How to Find Your Calling

It often happens that from early childhood, while we’re still only forming as people, our parents, teachers and friends “drown out” our will with their advice, their goals, their dogmas. And so we can lose touch with our own desires and stop hearing the inner voice, muffling that subconscious “what do I actually want?” We stop noticing the signs and signals the world around us keeps trying to send.

On top of that, the modern world seems to offer so many different possibilities that it creates an illusion of endless choice.

I’ve come to lean on three ways that can help you find yourself and your calling. They partly contradict one another — but that’s a feature, not a bug, because they let us look at the question from different sides.

1. Remember the moments of greatest energy and warm feedback

Let’s try to scan our whole life. Which activities gave us the biggest surge of energy and inspiration? Where did we feel most “in our element”? When did our efforts come back to us as unexpected praise, a reward, or some pleasant turn of events that seemed to arrange itself? Those moments often point to the areas where our true calling shows up naturally and without strain.

2. Flip the paradigm

Instead of asking, “What do I want to do in this world?”, let’s try asking, “What does the world want from me?” Given the skills and knowledge we have, where can we be of the most use? Don’t look for the problem we’d like to solve — look for the one where the inner voice shouts so loudly that we simply can’t walk past it. Many remarkable people found their calling exactly this way. One day they stumbled, by chance, into some situation they couldn’t look at without their values and principles forbidding them to stand idle. Whether it was a blatant injustice or a cry from society, they chose the path of serving that mission — sometimes turning their whole life and career inside out. David Brooks tells several such stories in The Road to Character: people who found their purpose by answering the challenges the world threw at them.

3. Get grounded and get to work

Let’s try to come back down to earth, stop over-reflecting, and simply start working wherever, as they say, we “came in handy.” Roll up our sleeves and sink into real labour. At times, the harder the work, the faster the clarity and the quiet satisfaction arrive. Work is the best medicine for doubt and restless thoughts. There’s far more calling in it than in idle daydreams.

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My personal motto is “less hype.” Go where no one else is going yet, where something is only just beginning to take shape but few people care about it so far. Or pick the more conservative, traditional fields that strike everyone else as boring and unfashionable.

It’s a joke, but only half — there may be more use in programming microcontrollers for household appliances than in yet another chatbot relaying answers from ChatGPT.

Here’s to all of us finding our calling! 😎