What Exactly Is True Calling
True Calling is Passion, Purpose, and Mastery.
Passion is the area of interest you want to spend most of your life working in.
Purpose is the meaning you assign to the most important outcome you strive for.
Mastery is the set of skills you master in your vocation to help create your intended outcome.
Without Passion, you don’t want to do it.
Without Purpose, you feel empty.
Without Mastery, you can’t even make it into a living.
True Calling is the vocation that rings true in your Heart, your Mind, and your Body.
It was as if the vocation kept “calling” you to do it again and again in a language only you can understand.
You might hear about it before but never thought about it again. You might see other people did it but never imagine doing it yourself. It might come into your life in several different forms again but it still made no sense.
Until the one fateful day, if you were lucky, your special journey began. It started with a “Call” that finally spoke to you in such a way that you would say to yourself, “That’s it. I am doing it!”
The “Call” is the Passion strong enough to motivate you to actually take the action.
“True Calling” is the actions taken persistently and still ring true in you.
If you have a desire to do something but you never do anything about it, you will never know whether or not it is really your True Calling. It is like trying on a new clothes. No matter how great it looks on others, you won’t be sure if it suits you or not if you never try it on. You may have your idols that you are aspired to become, but you may not enjoy actually working in their vocations. It is not your True Calling if the novel excitement worn off easily after the initial trials. It is not your True Calling, if you only want to do it occasionally as a hobby.
However, once you found it you want to do it all the time. You can never have enough of it. You love everything about it. You think about it all the time. You talk about it all the time. You want to see it, hear it, smell it, and touch it. You want to know anything about it. You want to know all the details. The more you do it, the more the excitement sustains and the thrill never goes away. The more you immerse yourself in it, the more the enjoyment amplifies. You can’t help but move your attention towards it naturally and block out anything else. When you overhear people talking about something related to your favorite topic, you would drop whatever you were doing and jumped into the conversation. It was like hearing a beautiful piece of music out of nowhere that stopped you from your track. Your senses heighten around it. You can see it cleaner than anything else. You can distinguish the minute differences that very few people can tell or care about. It was as if the concept of time disappears when you are doing it. Hours and hours can pass by without you realizing it as it is so enjoying for you.
If you found it, if you found the area of interest you want to spend most of your life working in, you found your Passion e.g. “I love everything about Mathematics.”
Some people are passionate about Mathematics. They can spend the hours solving challenging mathematical problems. Their ideal vocation will definitely involve working with numbers. They are likely to become an Accountant, Scientist, or Computer Programmer.
Other people are passionate about socializing with people. They enjoy meeting new people and making new friends. They are the social butterflies that you would see in parties. Ideally they don’t to work in a job where they spend most of their time sitting behind their desks. Instead, they want to go out and meet people. It would be not a surprise for them to end up working in Sales, Marketing, or Public Relation.
However, no matter how passionate you are about your job, you would still feel empty without your Purpose.
It would come a time when you started to ask yourself, “why am I doing this?”
It could be after an emotionally significant event you experienced that inspired you. It might give you the vision of creating a better future for you and the people you care deeply about. You might decide to make it your personal life mission to prevent a similar traumatic experience from happening again in the future. You might want to create a better solution for the major problem that frustrated you the most. You might need to adjust your current career path to fit your newfound Purpose or you might need to quit your job and be on a new path altogether.
Most people go to work for extrinsic motivations. It can be money, job security, or social status. You go to work with an intrinsic motivation if your job is your Passion. You would have still gone to work even if you were not paid. However, sometimes your job of Passion became no longer enjoyable. It could be due to the impossible challenges that you started to encounter. It could be the overwhelming workloads that started to pile on you turning your fun into hard work. It could be the over-ambiguous targets you needed to achieve. Most people simply found another job within the same domain of their Passion. Ever wonder why some people stayed and insisted to continue doing what they were doing in their own meaningful ways? Why do they still show up at work earlier than anyone else motivated? Why do they still work hard to complete their tasks even when they were ill? Why do they just never give up even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges? They are likely to be driven by their personal meanings and purposes in what they do.
If you found it, if you found the meaningful reason why you want the specific outcome so badly, you found your Purpose e.g. “I have a dream that one day every single person in the world can work in their True Calling because it is the worst feeling to me not being able to work in the most meaningful vocation I love.”
Your Purpose is meaningful as long as you think it is, no matter how ridiculous other people think it is. It is important to you, regardless of how trivial it seemed to others. It can be the world-changing ambition that will benefit all mankind or it can be a personal project to be achieved in a specific way that honors your promise to someone special. You can be the person who will invent the cure for cancer or you can be the best full time parent to raise your kids, if and only if you choose it to be your Purpose.
Getting off from your day job, you looked forwards to going home to complete the exciting task you started weeks ago. You finally did it. It probably took longer than it should, but you got it done with great pride. You knew you were not good at it. In fact, you don’t really want to be good at it. Sometimes messing around with it was a great way for you to decompress after a busy day. It was your hobby. It was the spaceship model you built or the rare stamps you collected. They were the novels you read or the poems you wrote. You like them enough to be your hobby. However, there is no Passion or Purpose that motivate you to master it into your vocation.
Conversely, if those hobbies are driven by your Passion and Purpose, you would want to master it so that you can do it all the time while it also helps you to fulfill your Purpose. Even if you don’t have the natural talent for it, your Passion and Purpose will still propel you to Mastery. When you are passionate about something that means so much to you, you will give everything you have to make sure you master your craft. You will always want to go the extra mile to improve continuously. You will want to share and teach others which in turn would force you to get even better. Particularly, with the mix of your personal Passion and Purpose, you are likely to develop a kind of Mastery unique only to you. It was as if you were the best and most suited person to put on this earth just to do this job. And you would be doing it more passionately, more purposefully, and more masterfully than anyone else in the world.
For example, assuming your Passion is Spaceship Models and your Purpose is to eliminate Poverty, you need to develop your skills of Spaceship Model Building at such a high level that people would pay to watch you do it or learn from you. You can do it all the time as you don’t need to find other paid jobs to support your life financially. It has become your paid vocation for the masterful values you created for other people who would support you as customers, sponsors, or employers. To fulfill your Purpose, you can use the extra money you earn to give to other people who are in poverty. With your celebrity fame as the best Spaceship Model Builder in the world, you can perform in fundraisers to raise more money to fight poverty. You can influence your massive following of fans globally to vote for politicians who favor policies that aims to eliminate poverty through educational reforms. The limit of your influence on your Purpose is the limit of your mastery and imagination. After all, you must elevate your vocation to such an excellent level that you can make a significant impact in creating the most important outcome you strive for.
After understanding exactly what True Calling is, you can still passively wait for your True Calling to call on you.
Or you can Create True Calling proactively for yourself by putting together the puzzle pieces of your Passion, Purpose, and Mastery.
To wait or to Create your True Calling, it is your Call.