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Tim Keller on Discerning Your Calling

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The other day I linked to Michael Horton’s article on discerning your calling. Tim Keller also has a very helpful article on that as well (online as a pdf).

You’ll notice these articles are in agreement with the same basic three questions to consider, but they complement one another in a helpful way.

Here’s the summary from the end of Keller’s article:

Your vocation is a part of God’s work in the world, and God gives you resources for serving the human community. These factors can help you identify your calling.

Affinity—“Look out.”
Affinity is the normal, existential/priestly way to discern call. What people needs do I vibrate to?

Ability—“Look in.”
Ability is the normal, rational/prophetic way to discern call. What am I good at doing?

Opportunity—“Look up.”
Opportunity is the normal, organizational/kingly way to discern call. What do the leaders/my friends believe is the most strategic kingdom need?

Your life is not a series of random events. Your family background, education, and life experiences—even the most painful ones—all equip you to do some work that no one else can do. “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do“ (Eph. 2:10).

(HT: Resurgence)

How to Discover Your Calling

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A great article by Mike Horton on discovering your calling. Here’s a key point:

God does give us the desires of our hearts. He is not out to get us, or to make us wander the vocational wilderness forever. Sometimes we are “dumped” into short-term vocations which to us seem utterly meaningless and yet in some way providentially equip us with a skill which will be vital in our as yet unknown calling in life. We just cannot figure out God’s secret plan, but we can trust it and learn from natural as well as biblical sources how we might better discern our calling.

The questions, What are your skills?, What do you really enjoy?, What would get you up on Monday morning?, are in the realm of nature. Super-spirituality may look down on such mundane questions and try to steal into God’s secret chamber, but biblical piety is content to leaf through the book of nature. God has created us a certain way, given us certain habits, skills, longings, and drives.

Sometimes we over-spiritualize things and think God doesn’t care about whether we are in a role that is a good fit, or that considering our own desires and giftings in choosing what to do is somehow unspiritual.

Not true. Sometimes God will have us doing something that is not the best fit, but seeking the right fit is a good — and spiritual — thing to do. It is a matter of good stewardship to seek the best way to maximize the gifts, skills, and interests that he has given us.

Finding Your Work Sweet Spot

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Scott Belsky:

There are two types of work in this world. The first is the laborious kind, which I call “work with obligation.” It’s work that we do because of a contractual obligation. The second – very different – type of work that we do is “work with intention.”

When we are working with intention, we toil away endlessly – often through the wee hours of the morning – on projects we care about deeply. Whether it is building an intricate replica model of an ancient ship, or pulling an all-nighter to write a song or map out an idea for a new business, you do it because you love it.

If you can put “work with intention” at the center of your efforts, you’re more likely to make an impact in what matters most to you. So, how do we find (and foster) work with intention in our lives and projects?

Read the whole thing.

If You are Discontent with Your Job, Maybe You Should Consider Missions

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I’ve been talking for the last couple of days on the value of having a job that you love. If you aren’t content in your current job, of course, the first thing to consider is how you might be able to craft it and shape it in a way that is more in line with your strengths.

But if the discontent remains, perhaps it’s worth considering something radical. Something more radical than just switching jobs. Maybe it’s worth thinking about missions.

I’m not suggesting here that secular employment or a non-profit or ministry role in the US is less valuable than doing missions. Rather, I’m just suggesting that, if you are discontent in your job and the discontent tends to remain, it’s worth considering missions as one of the possibilities for what’s next.

Here’s how John Piper puts it at the end of Don’ t Waste Your Life:

The Meaning of Your Discontent

Many of you should stay where you are in your present job, and simply ponder how you can fit your particular skills and relationships and resources more strategically into the global purposes of your heavenly Father.

But for others reading this book, it is going to be different. Many of you are simply not satisfied with what you are doing. As J. Campbell White said, the output of your lives is not satisfying your deepest spiritual ambitions.

We must be careful here. Every job has its discouragements and its seasons of darkness. We must not interpret such experiences automatically as a call to leave our post.

But if the discontent with your present situation is deep, recurrent, and lasting, and if that discontent grows in Bible-saturated soil, God may be calling you to a new work. If, in your discontent, you long to be holy, to walk pleasing to the Lord, and to magnify Christ with your one, brief life, then God may indeed be loosening your roots in order to transplant you to a place and a ministry where the deep spiritual ambitions of your soul can be satisfied.

It is true that God can be known and enjoyed in every legitimate vocation; but when he deploys you from one place to the next, he offers fresh and deeper drinking at the fountain of his fellowship. God seldom calls us to an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of his sustaining grace. . . .

Big issues are in the offing. May God help you. May God free you. May God give you a fresh, Christ-exalting vision for your life — whether you go to an unreached people or stay firmly and fruitfully at your present post. May your vision get its meaning from God’s great purpose to make the nations glad in him. May the cross of Christ be your only boast, and may you say, with sweet confidence, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Is it Biblical to Choose a Job You Love?

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It’s almost silly to even ask that question. It’s like asking “Is it biblical to chose a spouse that you actually want to be with?” Yes, of course it is. Why would you marry someone you don’t want to marry? Likewise, if you have the choice (and we do much more often than we realize), why would you chose a job you aren’t excited about?

In fact, Paul’s teaching on marriage is actually a helpful analogy here, because it gives us a principle. In regard to marriage, he says: “A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39). So marriage is an area of freedom — marry whom you want (as long as they are a Christian). In other words, what you want to do is not only a legitimate consideration; you are free to make your choice on that basis.

In fact, Paul goes further: “Yet in my judgment she is happier if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God” (v. 40). Now, at first it doesn’t sound like he’s going further, because he is actually recommending in this case that a widow not remarry. He’s not forbidding remarriage, but just recommending against it in this case. My point here is not to discuss whether it is better to marry or not. Rather, here’s the important point: Paul’s reason for his advice here is that she will be happier if she remains as she is.

In other words, your happiness is a valid and legitimate consideration in making life decisions. Paul is suggesting that she actually would be happier not to remarry. Again, the issue of whether someone should get married or not is not my point here. My point here is that, remarkably, Paul considers happiness a fully legitimate consideration in making the major life choice of whether to marry and whom to marry. In fact, it actually seems to be the primary consideration in the decision, since his entire reason for recommending singleness here is that this path would, he argues, result in greater happiness.

If happiness is a legitimate consideration in choosing a spouse, then it would also seem to follow that happiness is a legitimate consideration in making other life decisions as well, such as where you work and what you do for a living.

I’m not saying that there aren’t more things to take into account. But enjoying your work and having a job that suits you is a right and good and significant consideration in choosing your work.

Tomorrow I’ll give an example of what this looks like.

Is it Smart to Allow Your Job to Involve a Lot of Things You Don't Like Doing?

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Marcus Buckingham gives a good answer to this question in The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success:

Some people will tell you that you need a little difficulty in your life, a little grit; that, as an oyster makes a pearl, this grit will strengthen you, round you out, and polish you into something fine and valuable. No grit, they say, no pearl.

Now, of course, there is a sense in which this is true. Especially in life in general, suffering and difficulty plays a critical role in our sanctification.

But this doesn’t mean we should seek it out for it’s own sake. And, more to the point here, Buckingham is talking specifically about career choices. When it comes to your career, it is not advisable (and, I would argue, it’s not biblical, either) to purposely take a job, or allow responsibilities in your current job to be added, which grate you down.

This can sound irresponsible at first. And, of course, there are times when we just need to do things we don’t prefer for the sake of the greater mission. When it is necessary for the sake of others, we should do whatever needs to be done to serve them and make things better.

But Buckingham is here responding to the idea that it will somehow make us more effective in our work if we intentionally seek out tasks that grate us down — or allow others to impose them on us out of the misguided notion that it will be good for us.

We should be skeptical of this notion, and here’s why:

When it comes to your career, grit will only grind you down. Every minute you invest in an activity that grates on you is a poorly invested minute. It is a minute in which you will learn little and that will leave you weaker and less resilient for the next minute. It is a minute you could have spent applying and refining your strengths, a minute in which you could have taken leaps of learning and that would strengthen you for the minutes to come.

In other words, the notion that taking on tasks that drain you will make you more effective in your work is actually another form of the fallacy that we will grow most by focusing on our weaknesses. For, as I’ve blogged before, your weaknesses aren’t ultimately what you are bad at, but what drains you.

To focus on your strengths means carving out your role such that you are doing on what you do best and what strengthens you most of the time. This is how you will be most effective in your role and for your organization. I think most recognize this; but what is hard for people to see is that this means, by definition, seeking to cut out of our roles the thing that drain us, at least to the greatest extent that we can.

This is not a country club approach to work. I’m not advocating that we slack of and not work hard. Quite the opposite. We ought to work hard, be diligent, and excel in what we do, taking great pains even to do this. And we will be more effective in doing this when we are working in our strengths — the things that energize us — rather than our weaknesses.

Does It Really Matter if You Love Your Job?

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A lot of people say it doesn’t matter much if you love your job. If you do, that’s great — it’s a bonus. But the main purpose of a job is to put food on the table, and actually liking what you do is secondary.

This is actually bad advice. There are lots of reasons, but let me mention just one: if you don’t love your job, you risk being a poor steward.

I’m not talking here about people who have no choice in the matter. In the NT exhortations on work, slaves are the best example here. A slave had little or no control over his work, and Paul said “don’t worry about it — you are serving the Lord in what you do, and he values it and will reward you” (see 1 Corinthians 7:21; Colossians 3:23-24).

But we aren’t slaves, and we do have a choice in our work. This increases our responsibility to choose wisely. And it that choice in what we do for our work is a stewardship.

And here’s how that relates to why you should do your best to seek out a job you love (or, sometimes better, turn your job in to something you love most of the time): you will be more effective in your job if you love it.

We can, of course, work hard in jobs that we don’t love. But the extra effort, the mastery that takes us above and beyond and makes us maximally effective, is fueled by enthusiasm. To the extent that you lack this enthusiasm for the activities of your work, you will be less effective. You will not be able to stretch and push yourself and grow in your knowledge and skill as highly as you could otherwise.

Which means you will not be contributing as much as you could. Which is another way of saying: you won’t be making the difference you could and serving others to the extent that, perhaps, is truly needed. You will be leaving things on the table — things that could have benefited others, and wouldn’t have necessarily required much more from you because, after all, you have to work anyway.

I don’t necessarily want to say here that it is wrong to settle for a job you don’t love. But I do want point out that finding a job you love is not ultimately a matter of serving yourself. It’s a matter of serving others, because you will be more effective for the sake of others if, most of the time, your job is something you love.

A Better Answer to the Question "What is Your Greatest Weakness?"

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A common job interview question is “what is your greatest weakness?” (Or some variation of it.)

A common response is to answer in terms of what you are bad at or tend to overdo (but often trying to give it a positive spin by making it seem the flip-side of a strength!).

That’s an unnecessary and unhelpful route to go with that question. The reason is that it misunderstands the nature of a weakness.

A weakness is not what you are bad at. A weakness is any activity that drains you. Or, in other words, a weakness is any activity that depletes you.

Understood in this light, it is not simply the most honest thing to give a straight answer, it’s also the most strategic because you don’t want to have a job that calls upon your weaknesses primarily (for you will be unable to excel and will end every day drained). What you want to do with your weaknesses is make them irrelevant by managing around them. Adjust the position so it doesn’t generally require you to do what weakens you, for example. Or find a partner who is strong where you are weak.

Given these things, here’s an example of a good answer to the question: “What is my greatest weakness? A weakness is an activity that drains you. Understood in this light, one of my greatest weaknesses is falling behind on email. If I let my email go for a few days, I feel like I’m under a pile of nagging, unfinished tasks, and it drains my energy. [Then, you go to how you have addressed the weakness and make it irrelevant:] As a result, I have a daily process for getting my inbox to zero, and I make sure not to skip more than a few days unless circumstances really call for it. I find that as long as I make it a priority to keep my in box processed regularly (which I have a system for), I don’t have to deal with the sense of being drained from a collection of unprocessed and unknown emails.”

The Best Career Advice You Were Never Told

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The most effective people make career choices for fundamental reasons, not instrumental reasons.

That’s one of the key take-aways from Dan Pink’s excellent book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Dan Pink’s book is excellent on two counts. First, it presents the material in a creative and engaging way: the book is actually the first American business book in manga. I was slightly familiar with this approach because the resource team at DG worked with some people a few years ago to adapt some of John Piper’s content to a graphic novel format. Dan Pink has done the same thing here, except to teach career principles.

Second, the content is helpful — and counterintuitive. Here are the six lessons of the book:

  1. There is no plan.
  2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
  3. It’s not about you.
  4. Persistence trumps talent.
  5. Make excellent mistakes.
  6. Leave an imprint.

If I can, maybe I’ll do a series that briefly covers each of these points.

For now, here’s some advice for those who aren’t sure what to do next: make your next choice for fundamental reasons, not instrumental reasons.

Here’s how Pink explains it (via one of the characters in the book):

You can do something for instrumental reasons — because you think it’s going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it’s worthwhile.

Or you can do something for fundamental reasons — because you think it’s inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to.

And the dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons usually don’t work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen [and note that this is biblical! Proverbs 20:24; 16:9; James 4; etc.]. So you end up stuck. The most successful people — not all of the time, but most of the time — make decisions for fundamental reasons.

They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place — even if they don’t know exactly where it will lead.

There’s the key idea. If you don’t know what you want to do next, do what you think is inherently valuable. You don’t need to know where it will lead. And, almost certainly, it will lead to someplace interesting, because, first, you already are doing something interesting (that was the point of your choice!) and, second, we are more effective when we are doing what we love to do.

And even if you do have a clear goal for where you want to end up (which is a good thing), don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you will best get there by making a bunch of instrumental choices to do things you don’t really want to do, but which will “keep your options open” and eventually let you get closer to your interests. This approach usually backfires. Instead, have your large goal, but stay open to seizing unplanned opportunities to help get you there, and along the way seek to follow the path of doing what you find inherently valuable.

Be a Resource, Not a Limiter

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The people that are most helpful in any organization are those who take initiative, rather than simply doing what they are told. What organizations need from their people is engagement, not mere compliance. (And, conversely, this is what makes a job most satisfying — being engaged, rather than simply seeking to comply).

This has implications for managers as well. If you manage in a certain way (namely, with a command and control focus), you incentivize compliance. But if you realize that management is not about control, but rather about helping to unleash the talents of your people for the performance of the organization, and that this comes from trusting your people and granting them autonomy, then you see yourself not as the “boss,” but as a source of help.

A manager is a source of help and a catalyst, not a limiter or controller.

Godin touches on this well in his recent post “Moving Beyond Teachers and Bosses“:

We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a ‘good student.’

We train employees to deal with bosses in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to do. Figure out how to do exactly what they want, with the least amount of effort, and the last risk of failure and you are a ‘good worker.’

The attitude of minimize is a matter of self-preservation. Raise the bar, the thinking goes, and the boss will work you harder and harder. Take initiative and you might fail, leading to a reprimand or termination (think about that word for a second… pretty frightening).

The linchpin, of course, can’t abide the attitude of minimize. It leaves no room for real growth and certainly doesn’t permit an individual to become irreplaceable.

If your boss is seen as a librarian, she becomes a resource, not a limit. If you view the people you work with as coaches, and your job as a platform, it can transform what you do each day, starting right now. “My boss won’t let me,” doesn’t deserve to be in your vocabulary. Instead, it can become, “I don’t want to do that because it’s not worth the time/resources.” (Or better, it can become, “go!”)

The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss as teacher as taskmaster as limiter mindset. We need more from you than that.