Don’t try to find your “true calling” because it’s a false concept.
and
Have a mission: once you have skills, use them to explore options and find something that can be your life’s work and driving motivation.
Initially sounded like a contradiction—“your life’s work and driving motivation” just sounds like “calling”—but the point may be that you should first build skills and then based on that basis find your calling.
the point may be that you should first build skills and then based on that basis find your calling.
I think Newport would still argue with the word ‘calling,’ as it generally implies that there’s some external thing that you are drawn to that is recognizable from far away. “Your life’s work and driving motivation” is a much more internal thing- once you have developed the skills and craftsmanship, then you use your creativity on yourself.
Yeah, but IME there’s still not really any such thing as a personal mission. There’s a lot that actually needs doing in the world, there’s a decently sized set of things that pay enough to live prudently (ie: be able to plan for the future), and there’s a small set of things you’re actually good at (which can be enlarged by expenditure of effort, but will always be small relative to the other two sets). If you are lucky, at some point an intersection between these three sets will arise, and you can call it a “mission” or whatever, but really it’s just an intersection between the sets.
In my opinion (once again), there’s no reason your job has to pay you in money, warm-fuzzies, and wider-scale utilons all at once, and in fact our current socioeconomic system simply cannot arrange itself for a supermajority of the population to pursue such unrealistically wonderful careers.
And of course, seen from the other direction, if you successfully finished a Life’s Mission, accomplished some vast or even world-changing goal, then unless you’ve achieved Total World Optimization, it’s an absolute guarantee that the world has many important tasks remaining to be done, and you were always lying to yourself that you had one mission to carry out. Everyone has all the things to do, of course, but we all take it in the doses we can handle at our level of capability and privilege.
and
Initially sounded like a contradiction—“your life’s work and driving motivation” just sounds like “calling”—but the point may be that you should first build skills and then based on that basis find your calling.
I think Newport would still argue with the word ‘calling,’ as it generally implies that there’s some external thing that you are drawn to that is recognizable from far away. “Your life’s work and driving motivation” is a much more internal thing- once you have developed the skills and craftsmanship, then you use your creativity on yourself.
He argues that you actively choose a mission instead of passively finding the thing that’s your true calling.
Yeah, but IME there’s still not really any such thing as a personal mission. There’s a lot that actually needs doing in the world, there’s a decently sized set of things that pay enough to live prudently (ie: be able to plan for the future), and there’s a small set of things you’re actually good at (which can be enlarged by expenditure of effort, but will always be small relative to the other two sets). If you are lucky, at some point an intersection between these three sets will arise, and you can call it a “mission” or whatever, but really it’s just an intersection between the sets.
In my opinion (once again), there’s no reason your job has to pay you in money, warm-fuzzies, and wider-scale utilons all at once, and in fact our current socioeconomic system simply cannot arrange itself for a supermajority of the population to pursue such unrealistically wonderful careers.
And of course, seen from the other direction, if you successfully finished a Life’s Mission, accomplished some vast or even world-changing goal, then unless you’ve achieved Total World Optimization, it’s an absolute guarantee that the world has many important tasks remaining to be done, and you were always lying to yourself that you had one mission to carry out. Everyone has all the things to do, of course, but we all take it in the doses we can handle at our level of capability and privilege.