Many professionals believe their calling is out there somewhere — waiting under a rock to be discovered, if only they turn over enough of them. Surveys consistently confirm that meaning is among the top things people say they want from a job. And yet research shows that fewer than half of people see their work as a calling. The rest feel varying degrees of anxiety, frustration, and dissatisfaction — even in objectively good jobs.
What they — and many of us — fail to realise is that work can be meaningful even if you don't think of it as a calling. The four most common occupations in most developed economies — retail, food service, administration, customer service — aren't typically associated with deep meaning. And yet all of them share something with roles we do consider meaningful, like teachers, doctors, and clergy: they exist, fundamentally, to help other people.
Reframing the Work You Do
Research by organisational psychologist Adam Grant at the Wharton School has shown that people who see their work as a form of giving consistently rate their jobs as more meaningful — regardless of the content of the work. In one study, fundraisers in a university call centre who met a student whose education was funded by their work spent 142% more time on calls and raised 171% more money than peers who hadn't had that same connection.
Whether your customers are external or internal, becoming more conscious of how your work helps them live their lives or do their jobs can transform your experience of it. The work itself doesn't have to change. Your relationship to it does.
Connect to the Overarching Goal
There is a famous story about a janitor that President Kennedy encountered at NASA in 1962. When asked what he was doing, the man replied: "I'm helping put a man on the moon." He understood his work not as mopping floors, but as contributing to something historic. The specific task was the same either way. The meaning was entirely different.
Most organisations have a purpose beyond their immediate product or service. The question is whether you understand it, believe in it, and connect your daily work to it. Even if you can't get excited about the mission at a company level, you can often find meaning in what your work provides to the people closest to you — the family it supports, the freedom it enables, the contributions it makes possible.
You Don't Have to Find Your One True Calling
The pressure to find a "calling" can itself become a source of unhappiness. It creates an expectation that meaningful work must feel like a vocation — intense, clear, and undeniable. For most people, it simply doesn't arrive that way.
A more honest and useful goal is to find something meaningful in your work — a relationship, a skill being built, a contribution being made — and to strengthen it over time. This is not settling. It is wisdom about how meaning is actually built, which is slowly, through attention and intention, rather than in one dramatic discovery.
If you're in a role where you genuinely can't find any source of meaning — and you've looked honestly — that's worth taking seriously. Our coaching programmes and the Sweet Spot Framework are both designed to help you get clearer on what actually matters to you, and what your next step should be.
This article draws on research by Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning, originally published in Harvard Business Review.
A useful next step
How happy does your work-life feel right now?
Take the Happiness Score for a private starting point before deciding what you would like to change.
Subscribe to our articles
We’ll notify you when new articles are published.
