A favorite Zen Buddhist story of mine—such a favorite, I confess, that I mentioned it once before—tells of a novice monk who, on his first day at the monastery, stands before the head monk to receive his work assignment. “Before you reach enlightenment,” the master, or jikijitsu, says, “you will chop wood and carry water.” Dutifully, the young monk, or unsui, does as he is told: Day after day, month after month, year after year, he chops wood and carries water. It is backbreaking work, and many times he dreams that, after he attains enlightenment, his life’s calling will be to become a teacher himself. Or perhaps he will be a pure contemplative, spending his time in prayer and meditation. Either way, his work will involve sitting indoors, without chafed hands and aching muscles. After decades at the monastery, fulfilling his duties through arduous study and labor, the monk—now not so young—is finally judged to have the desired level of knowledge: He has risen to the level of Zen master himself. Standing before the aged head monk, he asks, “I have faithfully carried out my job all these years, chopping wood and carrying water, as I worked to become a master. What will my job be now?” The jikijitsu smiles and replies, “Chop wood, carry water.” This time of year, the most common question I get from my students who are starting out in their career is about this idea of work as a calling. My response is the same as the Zen story’s lesson: Don’t wait for your life’s calling to find you with the perfect job; turn whatever job you find into the way you seek that calling. You don’t have to be a career-obsessed go-getter to believe that work should be about more than financial success or just a necessary evil to pay the rent. In Genesis, God places Adam “into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” In other words, even in the original paradise—before all the unpleasantness with the snake and the apple—God designs the first human, made in his image, to work, not lie about. The Bible makes no mention of Adam’s daily labor being easy or fun, but clearly it is meaningful; working in the garden is how he lives in the image of his Creator. Hinduism has a very similar teaching: “By performing one’s natural occupation, one worships the Creator from whom all living entities have come into being.” Despite their ostensibly secular orientation, career counselors are taught to help clients find their “transcendent summons” to a particular career. This is because clients demand an ineffable sense that they are supposed to be doing this job. Psychologists have conducted in-depth studies of this desired sense of career calling. Writing in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2005, two researchers at Boston University distinguished between “objective careers,” which they defined as jobs chosen for entirely practical reasons (such as a paycheck), and “subjective careers,” which were selected for a sense of calling. They argued that subjective careers deliver greater satisfaction, even during difficult periods. Think about it: On a really bad day, you might quit your job in anger, but even on the worst of days, you don’t quit your calling, because you didn’t choose it—it chose you.