Jennifer Tosti-Kharas

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.