How to Create Your Calling

Your professional calling is a mysterious idea. It’s the ineffable sense that you are meant to do something. Many people get tripped up in their pursuit of their calling, because they conceive of it like buried treasure—something hidden that they must find. In truth, your calling can be built no matter your present circumstances. So, how do you do it? In this episode, I explain how to move from chasing an objective career—titles, status, money—to building a more subjective one based on what you care about and what genuinely interests you. I also share three simple steps to help you evaluate and shape your calling. If you stick with them, you’ll be more likely to end up doing work that feels meaningful—and, in turn, you’ll get happier. If you want to go deeper, check out my book, The Meaning of Your Life https://www.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-of-your-life. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:19) How to find what you’re meant to do (04:15) Work-ism and workaholism (06:04) 4 habits of the happiest people (07:13) What can we learn about our callings from religion? (13:33) Subjective vs. objective careers (15:19) Work-life balance vs. work-life integration (18:05) A misconception people make: calling isn’t just unusual talent (19:39) How do you find your calling? (19:42) #1. Look within (22:41) #2. Focus on fascination (27:45) #3. Serve others (31:35) Q&A #1: How can you positively influence others? (33:34) Q&A #2: Is retracing a career path not making progress? (34:53) Q&A #3: How can we help teenagers build their own happiness habits? (35:50) Outro — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com • Meaning Membership: https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership • The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks: https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur • 6 science-backed ways to raise happiness at work: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/podcast/6-science-backed-ways-to-raise-happiness-and-success-at-work • If I work harder, will you love me? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/workaholic-love-practical-solutions/684353/ • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:09Speaker 01

  How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com/autodisc counts. Restrictions apply.

• 0:15Arthur Brooks?

  One 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. So you look at an Olympic athlete or something, say, "Oh, it's an obvious calling, you know, this figure skater, gymnast or something." They have an obvious calling. You have an obvious calling because your abilities are so acute and amazing. That's actually completely wrong. Being 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. So, that's not what you have to figure out.

• 1:00Arthur Brooks?

  Calling isn't necessarily unusual talent.

• 1:09Arthur Brooks?

  Hey 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. I 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. Thank you for following the show, for using these ideas in your own life, and also for sharing these ideas to other people as well. My 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.

• 1:52Arthur Brooks?

  You 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. One 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. I know you're dedicated to that, which is why you're watching the show. Thank you for doing that. As always, please do feedback. [email protected] is the email address to do so. Also, you can leave us comments on any of the platforms. And we see them, and we pay a lot of attention to them, and we value them a lot. Please like and subscribe, recommend to a friend, pass these ideas around as liberally as you possibly can.

• 2:34Arthur Brooks?

  I want to talk today about how to find your calling at work. People ask me this all the time. And, you know, I teach at a business school, at a famous business school where people, they want to do really well, they want to be successful, for sure, of course, we all do. But they want to do so joyfully, they want to find something as their thing, something that they feel like they're meant to do. I mean, I talk all the time about my new book behind me here, The Meaning of Your Life. There's a whole chapter in there about finding your calling, because finding what you're meant to do, obviously, is part of meaning. How do you do that? How do we understand the sense of calling? That's what this is about today. Now, when we talk about work for strivers, and I suspect that you're a striver, just

• 3:19Arthur Brooks?

  like me, work really hard, work really long hours, really dedicated to what you do, there's a lot of cautions that you face. People talk about workaholism. And I've talked about it on the show before. Workaholism 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. Success 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. This obviously has neurobiological components to it.

• 3:55Arthur Brooks?

  You actually get the dopamine reward you're seeking in life when you feel like you're succeeding and you judge that usually by the behavior of other people around you. That's really super dangerous. I 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. So 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, you'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. We also, there's an expression that you may be aware of called work-ism. Work-ism, it kind of turns work into a religion.

• 4:40Arthur Brooks?

  Maybe where work is your personality, and you've met people like this, where all they can talk about is their work. It'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, and it almost becomes a sense of worship, you know, what they're doing, because their heart is so completely devoted to it. So workaholism and work-ism, bad. The idea that worldly success, money, power, fame, that these are going to lead to happiness, that's wrong. If you follow this show, you know that that's incorrect, and that leads to a whole lot of heartache. On the contrary, you need to shoot for happiness, and then you will be successful enough.

• 5:21Arthur Brooks?

  That's the truth of the matter, and I hope I've provided proof of that to you abundantly after thirty-some episodes of this show. However, it's also the case that work matters. Now, when I say work, I don't mean work for pay necessarily. Work means productive, a productive endeavor, using your capacities. That's really what it comes down to. Maybe that's raising your kids, and nobody's giving you, you know, writing checks to you for that. Maybe it's doing volunteer work because you're retired or because you want to. There 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.

• 6:02Arthur Brooks?

  But for most of us, it's the nine to five, or who knows, the six to six, you know, whatever your hours happen to be, fellow strivers. And that's a really important source of happiness. It falls into the framework of the habits of the happiest people. Perhaps you know that the four habits of the happiest people are pursuing a faith or life philosophy, understanding things that are bigger than you so you can transcend your daily, ordinary life. Your family, the kin that are related to you, that are part of your immediate or extended family, having relationships with them. Friendship, and I mean real friends, not deal friends. And last but not least, is a healthy orientation toward work.

• 6:46Arthur Brooks?

  Work that's meaningful, work that's a calling. That's what I want to talk about today, because that's what we want. Look, too obsessed with your work? That's a problem. But not paying attention to your work? That's also a problem. How do we find the balance? And the answer to that is understanding the notion of professional calling. So what I want to do today, and I hope I'm successful with you in the next 35 or 40 minutes, is giving you the information that you need so that you can find your calling if you haven't found it yet. And if you have, or you're wondering, I'll give you some information that you can use to interrogate what you're doing, to see whether or not you need to do something else or keep trying. Okay.

• 7:27Arthur Brooks?

  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, a Zen Buddhist riddle that is often presented to novice monks so that they can contemplate these things. I've talked about this in the past, where big questions that don't have answers, they exercise the right hemisphere of your brain and stimulate a contemplation of mystery and meaning. That's why big questions that are hard to understand are so important, that we should all be thinking about in our own lives. This particular Zen Buddhist story is actually about two monks. A junior monk, which is called an unsui, and a senior monk, the master monk at a monastery,

• 8:11Arthur Brooks?

  which is called a jikijitsu. The unsui comes to the jikijitsu and says, "Master, what will be my job?"

• 8:22Arthur Brooks?

  The master says, "Before you reach enlightenment, you will chop wood and carry water." That's your job. And the unsuing, now he's a little bit disappointed because, you know, this is gonna be a pretty hard and pretty boring job. It's a kind of big backbreaking, as a matter of fact. And so, day after day, month after month, year after year, he chops wood and carries water, and he doesn't complain. He dreams about what his life is gonna be like after he reaches some stage of enlightenment, adequate to change his job. Maybe, you know, he'll be a pure contemplative, spending his time in prayer and meditation. Maybe, maybe he'll be a teacher, sitting indoors without chafed hands and without aching muscles.

• 9:06Arthur Brooks?

  Okay, a few decades go by, chopping wood and carrying water. And finally, he, he's not so young anymore, and he's judged to have attained the desired level of knowledge to become, to be a master himself. And so, he goes into the jiki jitsu, who's now very, very old, and says, "I have faithfully carried out my job all these years, chopping wood and carrying water, as I worked to become a master like you. What will my job now be?" The jiki jitsu looks at heaven and says, "Chop wood, carry water." Now, you probably understand the point that I'm trying to make.

• 9:45Arthur Brooks?

  The point is that his mission, that his calling, is not a particular job, but to do his job in a particular way. That's what it comes down to. Now, easy to say, right? I mean, there are kinds, all kinds of things that you could, that you could do, that you can't really make into your calling.

• 10:07Arthur Brooks?

  But I hope I can make the case that there's more that can become a calling that you probably imagined in the past. And what it relies on is your orientation to yourself and what you're doing. Finding 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. Let's figure out how to do that.

• 10:34Arthur Brooks?

  Now, you might say to yourself, "I need to find the particular, perfect job for me." But that's the first mistake. A 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 to, I don't know what I want to do." And that's, makes them feel incredibly insecure. And I say, "Don't worry about it. It's not your last job. And 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. But along the way, your calling, if you have an openness, actually will find you." As a matter of fact, there are all kinds of cases where the same people will do the

• 11:16Arthur Brooks?

  same job with a different orientation toward that job, and it'll either be a slog, or a calling. I mean, this is as old as, well, I don't know, the Bible, for example. You 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? Kicked out. And 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. Really, clearly, it's a real drag. It's a slog. It's like, you know, the worst job you can possibly imagine.

• 11:58Arthur Brooks?

  But go back a little bit, before the fall, before the snake and the apple, when they were still in paradise, what were they doing? Here's Genesis. "God places Adam into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." In other words, he was doing the same thing, just in a different place, with a different orientation. The 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. It 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.

• 12:41Arthur Brooks?

  Now, this is not just a Christian or Jewish thing. In Hinduism, in the Bhagavad Gita...

• 12:48Arthur Brooks?

  We see by performing one's natural occupation, one worships the Creator, from whom all living entities have come into being. That work as a calling is divine, is what it comes down to. And this is almost every religious tradition, but also a lot of secular traditions. I mean, I've read a lot of work on how to train career counselors. Career counselors, like, you know, the ones that were telling you when you're a senior in high school that you'll never amount to anything? Yeah, me too. And what do they teach them to do? They teach them to, 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. It's to find what you're cosmically meant to do.

• 13:31Arthur Brooks?

  It's almost religious, is the whole idea. You're supposed to do something and find what that particular thing is. But 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? And that orientation is something that psychologists refer to as a subjective career, rather than an objective career. So, and again, this is a satiric language, because this is what we do in academia, is come up with fancy words for pretty easy ideas. An objective career is one that's chosen because of extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are money, or power,

• 14:14Arthur Brooks?

  or position, or prestige, anything like that. Subjective 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. That'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. That 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. You 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.

• 14:58Arthur Brooks?

  It's deeper than just saying, "I love my job." It's something that I feel like I'm actually supposed to do it. Researchers in 2012 devised a survey about this, asking people to either agree or disagree with the statement. "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. We'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. That's why this really, really matters, for sure. Now, I want to make a side point here that I think is really important. We hear all the time about work-life balance.

• 15:38Arthur Brooks?

  And during 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. Really, really high rates of job quitting is what it came down to. And a lot of what I heard about as a result of that was work-life balance. We need more work-life balance. And maybe this new generation is actually figuring it out that they're not going to be exploited. You know, I get that. I don't want to be exploited any more than anybody else does. I certainly don't want to exploit anybody. But 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. And you found that a lot of people who did that

• 16:23Arthur Brooks?

  were struggling to get back on their feet professionally. It turned out to have been a real mistake. The mistake was this whole conversation generally about work-life balance. And 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. If it's a subjective career that you're looking for, whatever you happen to be doing, it should be integrated with your life. You should look for work-life integration, not work-life balance. Work-life balance says work and life are separate things. And that in and of itself is a hugely problematic idea if you want to find meaning and happiness in your life. Now, I'm not saying you should work all the time. On the contrary, remember, we talked about workism and workaholism to start the episode. It's not it. What we need...

• 17:09Arthur Brooks?

  Very integrally is to understand how my work makes my non-work better, and my non-work makes my work better. That'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. That's the idea that we're actually looking for. Okay, so, do you have that? Perhaps you've never thought about it in this particular way, but that means, by the way, that if all you ever do is work and you neglect your relationships, you're doing it wrong. If 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,

• 17:55Arthur Brooks?

  deepening your spiritual life, cultivating your relationships, you're doing it wrong, is what it comes down to. It's all part of this seamless garment, getting done what needs to get done, where everything makes everything else better. So that's what we're looking for here. Now, and I'm gonna give you, once again, as I always do, the steps to getting this. But I wanted to go through these points first, and another point I wanna hit is that one 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, I don't know, they're, they choose their path in life according to an unusual vocation. So you look at an Olympic athlete or something, and say, "Oh, it's an obvious calling, you know, this figure skater, gymnast or something."

• 18:40Arthur Brooks?

  They have an obvious calling. You have an obvious calling because your abilities are so acute and amazing. That's actually completely wrong. Being born with unusual ability is not a sign of calling. And how do we know this? 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. I've talked to, you know, childhood athlete, and chess genius, and, you know, savant, and classical musician, and baseball player extraordinaire, who talk about the fact that they were never happy when they were doing it, and they only found their calling when they finished, as a matter of fact. So, that's not what you have to figure out,

• 19:25Arthur Brooks?

  is where you have extreme talent. Calling isn't necessarily unusual talent.

• 19:32Arthur Brooks?

  And we know that because that's not related to the intrinsic set. It might be, but it certainly wasn't for me as a classical musician. I'm much happier than when I was playing the French horn. And I was a pretty good French horn player. It turned out I needed to find my calling by leaving music, as a matter of fact. Okay, so here's what we really care about. How do you find your calling? What are the steps? Number one is don't look outside you. Don't look at what pays the most. Don't look at the jobs that are most likely. I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't look at pay. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a complete idealist. I'm not saying that you shouldn't look at what the market is going to bear in jobs. But fundamentally, the work that you need to do is to figure out

• 20:17Arthur Brooks?

  intrinsically what is meaningful to you. What is rewarding to you? Once again, that's in contrast to extrinsic compensation of material benefits and employment, wages, benefits, prestige, etc. It's the inherent psychological recompense that you get from working and doing something. Okay, now, what is that? That's not just fun. I mean, there's lots of things that I do in my job today that aren't fun, but it's intrinsically deeply, deeply satisfying to be doing this work on the science of happiness and share it with other people. It's meaningful. And what do I mean by that? If you're following the work here, you know that meaning has three parts to it. Coherence, purpose, and significance. So what are you looking for?

• 21:02Arthur Brooks?

  You're looking for something that gives your life a sense of coherence. Why you're doing what you're doing. Why you're organizing your life in the way that you are. Your work should at least partially answer that question. Purpose. Your work should give you a sense of goals and direction in your life because that's where you get your purpose. And significance, why your life matters. You should feel like you're needed. That's what it comes down to. Do the work to figure out what you can do that satisfies those criteria.

• 21:33Arthur Brooks?

  Now that holds true for life generally and not just for your work, to be sure. And I'll put in some links to articles that talk about this that are pretty interesting. The relationship between intrinsic rewards and job satisfaction, all this kind of stuff, if you want to read the science on this. But you get the idea. Have you done the contemplative work to actually figure out what gives you a sense of meaning? Or have you just looked at market signals? What's actually best? The smartest thing to do, the most... You know, it's funny because on this point, how many universities have gotten completely obsessed with STEM fields? I got nothing against STEM fields. You know, I have a son who's a STEM guy. Absolutely. Loves it.

• 22:17Arthur Brooks?

  My dad was a PhD biostatistician. Accomplished mathematics professor. Brilliant and all that stuff. Okay, fine. But the truth is, when we push everybody into that, we're pushing everybody into extrinsic rewards, or a lot of people into extrinsic rewards, because they're thinking about what the market will bear as opposed to intrinsically what will give them sense of psychological recompense. I know why we do it, because we're trying to be really practical. But that's led to a lot of really, really unhappy people who could have done something beautiful, like, I don't know, being a skilled cabinet maker. Instead, they go to college and they become an unhappy banker. Don't let that be you. Okay, that's step one, doing the work. Step two. Focus on fascination.

• 23:01Arthur Brooks?

  I do a lot of work on the biology of emotion and how the limbic system works. And I talk about the basic negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, and on the basic positive emotions. And it's pretty settled what the basic negative emotions are, but emotion researchers, they disagree on the positive emotions. Joy is always one of them, for example. But people disagree on surprise and delight, et cetera, et cetera. One that I find really interesting that shows up in a lot of the lists is interest. Interest is a positive, basic emotion. I really think that this is true. We are Homo sapiens. We're a learning species because it leads to our fitness. And so the result is that we get a psychological,

• 23:45Arthur Brooks?

  a neurobiological reward for learning something new. That's why it's so fun, you know, when you learn a new skill, when you learn a new fact and you actually want to share it with other people because it's a source of neurobiological reward, as a matter of fact. You know, you find... A caveman, your ancestor, found berries on a bush out someplace and like, "That's awesome." Right? I love that. Why? Because that actually, that kind of learning, that kind of curiosity would lead to greater fitness, more likely to survive and pass on your genes. And still today, people love actually learning about stuff. Focus on what's most interesting to you. Why? Because your calling is highly correlated with that positive affect, with that positive emotion that you're feeling.

• 24:29Arthur Brooks?

  And what you want to find your calling is to stay, and to stay engaged in something that can be your calling. You need to be getting interest. Now, people are interested in different things. People tell me the stuff that they're interested in. I'm like, "Wow, really?" I mean, people, I'm not a golfer, for example. I find golf deathly boring. But I talk to people who love golf and, man, they're super into it. They're not faking it. They're not doing it because they want to hang, just hang out with their friends. They like talk about their putter and, you know, different golf courses they play. They, they dream about golf. They're really, really, really into it. And I have to have a lot of humility to recognize that my interest isn't somebody else's interest. I'm interested in other stuff. I'm super interested in, you know, Bach, you know, hyperbolic music. I'm really interested in it.

• 25:14Arthur Brooks?

  I know a lot about it. I literally own recordings of every single piece that Bach ever wrote, where the manuscripts still exist. Every single one. More than a thousand pieces published by Bach. I own it, right? And you're like, "Gosh, that's so boring." Not to me. So the whole point is, if you want to find your calling, relate what you can make your living doing as much as you can to what's most interesting to you. And that will be a great gear toward calling. There's a bunch of research out there, by the way, that, that compares people who, um, they, they look for fun most in their work and people who look for, um, values most in their work. Right? What you find is people who take jobs because they're the most fun jobs,

• 25:57Arthur Brooks?

  they tend to not stay with their jobs very long and they tend not to be very engaged. People who, who, who follow their jobs for values, they do a little bit better. But the people who do the best are people who look for work that's fascinating to them. So what is it to you? You know, I figured out that I wasn't fascinated by playing music in an orchestra, even though I love music. I found that I was fascinated by behavioral science. The stuff that I'm doing now, I can't get enough of it. I can't get enough of it. And that's how I know it's my calling. Now, I see this, you know, it's so different between different people. My kids are all into really different things. I have a kid who's a, you know, a data scientist who does work in AI at the very cutting edge of large language models, and he talks about it all the time.

• 26:42Arthur Brooks?

  And I have another son who was a sniper in the military. And then came out and did construction management. He talked about that all the time. And neither one wants the other's job. One 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. And the other one doesn't want to actually be trying to learn the inner guts of large language models to write software for companies. To each his own, man. But they're both happy and they both feel like they've found their calling at different points in their career by exploring that. And thank God that we talked to our kids about that. You can also find a lot of interest in things you didn't know you'd find interest in. Again, I had no idea.

• 27:26Arthur Brooks?

  I wanted to study math and stats and economics and psychology and neuroscience. I had no idea when I was a musician. But there can be more prosaic than that as well. A great friend of mine, musician, who was having a hard time finding a living, he wound up taking a job as a waiter, and he wound up getting really, really interested in that. Get really interested in kind of the restaurant business itself. And he wound up talking about the restaurant industry all the time. And that turned it out, turned out to be his calling because of interest per se. That's, that's number two. Number three.

• 28:02Arthur Brooks?

  Serve others. This is it, because you're gonna have bad days. And the way to actually keep interest is when you feel like people need you. The essence of dignity in life is to be needed. The essence of despair is to be superfluous. This is one of the reasons that our welfare system in our country is often so demoralizing. It's not because it's not enough money or too much money. It's because we're horrible at treating people at the margins of society like assets to develop. We treat them like liabilities to manage. And nobody deserves to feel unneeded. You know, you would never treat your kid as unneeded, even if they're a big drain on your pocketbook. You know, being needed is the essence of dignity. And so therefore, if you want to be needed, go serve other people.

• 28:46Arthur Brooks?

  And this is what will keep you engaged in your calling over the long haul, is truly serving other people. Researchers have found that the highest satisfaction and morale in workplaces is where there's a strong culture of helping and reciprocity between employees, for example, but also between employees and clients.

• 29:08Arthur Brooks?

  One of the ways that you can raise your own job satisfaction is by increasing your commitment to service, as a matter of fact. I've seen this a lot. I remember one time I was doing a television show in New York with a live studio audience, a happiness thing, and a guy says, you know, "Give me some advice on my job. I feel like a cog in a machine. I'm doing data entry. I sit in a cubicle farm. I don't feel like my work really matters at all. So I don't know how to serve my clients because I don't think they even really need me. Tell me how I'm going to find my calling, or how I'm going to find my sense of service." And I said, "Well, tomorrow at 2 o'clock in the afternoon," I know I've given this example before, bear with me, "go to the break room and make a fresh pot of coffee,

• 29:52Arthur Brooks?

  and bring a cup of coffee to the guy in the next cubicle, and say, 'You look like you could use a cup of coffee,' and you'll become that guy. You'll become that guy that actually serves other people. And weirdly, I promise you, because I've seen the data and studies, but this follows common sense as well, as always, as it should, that you will like your job better because you're serving other people in the context of that job, even if it's not directly related to your job activities. Now, 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. I'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 that comes from serving other people.

• 30:35Arthur Brooks?

  If I could have given this...

• 30:38Arthur Brooks?

  Advice to my younger self, I most definitely would have. I would have found more meaning in what I was trying to do. I would have appreciated the intrinsic reward. I would have looked for different ways that I could serve my fellow musicians or offered up the work that I was doing, the music that I was playing for the people that were enjoying it, as opposed to simply trying to do it for myself. That would have lightened my daily load, as a matter of fact. It would have felt more like a calling.

• 31:07Arthur Brooks?

  Be that as it may, you can do that today. And I can still do that today. One way or the other, wun sui.

• 31:18Arthur Brooks?

  You need to chop wood and carry water. And do that in the spirit in which it truly becomes your calling because of what you're making it, not inherently for what it is. I hope that's helpful. I hope that's actually helpful to you. If you're on the job market, for example, or you're ready to change jobs, you're doing it for the first time, you're graduating, or you're simply trying to take what you've been doing for a long time and making it a more meaningful experience to you. Let's take a couple of questions before we finish. One from Suzie Frittel. And the source is the SEEK conference, which actually I attended and spoke at with my wife Esther at the beginning of 2026, first thing of the year. January 1st, 2026, as a matter of fact.

• 32:02Arthur Brooks?

  "How can you be a good influence on someone without letting them be a bad influence on you?" Yeah, I know, I know. So that's basically a question of how can you be a missionary, if this is a religious, if this were a religious context, how could you be a missionary to the unsaved, where you save them and they don't unsave you? That's what it comes down to. And you know, the truth of the matter is we're trying to be a good influence on people in our way all the time. To lift them up, to make them better. But when they need that, they're always, it feels like there might be a sense of danger because the contagion might go the other way, is what it comes down to. Now, to begin with, the orientation of a missionary, secular or religious,

• 32:46Arthur Brooks?

  don't get me wrong, is sharing and giving. It's sharing and giving. It's like, I want to bring something better, I want to bring something better. It's not just... You know, you don't go into the relationship with the idea that it's going to be a 50/50 transaction of ideas, beliefs, and values. That's not, that's not how it's, you're going in with the idea that you're actually sharing and giving. But you also ask the people that you're working for for good things. You're looking for a way to actually get good things from other people. And you can absolutely find that. You can, when you, when you give a homeless man on the street a sandwich, you can ask him for his prayers and he can give them to you.

• 33:30Arthur Brooks?

  Just because he's a homeless man on the street doesn't mean you don't need his prayers. Actually, you do, I believe. And that's an example of asking for what's truly good. So go into the relationship with sharing and giving and make sure that you're asking for what you truly do need as a person. And that, that should solve the problem. Thanks, Suzy.

• 33:50Arthur Brooks?

  Here's a question that comes in from, on the email address at [email protected]. "I just got fired." Father, too. Sorry about that. Yeah, happens, I know. "I recently got contacted by a former colleague with a potential job opportunity." So somebody he used to work with, with a potential job opportunity. "He started a new firm and his client is expanding into the market where I live. It's the same job that we used to do in the old days when I was starting out. Is it possible my next career move means retracing a path back down the spiral?" I love that. Nice. Here's the answer: No, it's not going to be the same thing. It's funny, because when people move back to their hometown after many years away, they're like, "It's a different place."

• 34:34Arthur Brooks?

  No, no, it's not. You're different. That's what it comes down to. So if you worked with somebody when you were 25 and they offer you to do something similar when you're 40, the 40-year-old you is a different person. That means the circumstances are going to be different. If this is the right thing to do and you feel at this point in your life it's the best option, and even better, if you can make it into a calling, I promise you, it won't feel like a step backward because you're a different person, you're a more effective person than you, and you will make it into a different kind of experience and a better one at that. Last is from Nadia Rotondo. Over the email, "How can we help 12-year-olds build the discipline of happiness in a way that feels motivating rather than forced?" Easy, model it.

• 35:19Arthur Brooks?

  Be the person you want your kids to become. That's it. I don't care what you tell them. You can talk to them in Swedish, and they don't speak Swedish, and it won't matter. What they see is what they'll do. The way for you to create happiness discipline is to practice happiness discipline. The greatest gift that you can give to your kids or anybody else is to work on your own happiness. I mean, by the way, if that sounds selfish, remember, nobody wants an unhappy mom. Nobody wants an unhappy husband. Nobody wants an unhappy boss. We don't. We want happy people around us. And so, working on your own happiness is a gift to other people, and it's the model that the people who are following you are going to follow most assiduously, most carefully. That's how to do it. Thank you, Nadia.

• 36:03Arthur Brooks?

  Well, we're done. Time to sign off. It's been another week. Please let me know your thoughts right into the email address posted here. Like and subscribe. Hit the subscribe button so that we have all the followers we could possibly dream of and share these episodes with friends, especially people who need it, or maybe who will need it in the future. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, every place where you get your fine podcasts. Leave a comment, we'll read it. Even if it's negative, we want to hear it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for watching and paying attention. Follow me on all the social media platforms where I'm posting content that's actually not even here. And order The Meaning of Your Life to learn more about this and the science of happiness.

• 36:46Arthur Brooks?

  And when you're done, order another copy and give it to your best friend. Hope this has been helpful to you in finding your calling, and I'll see you next week.