The Adventure of Finding One's Calling

I'm fascinated by tales of people doing amazing work. One of my favorite shows is Dirty Jobs (you know, the one where host Mike Rowe spends time with the folks who take care of sewers, manage pig farms, and deconstruct parade floats). What I find most interesting is how each of the folks who do dirty jobs for a living take such great pride in their work. It's with that same curiosity that I approached Chris Ballard's The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path.

In The Butterfly Hunter, Ballard observes and interviews ten people who managed to find their own calling in life doing work that's far from ordinary. Some of the colorful characters include a man who makes prosthetic eyes, a woman who is a competitive lumberjill, and the titular professional butterfly hunter. Every single individual profiled in the book, through their own experience and story, offers some valuable lessons on what it means to pursue a calling that is unique to their personal strengths and passions.

Lesson #1
There isn't a magic formula or predefined ten step program to help us find our calling. It's all about doing the hard work of knowing ourselves, staying true to what we love doing, and taking a risk here and there. And that's what I found compelling about this book. It's a healthy dose of inspiration through the stories of other intrepid souls. That's a nice change of pace to the more prescriptive career manuals out there now (though I shouldn't be too critical...I may be writing one of those someday in the future).

Lesson #2
Identity and work can become intertwined...and when they do we like to call it workaholism. But, that may be unfair and unnecessarily judgmental. I think there's a difference between overworking for the wrong reasons (chasing money or prestige, for instance) and overworking because you simply love the work itself. All of the individuals interviewed by Ballard acknowledged that they couldn't imagine doing anything else in their life. Many noted that they felt it was what they were born to do. So, all the talk of work/life balance as a uniform and one-size-fits-all concept doesn't work. We have our own sense of balance that's unique to each of us.

Lesson #3
Our calling should bring out our best self. As Ballard writes, "people who love their work love themselves at work." And those who are intimately engaged in their calling see beauty in the details of their work. It's in the details that we can find our voice.

In all, The Butterfly Hunter is an engrossing read. As a journalist, Ballard is able to capture what makes each of his subjects tick. And he artfully reflects on some important questions about what our work means in this modern age. In that same spirit, I wrote something on the last page that's well worth sharing with the JJL community:

Is the best question to ask someone, "Do you love your job?" Everybody has a different definition of love. Perhaps it's better to inquire about the relationship someone has with their work. Do they feel that it's a job, a career, or a calling?

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Post Author Chris Bailey is a coach, consultant, and organizational agitator (in a good way, of course) at Bailey WorkPlay. He writes the Alchemy of Soulful Work blog where he helps individuals and organizations create purpose and meaning in their work.

He's lucky to have a wife who reads tons of books and never fails to recommend a great one when he asks...like this one. Thanks, Carrie!