The Work We Find

THE WONDER ATLAS

Research Companion 0052

The Work We Find

Companion to Wonder Essay 0052

The Wonder Essay The Work We Find began with a simple conversation with a ninety-five-year-old man who had loved his work.

This Research Companion walks a little further, exploring what psychology, research, theology and lived experience may help us understand about interest, meaningful work, competence, opportunity, gratitude and calling.

Read the Wonder Essay First

Purpose

This Research Companion accompanies the Wonder Essay The Work We Find.

The essay began with a conversation with a ninety-five-year-old man who had spent his entire working life with the same printing company.

He had started there when he was fifteen.

A messenger boy.

One day, someone at the printers offered him a permanent job. He went home to ask his father, who told him to leave his dinner and go straight back to accept it.

So he did.

Eighty years later, his face still brightened when he talked about the work.

He had loved it.

That simple conversation left me wondering:

How do we come to love what we do?

The essay followed that question through opportunity, experience, learning, skill, meaningful work, gratitude and calling.

But it left other questions behind.

Do our interests already exist within us, waiting to be discovered, or can they grow through experience?

Why does becoming good at something sometimes change the way we feel about doing it?

What actually makes work meaningful?

Can work still carry meaning when we do not particularly enjoy it?

And what might calling mean if it is larger than finding the one perfect job?

These questions have been explored by psychologists, researchers of work and motivation, philosophers, educators and theologians.

This Companion brings some of those voices into conversation with the ordinary story that started it all.

It is not an attempt to explain the man’s life.

There is much about his working life I do not know.

Nor is it an argument that everyone should learn to love whatever work they happen to find.

Work can be difficult.

Some work is insecure, poorly paid or dangerous.

Many people have far less freedom to choose their occupation than others.

Sometimes leaving is the wisest thing we can do.

Instead, this is an invitation to linger with the questions.

To wonder whether interest can grow.

To explore what makes work meaningful.

To consider the relationship between competence, contribution, relationships and enjoyment.

To ask whether gratitude and growth can belong together.

And to look again at the work already in front of us.

Not because it must be our calling.

Not because we must stay.

But because there may still be something there worth noticing.

The Questions We Will Follow

1. Do we find work we love, or learn to love the work we find?

2. What makes work meaningful?

3. Can work still be meaningful when we don’t love it?

4. What if calling isn’t one perfect job?

We begin where the Wonder Essay began.

With an opportunity.

A fifteen-year-old messenger boy.

And a life he could not possibly have imagined in advance.

Question One

Do we find work we love, or learn to love the work we find?

Return to the Wonder

At fifteen, the man I met was working as a messenger boy.

Then an opportunity appeared.

Someone at the printing company asked if he would like a permanent job.

He went home.

His father told him to go straight back and take it.

So he did.

What strikes me is how little certainty there seems to have been at the beginning.

There was no grand plan.

No carefully identified passion.

No way for a fifteen-year-old boy to know that the decision he was making would lead into work he would still speak about with affection eighty years later.

He simply walked through a door.

And then he learned.

That made me question something we often tell people about work.

Find your passion.

The phrase suggests that our interests are already somewhere inside us, waiting to be discovered. If we search carefully enough, we may eventually uncover the work we were always meant to do.

Sometimes that may describe our experience.

But is it the only way interest develops?

Could we sometimes begin with the opportunity rather than the passion?

Could doing come before loving?

Could we learn our way into work we eventually come to enjoy?

Psychology

Psychologists Suzanne Hidi and K. Ann Renninger have spent years studying how interest develops.

Their work offers an important distinction.

Interest does not always begin as a settled passion.

Sometimes it begins because something catches our attention.

We encounter an activity.

Something about it engages us.

We return to it.

With continued involvement, knowledge can grow. The activity may begin to matter more to us. What started as a temporary interest can, under the right conditions, become something more enduring.

Hidi and Renninger describe this through a four-phase model of interest development, moving from interest that is initially triggered by a situation towards interest that becomes increasingly developed and self-sustaining.

That does not mean we can make ourselves love anything simply by doing it for long enough.

Some interests disappear.

Some work remains a poor fit.

But the research challenges the assumption that passion must always come first.

Sometimes interest grows because we began.

There may be another part of the story.

We often experience things differently once we become better at them.

Psychologist Albert Bandura used the term self-efficacy to describe our belief in our ability to carry out particular actions or meet particular challenges.

One important way self-efficacy develops is through experience.

We attempt something.

We discover that we can do it.

We practise.

We improve.

Tasks that once required intense concentration become more familiar.

Situations that once made us anxious become manageable.

Gradually, our experience of the activity itself can change.

Competence does not guarantee enjoyment.

Someone can become exceptionally good at something they dislike.

But becoming capable can change the emotional landscape of work.

What once felt threatening may become satisfying.

What once exhausted all our attention may eventually leave room for creativity, relationships and even play.

Self-Determination Theory offers another perspective.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have spent decades exploring human motivation and wellbeing.

Within this tradition, three psychological needs appear repeatedly:

competence — experiencing ourselves as capable;

autonomy — experiencing some meaningful agency in what we do;

relatedness — experiencing connection with other people.

This helps explain why becoming skilled may matter without being the whole story.

We might be very competent and still feel miserable if we have no meaningful freedom, no sense of connection and no room to contribute.

Likewise, work that looks fairly ordinary from the outside may become deeply enjoyable when we become good at it, have some ownership of how we do it, and share it with people we enjoy.

The question may therefore be larger than:

Have I found my passion?

We might also ask:

Am I learning?

Am I becoming capable?

Do I have room to contribute?

Do I belong here?

And what is happening to my interest as I grow?

Lived Experience

I recognise something of this in my own working life.

I have often enjoyed work more as I have become more competent at it.

When I know what I am doing, I have more capacity.

I can think beyond simply getting through the task.

I can notice the person in front of me.

I can help someone else.

I can improve a system.

I can even enjoy myself.

Experience has also taught me something else.

Thinking about whether I might enjoy something and actually doing it are not the same.

Sometimes we cannot know in advance.

We have to try.

And then pay attention.

The experience itself begins giving us information.

What do I enjoy?

What am I good at?

What am I becoming better at?

What drains me?

What gives me energy?

What have I learned about myself that I could not have learned simply by thinking about it?

Sometimes experience confirms that we have found somewhere worth staying.

Sometimes it teaches us that it is time to move on.

Both can be valuable discoveries.

What Stayed With Me

I keep returning to the pressure of knowing in advance.

What are you going to do?

What career do you want?

What are you passionate about?

What is your calling?

These can be good questions.

But they can also make us imagine that somewhere inside ourselves there is an answer we ought already to know.

The fifteen-year-old messenger boy could not know what eighty years of experience would eventually teach him.

He had to live some of the answer.

That is why I have come to like the phrase:

trial and learning.

Try something.

Pay attention.

Learn.

Become better at it.

Notice what happens.

Do you become more interested as you understand more?

Does increasing competence bring satisfaction?

Do you enjoy the people?

Are you contributing something worthwhile?

Are you discovering capacities you did not know you possessed?

And sometimes:

Is experience showing you that this isn’t for you?

That is learning too.

We don’t need to place quite so much pressure on ourselves to discover our entire working lives before we begin them.

Some things can only be learned by walking through the door.

The fifteen-year-old messenger boy did not know that he had found the work he would love.

He found an opportunity.

The loving came later.

Question Two

What makes work meaningful?

Return to the Wonder

When I asked the man about his work, he did not simply tell me that he had stayed with the same company.

He told me about the work itself.

They printed almost everything apart from newspapers and magazines.

He remembered the variety.

Five or six different jobs for different customers might pass through his hands in a single day.

Over the years, he learned different printing skills.

And when I asked whether he had enjoyed it, his face lit up.

He loved it.

That made me wonder what, exactly, he had loved.

Was it printing?

Was it becoming skilled?

The variety?

The people?

The satisfaction of producing something well?

The sense that his work was useful?

I don’t know.

He didn’t tell me, and I don’t want to fill the silence for him.

But his story opened a larger question.

When people describe work as meaningful, what do they actually mean?

Perhaps there isn’t one answer.

Psychology

The psychology we have already explored gives us part of the picture.

Competence matters.

So do agency and connection with other people.

But research into meaningful work widens the picture further. Researchers have explored the importance of purpose, identity, relationships, contribution, belonging and the experience of doing something worthwhile.

This begins to explain something I recognise in ordinary workplaces.

Skill matters.

But skill alone may not be enough.

We may be excellent at something and still experience little satisfaction if we feel controlled, isolated or disconnected from any worthwhile purpose.

Likewise, an occupation that appears unremarkable from the outside may contain surprising sources of meaning.

Becoming really good at something.

Being trusted.

Solving problems.

Helping somebody.

Belonging to a team.

Being needed.

Learning.

Laughing together.

Knowing that what we do contributes something.

Meaningful work may therefore be less like a single ingredient and more like several human goods meeting in the same place.

Work and Meaning

Researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton introduced the idea of job crafting.

Their research challenged the assumption that the meaning of a job is determined entirely by the job description.

People can sometimes shape aspects of their work.

They may change how they approach particular tasks.

They may invest differently in relationships.

They may change the way they understand the purpose of what they are doing.

The occupation itself may remain the same while the experience and meaning of the work begin to change.

I find that fascinating.

It suggests that the question is not always simply:

Have I found meaningful work?

There may also be another question:

How am I making meaning within the work I have found?

That needs careful handling.

Some working conditions are genuinely harmful.

Not everyone has enough freedom within their work to reshape it significantly.

And sometimes the right response to a workplace is to leave it.

But within those boundaries, there may still be more human agency than we sometimes imagine.

The same task can be inhabited differently.

Relationships can be cultivated.

Skills can be developed.

A workplace can sometimes become better because of the way someone chooses to be within it.

Lived Experience

I see this in people whose occupations might never appear on a list of dream careers.

A good barista does more than make coffee.

They learn people’s names.

They remember what someone orders.

They notice when a regular customer has not been in for a while.

They talk while they work.

They create warmth around a counter.

And they make an excellent cup of coffee.

There is something satisfying about watching somebody become exceptionally good at an ordinary thing.

I recognise that satisfaction in myself too.

I like work done well.

Good organisation.

Clear information.

Smooth systems.

People knowing what they are doing.

A team helping one another.

And people having a laugh.

None of those things, on their own, would probably answer the enormous question:

What is my purpose in life?

But together they can make an ordinary working day feel worthwhile.

There is another dimension too.

Someone receives our work.

A customer drinks the coffee.

A family eats the meal.

A passenger crosses the bridge.

A pupil receives the lesson.

A patient receives the medicine.

Someone enters the room that another person cleaned.

Someone reads the page another person printed.

Our work travels beyond us.

Doing something well can therefore contain more than personal satisfaction.

It can become contribution.

What Stayed With Me

I began this research wondering why a ninety-five-year-old man could still speak so warmly about his working life.

I still don’t know.

That matters.

Research can tell us a great deal about what tends to make work meaningful.

It cannot tell me exactly what made his work meaningful to him.

Only he could have done that.

But his story has made me notice how many different things can quietly gather around a working life.

Skill.

Variety.

Relationships.

Contribution.

Responsibility.

Belonging.

Service.

Growth.

The satisfaction of doing something well.

Meaningful work may not always be something waiting fully formed for us to discover.

Some of its meaning may grow as we learn how to inhabit the work we have been given.

We become better.

We begin to contribute more.

Relationships deepen.

People trust us.

Our work starts carrying something of ourselves.

And somewhere along the way, we may discover that the work has also been doing something to us.

We thought we were learning how to do a job.

Perhaps the job was also teaching us patience.

Judgement.

Responsibility.

How to solve problems.

How to work with difficult people.

How to serve.

How to keep going.

How to do something properly even when nobody is watching.

While we are doing our work, our work may also be quietly forming us.

And that leaves me with another question.

Because it is easy to talk beautifully about meaningful work when we have enough freedom to choose it.

But what about the person who doesn’t?

What about work that is exhausting, repetitive, poorly paid or undertaken simply because somebody needs to put food on the table?

Can work still carry meaning when we don’t love it?

Question Three

Can work still be meaningful when we don’t love it?

Return to the Wonder

There is something attractive about the idea of meaningful work.

Work that suits us.

Work we become good at.

Work that gives us relationships, purpose and satisfaction.

Work we might even come to love.

But there is a danger in talking about work this way.

We can begin to assume that everybody has the same freedom to choose it.

They don’t.

The ability to ask,

What kind of work would make me come alive?

is itself shaped by circumstance.

For some people, the more immediate question is:

What work can I find?

That difference matters.

It means that any serious conversation about meaningful work must eventually make room for people whose work is determined less by passion than by necessity.

Work and Choice

Vocational psychologists sometimes use the term work volition to describe the extent to which people experience genuine choice in their working lives.

That choice is not distributed equally.

Economic circumstances matter.

Education matters.

Opportunity matters.

Social conditions matter.

Where we are born matters.

Responsibilities matter.

The work available to us matters.

For some people, there may be considerable freedom to explore different occupations, retrain, study, experiment or leave work that no longer fits.

For others, those possibilities may be severely constrained.

This complicates the familiar advice:

Find work you love.

It may be excellent advice for someone with genuine choices.

It may sound very different to someone whose immediate concern is earning enough to eat.

That does not mean aspirations are unimportant.

Nor does it mean people in difficult economic circumstances do not possess dreams, gifts, ambitions or preferences.

It simply means that opportunity affects which possibilities can realistically be pursued.

Sometimes work is chosen because we love it.

Sometimes work is chosen because someone we love needs us to do it.

Lived Experience

I have spent time in Haiti.

I remember meeting young men there who were frustrated because they could not find work.

One man told me that he would receive two dollars for a full day’s work breaking one large rock into smaller rocks with a sledgehammer.

He told me it hurt his joints and bones.

I have never forgotten that.

Photography: Matt Smith

Not because I want to use somebody else’s hardship to make people elsewhere feel guilty about complaining about their jobs.

And not because poverty should somehow make difficult work noble.

It shouldn’t.

What stayed with me was the difference in the question.

The question wasn’t:

How do I find work I love?

It was:

How do I find work?

That encounter has made it difficult for me to talk about finding our passion without remembering that the freedom to search for fulfilling work is not equally available to everyone.

Decent Work

This distinction also appears in contemporary research.

Researchers studying work increasingly distinguish between meaningful work and decent work.

Meaningful work asks about the significance we experience in what we do.

Decent work asks more foundational questions.

Is the work safe?

Is the income adequate?

Are workers treated with dignity?

Are basic rights protected?

Do people have appropriate security and opportunity?

The International Labour Organization has developed the idea of decent work around productive employment, fair income, security, social protection, rights, equality and human dignity.

That distinction is important.

A person may find profound meaning in providing for their family through difficult work.

But the meaning they find does not make unsafe conditions safe.

It does not make inadequate wages adequate.

It does not make exploitation acceptable.

And it should never become an excuse for those with power to leave unjust conditions unchanged.

There are therefore at least two questions worth asking about work.

Can someone find meaning here?

And:

Are the conditions themselves worthy of the person doing the work?

We need both.

Meaning Beyond Enjoyment

This also raises another question.

Must work be enjoyable in order to be meaningful?

I don’t think so.

There are things we do because they matter even when we would rather not do them.

A parent gets up for work because a family depends upon the income.

Someone takes an exhausting shift because bills need to be paid.

A person accepts work that is far from their ideal because it creates stability.

Another remains in a difficult season because leaving immediately is simply not possible.

The work itself may not be loved.

But love may still be present in the reason for doing it.

Provision can carry meaning.

Responsibility can carry meaning.

Service can carry meaning.

Relationships formed within difficult work can carry meaning.

Doing something faithfully because another person depends upon us can carry meaning.

None of this requires us to pretend that bad work is good.

There is a difference between:

finding meaning within difficult circumstances

and

declaring the difficult circumstances meaningful.

The first can honour human agency.

The second can romanticise suffering.

Gratitude and Growth

This brings me back to something the Wonder Essay tried to hold together.

Gratitude and growth.

Gratitude does not require us to pretend that everything about our present work is good.

And growth does not require us to despise everything about where we are now.

I can be grateful for an income while hoping for better conditions.

I can appreciate an opportunity while developing skills for another one.

I can serve people well today while applying for something different tomorrow.

I can acknowledge what a job provides without declaring that it must therefore be where I remain.

Sometimes gratitude may even help us notice what our present circumstances are giving us.

Experience.

Relationships.

Skills.

Confidence.

Income.

A clearer understanding of what we do and do not want.

And sometimes growth means leaving.

The two do not need to fight one another.

What Stayed With Me

The ninety-five-year-old man and the young men I met in Haiti experienced very different worlds of work.

I don’t want to flatten either into a lesson.

One looked backwards over a working life he had loved.

The others were trying to find work.

Both encounters changed the questions I ask.

The first made me wonder:

How do we come to love what we do?

The second made me ask:

How much freedom do we actually have to choose?

Together they make me wary of simple answers.

Not everybody needs to quit their job and find their passion.

Not everybody should remain where they are and simply become more grateful.

Not every difficult job is secretly meaningful.

Not every ordinary job is meaningless.

Sometimes the work in front of us contains more goodness than we have noticed.

Sometimes it contains conditions that should change.

Sometimes we need to become better at what we do.

Sometimes we need to find the courage to leave.

Sometimes we have choices.

Sometimes we don’t.

Wisdom may lie partly in learning to tell the difference.

And that brings us back to the language of calling.

Because if calling means finding the one occupation perfectly suited to us, what do we say to the person who never has the opportunity to find it?

Perhaps calling needs to be large enough to travel with us into work we choose, work we stumble into, work we love, work we endure and seasons in which there is no work at all.

Which raises our final question:

What if calling isn’t one perfect job?

Question Four

What if calling isn’t one perfect job?

Return to the Wonder

The fifteen-year-old messenger boy did not know what his calling was.

At least, nothing in the story he told me suggested that he did.

He had an opportunity.

His father told him to take it.

He went back.

He learned.

He became skilled.

And somewhere within the life that followed, he came to love his work.

That story has made me increasingly cautious about the language of calling.

We often use the word as though somewhere in the world there is one occupation with our name written on it.

Find it and we have discovered our calling.

Miss it and we may somehow have missed the life we were meant to live.

I wonder whether that places too much weight on a job.

And too much pressure on us.

What if calling is larger than occupation?

Calling and Work

Psychologists have studied the idea of calling too.

There is no single definition.

Some researchers emphasise work experienced as deeply meaningful.

Others include a sense of being drawn towards particular work, sometimes from beyond oneself.

Service to others frequently appears within definitions of calling.

Research has associated living out a calling with a number of positive experiences, including greater meaning and satisfaction.

But the picture is more complicated than simply:

Find your calling and everything will be well.

A calling can be difficult to pursue.

Circumstances can prevent people from doing the work they feel drawn towards.

And, as we have already seen, not everyone possesses the same freedom to choose an occupation.

That leaves me wondering whether we sometimes ask a job to carry something larger than a job can bear.

If my calling is identical to my occupation, what happens when I lose the job?

What happens when illness changes what I can do?

What happens when the work disappears?

What happens when financial necessity requires me to do something else?

What happens when I retire?

Does my calling disappear too?

Perhaps occupation and vocation can overlap without being identical.

Theology

The Christian story begins its account of human work surprisingly early.

In Genesis, human beings are given work within the garden before the Fall.

They are placed there to cultivate and care for it.

Work, therefore, does not first appear in the biblical story as punishment.

But something happens to work after the Fall.

The ground becomes resistant.

Labour becomes painful.

Thorns appear.

The biblical picture holds together two realities that many of us recognise.

There can be goodness in work.

And there can be toil.

Work can allow us to create, cultivate, contribute and serve.

And work can frustrate, exhaust and disappoint us.

Christian theology therefore has little reason to romanticise work.

But neither does it need to dismiss ordinary work as something merely secular that sits outside the purposes of God.

That raises the question again:

If calling is larger than finding the perfect occupation, what is it?

I keep returning to a conversation Jesus had when someone asked him which commandment mattered most.

His answer was not an occupation.

Love God.

Love your neighbour.

That is obviously not a careers formula.

Jesus was answering a question about the greatest commandment, not advising someone which profession to choose.

But it gives me a much larger horizon within which to think about calling.

What if my deepest calling is not first to discover the correct job?

What if it is to become someone who loves God and loves people?

Then occupation becomes one of the places where that calling can be lived.

Work as a Place to Love

That changes the questions I bring to work.

The question is no longer only:

Is this the work I was born to do?

I can also ask:

Who is here for me to love?

The colleague beside me.

The customer who is having a difficult day.

The person receiving what I make.

The young employee who needs somebody to be patient while they learn.

The person whose work goes unnoticed.

The person who needs encouragement.

The next person who comes through the door.

Work gives us people.

And if love of neighbour matters, then the quality of our work matters too.

Someone receives what we do.

The bridge needs to hold.

The medicine needs to be right.

The meal needs to be safe.

The information needs to be accurate.

The room needs to be clean.

The lesson deserves preparation.

The page deserves care.

This is where one of the theological ideas from the Research Workshop has stayed with me:

Excellent work can become a material expression of love for our neighbour.

That sentence is an interpretation rather than a biblical quotation.

But I think it captures something important.

Excellence need not be about proving how good we are.

It can be about caring for the person who receives the consequences of our work.

Faithfulness

There is another biblical phrase that has often been associated with work.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul tells his readers:

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”

The immediate context matters.

Paul was not writing a modern career guide, and the surrounding passage belongs to a first-century household world very different from our own.

So I do not want to turn the verse into:

Work harder.

Never complain.

Stay wherever you are.

Accept whatever conditions you are given.

That would take it somewhere it does not need to go.

What interests me is the larger horizon it gives to ordinary faithfulness.

Work can matter even when nobody applauds it.

Doing something properly can matter even when nobody notices.

Care can matter when the task itself feels ordinary.

Faithfulness can exist in work we love.

And it can exist in seasons of work we would never have chosen.

That does not mean faithfulness always requires staying.

Sometimes faithful stewardship may include learning, growing, challenging what is wrong or moving towards another opportunity.

We can inhabit today well without insisting that today must become forever.

Lived Experience

This has become a much more helpful way for me to think about my own work.

I don’t need every occupation to answer the question of who I am.

And I don’t need to pretend that every task is deeply fulfilling.

Some tasks are simply tasks.

Some days are difficult.

But wherever I am, there are still questions available to me.

Can I do this well?

Can I make things better?

Can I serve somebody?

Can I encourage somebody?

Can I help the people around me flourish?

Can I bring a little more order where there is chaos?

Can I create space where people can relax?

Can I treat the person in front of me as a person rather than another task?

Those questions can travel.

They are available in one occupation and another.

They are available before promotion and after it.

They are available when work feels meaningful and when it feels disappointingly ordinary.

Perhaps that is one advantage of a calling larger than occupation.

We can carry it with us.

What Stayed With Me

I began with a man who had spent almost his entire working life in one place.

There is something beautiful about that.

But I don’t think the beauty of his story is that everybody should find their printing company.

Nor that somewhere there is one perfect occupation waiting for each of us.

His story has left me with something gentler.

We may receive opportunities we could never have planned.

We may discover interests we did not know we had.

We may become good at things we once knew nothing about.

We may stay.

We may leave.

We may begin again.

There will be seasons when work feels deeply meaningful and seasons when it simply needs to be done.

Calling does not need to answer all of that in advance.

Perhaps it can be both larger and simpler.

Love God.

Love people.

And allow our work, whatever it happens to be for this season, to become one of the places where we practise both.

That takes some of the pressure away from finding the perfect job.

But it places a different kind of significance upon the work already in front of us.

Because the question becomes less:

Have I found the one thing I was meant to do?

And more:

How might I faithfully inhabit what I have been given today?

The fifteen-year-old messenger boy could not see eighty years ahead.

He didn’t need to.

There was a door in front of him.

He walked through it.

And then he learned what could be made of the opportunity he had received.

Returning to the Wonder

We began with a ninety-five-year-old man and a question.

“What did you do for a living?”

I could not have known where his answer would take me.

Back to a fifteen-year-old messenger boy.

Back to an unexpected opportunity.

Back to a father telling his son to leave his dinner and go straight back and accept it.

And then forward again through a lifetime of work.

The research has taken us much further.

It has made us question whether interests must always be discovered before they can be developed.

It has explored how competence, agency and relationships can change our experience of work.

It has helped us see that meaningful work can contain many things at once: skill, contribution, belonging, responsibility, purpose and service.

It has reminded us that the freedom to choose fulfilling work is not equally available to everyone.

And theology has invited us to consider whether calling might be larger than finding one perfect occupation.

But after all that research, I find myself returning to something much simpler.

An opportunity was offered.

He took it.

He learned.

He became good at what he did.

And eighty years later, he was grateful.

There is something beautiful about that.

Not because everybody’s working life should look like his.

Not because staying in one place is necessarily better than leaving.

Not because difficult work should simply be endured.

And not because every opportunity deserves to be taken.

His story does not give us a formula.

It gives us something to notice.

Much of a life can grow from things whose significance we cannot see when they first arrive.

A first job.

A conversation.

Someone giving us a chance.

A skill we begin awkwardly.

A colleague who teaches us something.

Work we thought would be temporary.

An opportunity we almost didn’t take.

We live these things forwards.

Only later do we sometimes understand what they became.

Perhaps that is why his gratitude stayed with me.

At fifteen, he could see an opportunity.

At ninety-five, he could see a life that had grown from it.

Most of us cannot see our working lives from that distance.

We are somewhere in the middle.

Learning.

Working.

Changing.

Staying.

Leaving.

Beginning again.

Trying to become better at what we do while wondering where it might all lead.

Maybe we don’t need to know.

There is work in front of us today.

Some of it we may love.

Some of it we may simply need to do.

Some of it may be preparing us for something else.

And some of it may already contain more meaning than we have noticed.

Tomorrow, many of us will make the same journey to the same place and meet the same people.

The tasks will still be waiting.

But perhaps we might notice them differently.

Something we have become remarkably good at.

Someone who depends upon the quality of what we do.

A colleague whose day is better because we are there.

A skill that once felt impossible and now feels ordinary.

An opportunity we once hoped for and have slowly stopped seeing as one.

And perhaps, in the middle of an ordinary working day, we might occasionally ask ourselves a different question.

Not only:

Is this the work I love?

But:

Who am I becoming, who am I serving, and what am I learning to love through the work I have found?

Because sometimes we find work we love.

Sometimes we discover that we need to leave.

And sometimes, as we learn to notice and love the people we meet through our work, we may find ourselves loving the work a little more too.

Still Carrying

One of the things this Research Companion has reminded me is that work refuses simple answers.

The more I explored it, the more questions appeared.

Some have become clearer.

Others remain wonderfully unresolved.

These are some of the questions I am still carrying.

• How much of what we call passion is discovered, and how much is developed?

• Why do some people grow to love work they never imagined choosing?

• What makes the difference between work that forms us and work that diminishes us?

• How much freedom do we really have in choosing the work we do?

• Can we become so focused on finding meaningful work that we fail to notice meaning already present in ordinary work?

• How should gratitude for an opportunity sit alongside the desire for better opportunities?

• What responsibilities do employers have for creating conditions in which people can flourish?

• What happens to our sense of calling when our occupation changes, disappears or becomes impossible?

• How might the way we love the people around us change our experience of the work itself?

• And when we eventually look backwards across our own working lives, what will we be grateful for?

  
  

I don’t think all of these questions need immediate answers.

Some may simply need to travel with us.

Into tomorrow’s work.

Into conversations with colleagues.

Into decisions about staying or leaving.

Into opportunities we have not yet recognised.

And into the way we notice the people working quietly all around us.

Keep Wondering

Thank you for exploring a little further.

If these pages have changed the way you think about work, don’t feel any pressure to turn that into a five-year plan.

Pay attention.

Notice what you enjoy.

Notice what you are becoming good at.

Notice what drains you.

Notice the people around you.

Notice who receives the work you do.

Remain grateful for good opportunities without becoming afraid to grow beyond them.

And remain curious about work that looks ordinary from the outside.

The barista.

The cleaner.

The teacher.

The tradesperson.

The parent.

The person behind the counter.

The colleague at the next desk.

The person quietly becoming excellent at something most of us barely notice.

Ask them what they do.

Ask them what they have learned.

Ask them what they enjoy.

You may discover that some of the most interesting stories about work are being lived by people who would never describe themselves as having found their passion.

Sometimes all wonder needs is a good question and enough attention to hear the answer.

Continue Exploring

The Wonder Atlas Research Companions are intended to be accessible introductions rather than comprehensive studies.

If this Companion has awakened your curiosity, the following resources provide thoughtful opportunities to continue exploring.

Research & Articles

Suzanne Hidi & K. Ann Renninger — The Four-Phase Model of Interest Development

A helpful exploration of how interest can develop and deepen over time rather than necessarily appearing fully formed at the beginning. Published in Educational Psychologist, 2006.

Albert Bandura — Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change

The foundational paper introducing Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy. Particularly relevant to our exploration of confidence, mastery and how experience can influence what people believe themselves capable of doing. Published in Psychological Review, 1977.

Edward L. Deci, Anja H. Olafsen & Richard M. Ryan — Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science

A substantial overview of Self-Determination Theory in the workplace, including the importance of competence, autonomy and relatedness for motivation, performance and wellbeing. Published in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2017.

Amy Wrzesniewski & Jane E. Dutton — Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work

The influential paper developing the idea of job crafting: how people may shape aspects of their tasks, relationships and understanding of their work in ways that alter its meaning and their experience of it. Published in Academy of Management Review, 2001.

Ryan D. Duffy, David L. Blustein, Matthew A. Diemer & Kelsey L. Autin — The Psychology of Working Theory

An important framework for thinking about work while taking seriously economic constraints, marginalisation and the unequal freedom people possess to choose their working lives. Published in Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2016.

David L. Blustein, Evgenia I. Lysova & Ryan D. Duffy — Understanding Decent Work and Meaningful Work

A valuable review distinguishing decent work — the basic conditions workers should be able to expect — from meaningful work, which concerns experienced significance. Published in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2023.

Bryan J. Dik & Ryan D. Duffy — Calling and Vocation at Work: Definitions and Prospects for Research and Practice

A thoughtful introduction to the psychological study of calling and vocation, including meaning, purpose and other-oriented dimensions of work. Published in The Counseling Psychologist, 2009.

Organisations & Wider Exploration

International Labour Organization — Decent Work Agenda

A valuable place to explore work from the perspective of opportunity, fair income, workplace security, social protection, rights, participation and human dignity.

Research Topics

Readers who enjoy exploring further may wish to investigate:

Interest development

Self-efficacy

Self-Determination Theory

Meaningful work

Job crafting

Psychology of Working Theory

Work volition and constrained career choice

Craftsmanship

Calling and vocation

Decent work and workers’ dignity

Biblical Reading

For readers interested in exploring the theological themes further:

• Work in the garden — Genesis 2:4–15

• Work, toil and the Fall — Genesis 3:17–19

• The greatest commandments — Matthew 22:34–40

• Faithfulness in ordinary work — Colossians 3:22–24

• Love as the governing virtue — 1 Corinthians 13

Final Thought

Every Wonder Essay begins with an ordinary moment.

Every Research Companion simply follows the questions that moment awakens.

The greatest gift of research is not that it gives us every answer.

It is that it teaches us to look again.

Sometimes the work has not changed.

Only the way we see it has.

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