Jennifer Tosti-Kharas

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?