlier, Steve Jobs, et cetera, it's about overcoming these odds, right? Despite everything stacked against me, I persevered and I broke through and I made it.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  And I think that can be true to a point. Obviously, having some self-confidence or even maybe a little bit of an overinflated self-perception might be helpful or might be adaptive or might help with resilience. But it's hard not to think that there comes a point when an inability to listen to people that have our best interests at heart, who are telling us, giving us real feedback, that the inability to listen to this might harm us in some way.

• 38:05Shankar Vedantam?

  There are many callings that do not involve making a lot of money. I'm thinking about the arts, I'm thinking about music, I'm thinking about sports in many cases, perhaps not all sports, but many sports. What do we know about the economic impacts of pursuing a calling, Jen?

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're absolutely right that the more prototypical calling-oriented professions, whether it's nonprofit work, helping work, you know, international aid work, et cetera, tend to not be well-paid. So already, many people to pursue their callings or meaningful work in general are being asked implicitly to accept a pay cut relative to, I'm going to go work for that big bank and not ask too many questions, right? Or I'm going to go work for, you know, I'm going to work in a big law firm and not ask

• 39:10Speaker 03

  too many questions about who my clients are, things like that. So already, we have some sense that we ask people in society to take their love for what they're doing or the meaning they get from the work they do and substitute it for pay. But actually, we have found this in my own research and the research of others, that people with stronger callings will actually make financial sacrifices to do the work that they love doing. So suddenly, the question becomes, is this potentially overwork? And that basically sets people up to be taken advantage of.

• 39:53Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I was just going to ask you this question, which is, if someone is willing to work without really seeking or demanding pay because they're saying, I'm pursuing my passion, doesn't that make them vulnerable to exploitation?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And so that's something that I teach my students about and that I would really caution people about, because we've already said that these are the good workers and that these are people that organizations really want to attract and really want to retain. So then if on top of that, I really feel like, gosh, no matter what I ask you to do, I ask you to come in, you know, off-hours, all times of day or night, always go above and beyond, oh, I know I can't count on my other employees, but I can really count on you. You know, at what point is it unfair? Is it exploitative? And is it pushing into a personal space, you know, personal life, in a way that is

• 40:50Speaker 03

  depleting and frankly, would lead to burnout? And in fact, that is what some studies have found, is that people with stronger callings, the good way to say it is, they go above and beyond their ideal employees. The more negative way to say it is, they will sacrifice personal time even when it's not paid, and they do, they can as a result, report greater physical and psychological health issues, greater fatigue, stress, burnout, and ultimately, will leave jobs because it's simply unsustainable to keep working at this pace.

• 41:38Shankar Vedantam?

  You tell the story about a man named Colin Huggins. What is the story and how is it germane to what we're talking about here, Jen?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is another musician's story. Colin Huggins is a busker, so he plays his 900-pound Steinway baby grand piano in the middle of Washington Square Park. So listeners may have stumbled upon him if they've walked through Washington Square Park and heard absolutely beautiful classical music being played. He would literally lug this piano from his apartment in the East Village over to Washington Square Park. And the moving blankets he would lay under the piano and invite people to lay down under the piano so they could really experience the wall of sound that he was producing. He was doing this by choice. He used to be a professional accompanist for the Joffrey Ballet.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  He described that once he got a taste of this public performance, he was hooked. So he, you know, experienced a strong passion for music, a strong passion for public performance. And it may come as no surprise, this was not a lucrative way to make a living even pre-COVID. But the last, and this is a, so this is already representing a real sacrifice to do one's work. But the last that I had read about Colin Huggins, and again, he's this beloved, you know, piano man of the, of the Village and of Washington Square Park. This was in 2023. It was reported that he was homeless, so couldn't keep paying the rent in the East Village,

• 43:13Speaker 03

  and was in fact, sleeping in the park on his piano. So this is a terribly tragic, very poignant story of sort of ultimate sacrifice to do work that one loves, sort of with, with very little concern about even meeting basic needs.

• 43:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So many people switch jobs as new opportunities come up. And if you don't like one job, you can go to another job. But if you're pursuing a calling and your career doesn't work out as planned, this feels emotionally very different than someone who loses a job or gets laid off from a position. I mean, they're both painful. But if you feel like you're doing something you're called to do and it's deeply meaningful to you, losing out on a career like that can be very, very difficult. Can you talk about this idea that in some ways, one of the downsides of having a calling is what happens when it doesn't work out as a career?

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So not everyone is lucky enough to find work in their calling to begin with. Similarly, not everyone is able to sustain work in the calling. And we can imagine that could be for a lot of reasons. People might not be able to pursue their callings. And research by Justin Berg and others has shown that this is a deeply psychologically aversive state, filled with frustration, regret, depression, because it's not just, I need a job, any job. You sort of have this notion that it's really got to live up to this high sense that I have of what work should be.

• 45:05Shankar Vedantam?

  It's worth also pointing out, Jen, that the effects of the choices we make are not experienced only by ourselves. The people around us are affected as well. We talked earlier about how the painter Paul Gauguin left France to try his luck as an artist in Tahiti. Now, he may have gone into the history books as a great artist, but talk a moment about the impact of his choices on the people around him. What does that legacy look like?

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Not such a good legacy, Shankar. So Paul Gauguin today, in the parlance of today, should be canceled, or we believe he should be canceled, because he led a life of...

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Utter selfishness at the expense of his family. He left his family behind in France when he went to Tahiti. So first of all, he was no longer there to contribute. And as we said, he was not doing so well by selling his art in Polynesia that he could send money home to them. So another way to say this is he abandoned his family in France. And to go one step further, by all accounts, I mean, Paul Gauguin is now a very kind of,

• 46:24Speaker 03

  his legacy is somewhat conflicted by the fact that he pursued women that he painted and had, you know, by all accounts, affairs with them. There's a story that his favorite child died and he still did not return home. And by all accounts, it sort of led to his downfall. He went sort of mad and, and, you know, kind of consumed by his own, you know, obsession to paint. But it was sort of this all-consuming passion or obsession. And he died in Polynesia without having returned home to this family that he essentially left behind.

• 47:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Being swept up by a calling can make people obsessive and single-minded. That might be good for the pursuit of passion, but it can be harmful for other dimensions of life, from your physical health to your relationships with family and friends. So often, it seems, the good and the bad go hand in hand when it comes to callings.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. I think it's certainly something that people should be aware of and look out for. So I think just in the same way that it might be this excuse, you know, we don't have to pay you as much because you really love it. It also might be an excuse to not engage fully in areas outside of work because I'm so consumed by work and my work is the most important thing to me. At what point do other domains of life, whatever those are, whether they're a family who depends on you, whether they're, you know, just self-care and... The cultivation of a life outside work, which has merit and benefit. At what point do those things suffer

• 48:14Speaker 03

  because of this kind of all in sense of performing the work?

• 48:21Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, it's interesting. We've talked about how the idea of having a calling is a romantic idea. But I can't stop seeing the parallels with actual romance. So a century or two ago, everyone thought that work was just how you paid the bills. But similarly, a couple of centuries ago, marriage was a very prosaic institution designed primarily for raising children. Today, people want romantic partners who are going to be their soulmates. Similarly, people with a calling might ignore good advice. People in love can be blind to reason. And if having a calling that doesn't work out can leave you brokenhearted, failing at love can also leave you grief stricken. And I'm wondering psychologically, do you think in some ways there are the same processes that are at work here?

• 49:05Speaker 03

  I think they are. I think that is so well said. And I think they are very similar processes. I want to remind listeners who maybe haven't heard the Steve Jobs commencement speech in a while. He makes this parallel. He says, don't settle. Keep looking until you've found that perfect fit, that job that you love. It's as important in your work life as it is with your romantic partners. I mean, he makes this literal parallel to a romantic search and the search for the perfect job. And just as this is a very high bar to live up to in your romantic life, this is a very high bar for any job to live up to.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  And again, the research bears this out. So people with stronger callings tend to be. So again, we've talked about how they're all in on work. They're very, you know, go above and beyond, think outside of the box. The flip side of this is they can be extremely critical of those around them, whether it's the organization, leaders, coworkers, have a view that differs from their own. But in terms of actually performing the work, they can be. Quite tough to work with. They can have strained work relationships. They will be, you know, the first to sign up if someone needs to to work extra hours, but also the first to complain if a decision is made that they don't agree with or that

• 50:34Speaker 03

  they, because again, it runs counter to my calling. So to have this lofty ideal of what the perfect job is going to feel like is just as sort of unrealistic an assumption as thinking, when I find my perfect life partner, every day will be roses and sunshine and we'll never quarrel and we'll, you know, nothing will ever feel hard again. These are myths.

• 51:05Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, some, some time ago, we had the researcher Eli Finkel from Northwestern University on Hidden Brain, and he was making a very interesting argument. His argument was that as our expectations of our romantic partners have gone higher and higher and higher, fewer of us are actually able to meet those expectations. So many of us, because our expectations for marriage have now become so much higher than they were two centuries ago, fewer of us are actually able to reach the level where we are satisfied or we say that we're in a happy relationship. But for those of us who actually are able to meet that standard, who are actually able to put in the time and the effort to cultivate great relationships, they're probably having much happier marriages than people two centuries

• 51:50Shankar Vedantam?

  ago. But it also means that there are many, many people who feel like they're falling short. And again, I can't help but see the parallels here with having a calling. If you have a calling, you happen to be lucky enough to achieve that calling. You're doing work that's meaningful. You're doing work that transforms the world. I mean, you're clearly happier than almost everyone in human history who's ever had a job. But if everyone aspires to that very, very high standard, lots of us are going to be disappointed.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is a perfect parallel. So first, I think someone should do that study about exactly how do people feel about the expectation of the calling versus the, I want to see that, you know, that type of study. But I also think that's right, because we know that there are So many jobs that need doing that are unlikely to feel like people's callings. And so where does that leave people who are left out of this ability to, you know, choose work freely, work in areas that have a reasonable enough degree of autonomy that there's something that they can tap into?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  I think that phenomenon will absolutely play out in a very similar way.

• 53:06Shankar Vedantam?

  I have to say that I feel torn here after this conversation because I think I want to live in a world that has Marie Curies and Steve Jobses, but I can also see the great costs that come from being so single-minded. After doing all this research and thinking, where do you come down, Jen? Are callings a good thing?

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what I like to say is, absolutely, people should not be doing work that feels meaning less, that is drudgery, and that you believe is not just not making the world a better place, but might actually be making the world a worse place. That's a fate I wouldn't want for anyone. So, you know, my great hope would be that we, as a society, figure out how to offer jobs that provide a path to a sense that the work is meaningful and worthy of respect and human dignity. I do also want to say, I don't think that feeling that work is a strong calling is

• 54:08Speaker 03

  the only path or the best path to feeling that you have a good life or a meaningful life. So there are lots of people who find the meaning in their life outside of the meaning of their work. So in some ways, it's sort of like what you had said. If you're lucky enough to find work that you love doing, that's great. But I think for those who haven't yet found it, or maybe will never find it, don't despair. That's not a personal or moral failing, as we sometimes make it seem. And there are so many ways that we can feel like we're making a difference and a contribution. It doesn't only need to be through our work, or primarily through our work.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  And there are lots of things that give our lives meaning that have nothing to do with work.

• 55:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Jennifer Tosti-Carris and philosopher Christopher Wong-Michelson are the authors of the book, Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work. In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at how all of us, people who have a calling and people who don't, people who want a calling and people who don't, can derive greater meaning and satisfaction from our work. We'll explore psychological techniques that can change your relationship to your job, your coworkers, and your profession. If you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain, that episode should be available in your feed right now. It's titled, "How to Make Work Meaningful." If you're not a subscriber, this is a great time to check out Hidden Brain Plus.

• 55:54Shankar Vedantam?

  All through the month of September, listeners who subscribe on Apple Podcasts will get access to an extended 30-day free trial. To access that 30-day trial, find Hidden Brain on Apple Podcasts and click the Try Free button, or go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Your support helps us make research-based insights accessible, relevant, and engaging to a broad audience around the world. Again, that site is apple.co/hiddenbrain. Jen, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Shankar. It was a true pleasure.

• 56:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow-up questions or stories that you'd like to share with Jennifer Toasty-Carris? Have you found a calling that gets you up in the morning each day? Are you a skeptic of callings? Or do you have questions about how to make work more meaningful? If you'd be willing to share your questions, stories, and comments with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Calling." That email address again is [email protected].

• 57:35Shankar Vedantam?

  I'd like to call out some unsung heroes on this 10th anniversary show. Cara McGurk Allison played a central role in getting the show started, and Maggie Penman was one of our first producers. Jenna Weiss-Berman helped build several pilot episodes. Lots of others helped as well. Lynette Clementson and Anya Grunman provided a lot of guidance, and Lauren Embry, Paul Hager, Paul Ginsberg, and Camilla Smith provided some of the initial seed funding. We're so grateful to all of them. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle,

• 58:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week on the show, we're going to kick off a new series. It's a topic that almost everyone cares about, a topic that has inspired great songs and poems and works of fiction. That topic is love. Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about what happens when the heady first phase of infatuation is done, and the harder work of navigating the day-to-day with your partner begins.

• 58:54Speaker 09

  So, oh, we're having a good time. We're feeling jokey with each other, and something happened. But maybe I can just, like, keep going with the playfulness, and it'll just wash away. And, you know, that, just as it turns out, doesn't usually work.

• 59:12Shankar Vedantam?

  That's Love 2.0, starting next week. I hope you'll join us. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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