Jennifer Tosti-Kharas

Thank you so much, Shankar.

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 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.

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.

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.

So we know now posthumously he was extremely successful.

And again, he's one of those names that if you can name a few painters, famous painters, he's likely one of them.

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.

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.

And we would not have this beautiful art that everyone loves.

appreciates and loves to look at.

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.

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.

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 pursuing work that we love.

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.

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 of this Steve Jobs commencement speech, 2005, is right around the time of peak calling.

And if you look at Google engrams for find your calling or find your passion, it really follows this.

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

Yeah, they are.

So I conducted, along with my co-authors, Shassa DeBrow, Hannah Weissman, 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.

In a study with Shassa DeBrow and Heather Kappes, 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.

Exactly right.

Yeah, so a calling could almost be like a deep reserve of resilience, of connection to the work, the 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.

Yeah, so this was with Marco DiRenzo and Ned Powley.

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 that they were at a plateaued space in their career.

That in turn drove their commitment to staying in the military as an organization.

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 leads people to do great work or their best work is very well founded.

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 guys.

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 um 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

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, traveling potentially four or five days a week?

And ultimately, I decided that it was not and that I needed to do something else.

Yeah, I do feel a calling, and I feel so fortunate to be able to study these questions that I've wondered about 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.

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.

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.

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.

We would imagine to see a lot of callings, a lot of passion toward music.

It's something a lot of us do pursue in some way or another.

It's a very fraught profession because we know that not everyone will make it as a professional musician who might want to.

And 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 Shasa DeBrow.

She is not only a professor at the London School of Economics, but she is a professional bassoonist.

So she knows this world.

very, 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?

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 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?

Yeah, they do not listen to that feedback.

So Shassa and I have studied this specifically in the context of musicians.

And so what we found was the stronger musicians 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, 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 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.

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.

yeah so you're absolutely right that the more prototypical calling oriented professions whether it's non-profit work helping work um you know international aid work uh etc 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 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?

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 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 depleting and frankly would lead to burnout?

and in fact that is what some studies have found is that people with stronger callings the 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 um greater physical and psychological um health issues

greater fatigue, stress, burnout, and ultimately will leave jobs because it's simply unsustainable to keep working at this pace.

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.

He described that once he got a taste of this public performance, he was hooked.

So he 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 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 piano man 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, 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 very little concern about even meeting basic needs.

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.

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 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 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 once.

And he still did not return home.

And by all accounts, it sort of led to his downfall.

He went sort of mad and kind of consumed by his own 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.

Yeah, 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, 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 just self-care and the cultivation of a life outside work, which has merit and benefit, at what point do those things suffer because of this kind of all-in sense of performing the work?

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 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.

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 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 the first to sign up if someone needs to work extra hours, but also the first to complain if a decision is made that they don't agree with.

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 nothing will ever feel hard again.

These are myths.

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 reality.

I want to see 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?

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

Yeah.

So what I like to say is,

If absolutely people should not be doing work that feels meaningless, 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 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 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.

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

Thank you so much, Shankar.

It was a true pleasure.