Passion vs. Paycheck

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: Hey there, Shankar here. We're dropping this episode on September 22nd, 2025. That's 10 years to the day since we first launched Hidden Brain into the world. A lot has changed since we started this podcast. But for us, one thing remains steadfast. Week in and week out, we love making the show for you. It's been our calling. So today, we mark this anniversary with an episode about just that, callings, and how finding one can change our lives. If you've been listening to Hidden Brain for many years, please come to my live tour. I'll be in Baltimore on October 11th, in Washington DC on October 12th, and in Los Angeles on November 22nd. More dates are coming in 2026. I'll be sharing seven key insights from the first decade of the show. For more information and tickets, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. Again, that's hiddenbrain.org/tour. Hope to see you there, and here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: In 2005, an intense man with a receding hairline and glasses stood before thousands of young graduates in Palo Alto, California. He wore dark robes with a hood of cardinal red. Truth be told, he joked, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. The speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University's commencement that year didn't just transfix his audience. It would transfix countless other audiences in the years to come. His central message was simple. As he put it, your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life.

Steve Jobs: I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

Shankar Vedantam: Finding a vocation, the inventor and entrepreneur said, was no less important than finding a soulmate.

Steve Jobs: As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

Shankar Vedantam: And what if you hadn't found something you loved? What if the work you did paid the bills but didn't complete you? The iconoclastic leader of Apple Inc had very definite advice for the recent graduates.

Steve Jobs: Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

Shankar Vedantam: The idea of being driven by a calling goes back centuries. It was the language used to describe religious people who were called to the priesthood, to a life of service and prayer. You were called, in effect, by God. Today, millions of people in secular professions yearn to be similarly galvanized by their work. This week on Hidden Brain, the immense power and the downsides of pursuing a calling.

Shankar Vedantam: Have you ever looked up from your work in the middle of the day and asked yourself, is this all there is? Am I really doing what I was meant to do? What are the thoughts and images that go through your mind at times like this? Who do you compare yourself to? What do you wish you were doing instead? At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti-Kharas studies how we find meaning in work and ways we can derive more satisfaction and purpose in our professional lives. Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Thank you so much, Shankar.

Shankar Vedantam: Jen, I want to start with a story of a stockbroker in the 19th century. What do we know about Paul Gauguin's life as a middle-class breadwinner in 19th century Paris?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah. Before he was the celebrated world-renowned artist that we know today, Paul Gauguin was a workaday stiff. >He was a very reluctant stock trader. >He hated this job, which required him to sort of, you know, dress up, put in long hours in the office. >And he had this sort of, let's call it a side pursuit, maybe not quite a side hustle, but he certainly had this interest outside of work, which was art and both making art and collecting art.

Shankar Vedantam: Perhaps you know someone like this, whose days are filled with work they detest. Perhaps you feel this way yourself and wonder how your life could have turned out differently. In 1882, the stock market crashed and Paul Gauguin lost his day job. He started to look for work that would pay the bills.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: He was in a situation that so many people do find themselves where essentially to try to make a living, to try to support your family, I mean, truly in a subsistence way, he was casting about for any job he could find.

Shankar Vedantam: Even as he was struggling to make ends meet, Paul Gauguin kept returning to his passion. Art was his refuge, his calling. Would he ever be happy if he kept ignoring it?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: This is part of the power of this story in the sense of what if then to escape this drudgery, I made a radical break? Sort of, if I'm not fulfilled here, might I be better fulfilled or more fulfilled elsewhere? And in a way, that's a lot closer to my passions. Paul Gauguin took a move that a lot of us wouldn't. So after trying various attempts to move in new cities, he left everything, truly chucked it all, upended his life, and moved to Tahiti and pursued his art full time.

Shankar Vedantam: Paul Gauguin's life after he moved to Tahiti has been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny among modern biographers and art historians. In Tahiti, then a French colony, he lived for years with a 13-year-old girl. He impregnated a 14-year-old. Such behavior would be both illegal and disturbing to people in many parts of the world today. But in the 19th century, the legal age for sexual consent in France and French colonies was 13. When Paul Gauguin died in 1903, he was still relatively unknown. Jennifer says that changed after his death.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: So we know now posthumously he was extremely successful. And again, he's one of those names that if you can name a few famous painters, he's likely one of them.

Shankar Vedantam: So we remember Paul Gauguin today not for his acumen as a stockbroker or his skill as a sales rep, but for his art and his paintings, of course, hang in the world's preeminent museums today. Do you think at least in death, he would say that his gamble paid off?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: It would be hard not to say that again, given the level of fame, notoriety, perhaps infamy, but that he's enjoyed. So Paul Gauguin was so influential, not only on his peers, so people like Vincent van Gogh, but on generations of artists to come, not least of which was Pablo Picasso. So art historians have drawn a direct line from the oceanic iconography and styling. You know, it's not completely naturalistic. It's somewhat abstract representation of form in Gauguin's Tahitian figures and the work of Picasso and Cubism. So in terms of his impact on art today as we know it, it's been massive. And therefore, it's very hard to look and say that this gamble didn't pay off. In fact, absent this huge risk to chuck it all and move to Tahiti, we would not have the art that I love going to the MFA in Boston and looking at this giant, famous, maybe one of the most iconic Gauguin paintings, which hangs proudly there. And we would not have this beautiful art that everyone appreciates and loves to look at.

Shankar Vedantam: I want to talk about another person who had a giant effect as a result of her work, and also influenced a number of people who came after her. This is the scientist Marie Curie. She was a physicist who was famously devoted to her work. Talk about the impact she had, Jennifer.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Her impact today is widely felt in the use of radiology and medicine. She's completely changed the way we think about radioactivity, evident in so many domains of modern life. Yet, on top of that, perhaps in a way that we wouldn't say Gauguin was, Marie Curie was a ground breaker. So she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She was not only that, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice and in separate disciplines, so in physics and in chemistry. Similarly, her sort of all or nothing, all in commitment to doing the science, I think, really sets it apart. So this is similarly someone who was somewhat obsessed with her work, put a great deal into it, and for her, it wasn't about fame or recognition. She famously gave away her Nobel Prize money to students who needed it, but she was a towering figure who we recognize today.

Shankar Vedantam: And it's also clear, Jen, that looking back, we know that she paid an enormous price for her success as a scientist. In fact, many people believe she died as a result of her pursuit of the study of radioactivity.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, and I think that is really the ultimate symbol of us being willing to sacrifice everything for our work, is the willingness to potentially die as a result of the work or related to the work that we're doing, whether it's directly from the work itself or as a result of not taking care of ourselves because we are pursuing work that we love.

Shankar Vedantam: So as I was preparing for this interview, Jen, I came by a clip from an American pioneer. She was born in poverty in Mississippi to a single mom, but she always felt like she was cut out for great things. I want you to listen to this clip from Oprah Winfrey.

Sometimes the calling is right in your own neighborhood. Sometimes the calling is something that was just a whisper to you. And when you begin to honor that whisper and to follow that, you end up being the best that you could be.

Shankar Vedantam: Now, Oprah, of course, went on to become a billionaire. You know, people have begged her to run for president. So we've looked at a painter in the 19th century, a scientist in the 20th century, and a television star in the 21st century. Do you hear common threads in these stories, Jen?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: So absolutely. I think the common thread here is this notion that work can be a calling, it can be more than just a paycheck, it can be a source of personal fulfillment, of doing great things in the world. And as we talked about, a really deep sense of immersing yourself in the doing of the work. It does show the power, I believe, of viewing one's work as more than, if you will, just a job, but as a real possibility to contribute both to yourself and to the world at large.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, the psychology of vocations and how we can all find greater meaning in our work. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford's commencement in 2005, he told the story of why he dropped out of college. It was pretty scary at the time, he said, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Dropping out allowed him to drop in on classes that interested him, rather than classes he was being told to attend. He said, I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it, and much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti-Kharas studies the nature and meaning of work. Jenn, you say that the notion that we can find meaning and pleasure in work is relatively recent. How recent?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: The idea of work as a calling goes way, way back to the Protestant Reformation, where the idea was work could be a calling, and specifically, that calling was to the ministry, to the clergy, to serve God directly. Now, work as a secular calling started to gain a foothold around the time that we started having knowledge work, so kind of 80s, 90s, where I have a project I can own, I can really invest myself into, and so therefore, I really feel like it's more than just my job, it's me. I'm actually putting me into it. I would say that the time of the Steve Jobs Commencement speech, 2005, is right around the time of peak calling, and if you look at Google n-grams for find your calling or find your passion, it really follows this. We see this meandering line, very low, starting to uptick in the early 1980s and then reaching this kind of insane asymptotic almost peak in right around the early 2000s. And so, you know, while this idea has deep roots, we don't assume this is a calling from a higher power, but that the experience of the calling is very, very personal, very deep, and very sort of connected to this sense of self.

Shankar Vedantam: So, your own research has explored the effects of having a calling. You've examined the happiness levels of people who have found a calling. Are these people more engaged and satisfied with their work, Jen?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, they are. So I conducted, along with my co-authors Shasa Debrow, Hannah Weissman, and Danny Heller, we conducted about a 20-year survey, quantitative survey, of results on what it means to experience work as a calling. And we found very strongly that people with strong callings report greater satisfaction with their work and their life, and with engagement at work, and some behavioral indicators of better performance, lower absenteeism. And these are sort of consistent findings across studies about how and why experiencing work as a calling matters.

Shankar Vedantam: So, Steve Jobs argued that having a calling allows you to work hard because you're working with passion. Do you find that? Is that borne out by the evidence? Are people with a calling, do they have a higher propensity for hard work?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: In a study with Shasa Debrow and Heather Kappes, we looked at this very question of do strong callings lead to greater effort? And we found empirically that they do. So, when you have a stronger calling, you will expend more effort on calling relevant tasks. So, not just any task, right? It has to be sort of, so if my calling is toward my work domain, and then I'll put in more effort at work, the mechanism through which this happens is through enjoyment of that work. So, stronger calling means I enjoy the work more, therefore, I will work harder at it.

Shankar Vedantam: So, this is the idea that if you love what you do, then you'll never work a day in your life. If it's that idea.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Exactly right.

Shankar Vedantam: So, other research finds that people who have a calling are more resilient. They are able to better withstand setbacks. Why would this be the case, Jen?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, so a calling could almost be like a deep reserve of resilience, of connection to the work, this sense that even if things are not going well in work, that somehow my connection to the work that I'm doing, my belief in my ability to do it, can help me to overcome a setback.

Shankar Vedantam: You conducted a study of officers serving in the US military and compared people who felt a calling to those who did not. Tell me about the study and what you found.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, so this was with Marco Di Renzo and Ned Paoli. We conducted a survey of military officers. So they were mid-career, sort of junior officers, but with supervisory experience. They had about 10 to 12 years of service, on average, in the military. And we specifically looked at their perception that they had hit a career plateau, which is just what it sounds like. So rather than this sense that I'm on the typical career upward trajectory that is desired, that I have leveled off. Basically this subjective sense that I'm not learning and growing and developing in my current career. And we found that the stronger their callings toward the military, the less likely they were to perceive that they were at a plateaued space in their career, that in turn drove their commitment to staying in the military as an organization.

Shankar Vedantam: So Steve Jobs told us that following a calling helped him be more creative. Is there any evidence that that is the case more generally?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Stronger callings mean you're just more deeply connected to that domain. You might want to learn more about it. You might want to spend more time doing it. Employees with strong callings might expend resources that other employees who don't feel as strongly just simply aren't as willing to expend. So this notion that, like Steve Jobs, like Oprah, like everyone else we talked about, a calling might mean an engulfment or immersion in the work that leads to breakthroughs. I will say we need more research to support these conclusions, but the notion that experiencing a strong calling leads people to do great work or their best work is very well founded.

Shankar Vedantam: So in your own career, Jen, you started out as a management consultant. What was that work like for you?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah. So I was an undergraduate business major, and getting a job as a management consultant at a big firm in New York City was like a dream because I was making more money than seemed reasonable. I was working with smart, very interesting people. Consulting work is project based, so it doesn't get boring. You're always moving around, new organization, new setting, sometimes a new city. There was travel. I was young and unencumbered. It was all very glamorous. Getting hotel points and all these kinds of things, frequent flyer miles. But despite all these sort of objective reasons for me to love the work, I never felt like consulting was certainly my calling or even frankly, something I wanted to stay in. And I also noticed this real gender gap. And this has gotten, I think, somewhat better, probably not all the way better, but somewhat better within consulting firms. But it was this classic thing where you would see a lot of predominantly male partners who had, you know, families, kids at home. But the female partners, few as they are, were primarily single, no children. And I'm just thinking both, is this the life that I want? But also, is this the work that I can really see myself doing, traveling potentially four or five days a week? And ultimately, I decided that it was not, and that I needed to do something else.

Shankar Vedantam: So you eventually left the consulting firm and you became an academic. Do you feel a calling when it comes to being a teacher and a researcher, Jennifer?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, I do feel a calling and I feel so fortunate to be able to study these questions that I've wondered about my whole life, really. Why do people spend so much time at work? Why does work define us to the extent that it does? When we go to parties and someone says, what do you do? We know what that means. That means what do you do for a living? It doesn't mean like, what do you do in general, right? In the US and in the Northeast, which is where I've mostly lived, what you do is who you are. I wanted to understand always more about that. Being able to study that and to talk to real people and find out more about how this resonates with them, and that is the best.

Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. I have to say that I almost didn't need to ask you the question of whether you feel like you are pursuing a calling, because I can almost hear it in your voice as you are talking. I can hear your enthusiasm for what it is that you do. And I feel like that's often the case, that when you come by people who have a calling, it's almost as if they are jumping out of themselves to tell you how wonderful it is, the thing that they're doing. And what they are doing could be quite obscure and could have no interest whatsoever to you. But their enthusiasm in some ways rubs off on you.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: I think that's absolutely right. I would go so far as to say it probably wouldn't be a surprise to people working in an organization to hear from each person how they feel about their work. I think there would be something intangible that you could sense about their engagement with the work, maybe their obsession with the work, how they feel about the work that would come through.

Shankar Vedantam: It can seem like a slam dunk. Steve Jobs was right. All of us should find and pursue our callings. But human nature, as you know from listening to the show, is endlessly complicated. What serves us well in one domain can be an impediment in another. When we come back, the downsides of callings. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from WhatsApp. Group chats are meant to connect us, but they often lead to confusion instead, like when you're planning a group trip. Travel dates get buried under endless messages, someone misreads a pixelated flight itinerary sent via SMS, and suddenly, half the group thinks the trip is next month, not next weekend. Add different phones into the mix, even more chaos. Luckily, there's WhatsApp. WhatsApp polls make collective decisions, like choosing a travel budget, fast and frictionless. Pinned messages keep key details, like the hotel reservations or flight times, visible and accessible. Event invites bring structure, while high-res media ensures clarity across devices, so you can easily share incredible vacation pics. And with end-to-end encryption, conversations stay completely private. Even podcast hosts can benefit from WhatsApp by pinning episode themes, collecting audio clips, or sharing new show logos. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Wealthfront. When markets feel unpredictable, finding a safe place for your money can be hard. Wealthfront's cash account offers 4% annual percentage yield on your uninvested cash through program banks with no minimum balance or account fees. Plus, you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts every day, so your money is always accessible when you need it. No matter your goals, Wealthfront gives you flexibility and security. Right now, open your first cash account with a $500 deposit and get a $50 bonus at wealthfront.com/brain. Bonus terms and conditions apply. Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, not a bank. APY on deposits as of December 27th, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum. Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. As you're listening to this episode, do you feel like you're hearing a description of yourself? Someone who has found what they were meant to do? Someone with a purpose and a passion that transcends them? Or do you feel envy of people who have found their calling, and wonder whether you'll ever find something similar? If you have stories or questions about having a calling that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please go to a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, calling. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Sigmund Freud said, There are two sources of human happiness. There was love and there was work. Clothes, intimate, personalized with other people are essential to flourishing. Friends, families and lovers make life worth living. But equally, he argued, work that shows we are making a difference in the world can be a source of enduring satisfaction. At Babson College, Jennifer Tosti-Kharas has found that this is true. Meaningful work is a source of happiness. Along with a philosopher, Christopher Wong-Michelson, she is the author of the book, Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work. Jen, the idea of having a calling is so celebrated in our culture, that it might come as a surprise to many people that callings can have downsides. But you and others have found that they can be drawbacks to pursuing a vocation. For one thing, pursuing a calling seems to distort our judgment. You've looked at this idea specifically in the context of musicians. What do you find?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah. I agree, first of all, that this is startling to people because we have so encoded this cultural message of do what you love, the money will follow, find your calling, love your life. These are literally book titles that seem so obvious. I find my calling and the rest is gravy. But the reality looks very different, and musicians are fascinating to study because this is both a quintessential arts field, right? We would imagine to see a lot of callings, a lot of passion toward music. It's something a lot of us do pursue in some way or another. But yet, it's a very fraught profession because we know that not everyone will make it as a professional musician who might want to, in the same way with sports, arts, lots of different fields operate like this. So I've done a series of studies and there's a series of interesting studies that have been done by my co-author Shasa Debrow. She is not only a professor at the London School of Economics, but she is a professional bassoonist. So she knows this world very, very well. So she has been studying musicians over a long career span. So 11 years and counting. And she started studying them when they were in a program for talented high school students who were talented at music, and she assessed their level of calling toward music, then saw years later, do they pursue music professionally or not? Maybe not surprisingly, the stronger the calling, the more likely people are to pursue music professionally down the road. But that one of the drivers of this is not their actual ability or talent level, as we might think, but their perception that they're talented. And that actually, with strong callings, people tend to have overinflated perception of their own ability level. So they think they're better than they are. And that leads them, then, to pursue this pretty risky career path. So that started this idea that strong callings might lead to a sort of a career tunnel vision, where you truly can't imagine that you won't make it because I love it so much. You know, how can I not be the one to break through when this is my passion and this is my calling?

Shankar Vedantam: What happens when people who have a calling get feedback or guidance from others that in fact they're not as good as they think they are?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, they do not listen to that feedback. So Shasa and I have studied this specifically in the context of musicians. And so what we found was the stronger musicians calling toward music, the less likely they were to follow the advice of their private music teacher if that music teacher discouraged them from going into music. They would basically say, thank you very much, I disagree, I'm doing it anyway. And lest we think this phenomenon is limited to or specific to musicians or the context of music or the arts, we replicated this exact finding in a sample of business school students who said the stronger their callings toward business, they would not accept the advice of a trusted mentor. We left this one more open, a trusted mentor who discouraged them from going into business professionally. So there does seem to be something about strong callings. And it would be very easy to say, well, why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't we have a sense that we are like, I want to do this and nothing's going to stop me and no one or nothing can dissuade me. In fact, a lot of these archetypal calling stories, like we shared earlier, Steve Jobs, et cetera, it's about overcoming these odds, right? Despite everything stacked against me, I persevered and I broke through and I made it. And I think that can be true to a point. Obviously, having some self-confidence or even maybe a little bit of an overinflated self-perception might be helpful or might be adaptive or might help with resilience. But it's hard not to think that there comes a point when an inability to listen to people that have our best interests at heart, who are telling us, giving us real feedback, that the inability to listen to this might harm us in some way.

Shankar Vedantam: There are many callings that do not involve making a lot of money. I'm thinking about the arts, I'm thinking about music, I'm thinking about sports in many cases, perhaps not all sports, but many sports. What do we know about the economic impacts of pursuing a calling, Jen?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, so you're absolutely right that the more prototypical calling-oriented professions, whether it's nonprofit work, helping work, you know, international aid work, et cetera, tend to not be well paid. So already many people to pursue their callings or meaningful work in general are being asked implicitly to accept a pay cut relative to, I'm going to go work for that big bank and not ask too many questions, right? Or I'm going to go work for, you know, I'm going to work in a big law firm and not ask too many questions about who my clients are, things like that. So already we have some sense that we ask people in society to take their love for what they're doing or the meaning they get from the work they do and substitute it for pay. But actually, we have found this in my own research and the research of others, is that people with stronger callings will actually make financial sacrifices to do the work that they love doing. So suddenly the question becomes, is this potentially overwork? And that basically sets people up to be taken advantage of.

Shankar Vedantam: I mean, I was just going to ask you this question, which is, if someone is willing to work without really seeking or demanding pay because they're saying, I'm pursuing my passion, doesn't that make them vulnerable to exploitation?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Absolutely. And so that's something that I teach my students about and that I would really caution people about because we've already said that these are the good workers and that these are people that organizations really want to attract and really want to retain. So then if on top of that, I really feel like, gosh, no matter what I ask you to do, I ask you to come in, you know, off hours, all times of day or night, always go above and beyond, oh, I know I can't count on my other employees, but I can really count on you. You know, at what point is it unfair? Is it exploitative? And is it pushing into a personal space, you know, personal life in a way that is depleting and frankly would lead to burnout? And in fact, that is what some studies have found, is that people with stronger callings, the good way to say it is they go above and beyond, their ideal employees. The more negative way to say it is they will sacrifice personal time, even when it's not paid, and they do, they can as a result report greater physical and psychological health issues, greater fatigue, stress, burnout, and ultimately will leave jobs because it's simply unsustainable to keep working at this pace.

Shankar Vedantam: You tell the story about a man named Colin Huggins. What is the story, and how is it germane to what we're talking about here, Jen?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, so this is another musician's story. Colin Huggins is a busker, so he plays his 900-pound Steinway baby grand piano in the middle of Washington Square Park. So listeners may have stumbled upon him if they've walked through Washington Square Park and heard absolutely beautiful classical music being played. He would literally lug this piano from his apartment in the East Village over to Washington Square Park, and the moving blankets he would lay under the piano and invite people to lay down under the piano so they could really experience the wall of sound that he was producing. He was doing this by choice. He used to be a professional accompanist for the Joffrey Ballet. He described that once he got a taste of this public performance, he was hooked. So he experienced a strong passion for music, a strong passion for public performance, and it may come as no surprise, this was not a lucrative way to make a living even pre-COVID. But the last, and this is already representing a real sacrifice to do one's work, but the last that I had read about Colin Huggins, and again, he's this beloved piano man of the village and of Washington Square Park. This was in 2023. It was reported that he was homeless, so couldn't keep paying the rent in the East Village, and was in fact sleeping in the park on his piano. So this is a terribly tragic, very poignant story of ultimate sacrifice to do work that one loves, sort of with very little concern about even meeting basic needs.

Shankar Vedantam: So, many people switch jobs as new opportunities come up, and if you don't like one job, you can go to another job. But if you're pursuing a calling and your career doesn't work out as planned, this feels emotionally very different than someone who loses a job or gets laid off from a position. I mean, they're both painful, but if you feel like you're doing something you're called to do, and it's deeply meaningful to you, losing out on a career like that can be very, very difficult. Can you talk about this idea that in some ways one of the downsides of having a calling is what happens when it doesn't work out as a career?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Absolutely. So not everyone is lucky enough to find work in their calling to begin with. Similarly, not everyone is able to sustain work in the calling. And we can imagine that could be for a lot of reasons. People might not be able to pursue their callings. And research by Justin Berg and others has shown that this is a deeply psychologically-aversive state, filled with frustration, regret, depression, because it's not just I need a job, any job. You sort of have this notion that it's really got to live up to this high sense that I have of what work should be.

Shankar Vedantam: It's worth also pointing out, Jen, that the effects of the choices we make are not experienced only by ourselves. The people around us are affected as well. We talked earlier about how the painter, Paul Gauguin, left France to try his luck as an artist in Tahiti. Now, he may have gone into the history books as a great artist, but talk a moment about the impact of his choices on the people around him. What does that legacy look like?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Not such a good legacy, Shankar. Paul Gauguin, today, in the parlance of today, should be canceled or we believe he should be canceled because he led a life of utter selfishness at the expense of his family. He left his family behind in France when he went to Tahiti. So first of all, he was no longer there to contribute, and as we said, he was not doing so well by selling his art in Polynesia, that he could send money home to them. So another way to say this is, he abandoned his family in France. And to go one step further by all accounts, I mean, Paul Gauguin is now a very kind of, his legacy is somewhat conflicted by the fact that he pursued women that he painted and had, you know, by all accounts, affairs with them. There's a story that his favorite child died, and he still did not return home. And by all accounts, it sort of led to his downfall. He went sort of mad and, you know, kind of consumed by his own, you know, obsession to paint. But it was sort of this all-consuming passion or obsession. And he died in Polynesia without having returned home to this family that he essentially left behind.

Shankar Vedantam: Being swept up by a calling can make people obsessive and single minded. That might be good for the pursuit of passion, but it can be harmful for other dimensions of life, from your physical health, to your relationships with family and friends. So often it seems, the good and the bad go hand in hand when it comes to callings.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it's certainly something that people should be aware of and look out for. So I think just in the same way that it might be this excuse, we don't have to pay you as much because you really love it. It also might be an excuse to not engage fully in areas outside of work because I'm so consumed by work and my work is the most important thing to me. At what point do other domains of life, whatever those are, whether they're a family who depends on you, whether they're just self-care and the cultivation of a life outside work, which has merit and benefit, at what point do those things suffer because of this kind of all-in sense of performing the work?

Shankar Vedantam: It's interesting. We've talked about how the idea of having a calling is a romantic idea, but I can't stop seeing the parallels with actual romance. A century or two ago, everyone thought that work was just how you paid the bills. But similarly, a couple centuries ago, marriage was a very prosaic institution designed primarily for raising children. Today, people want romantic partners who are going to be their soulmates. Similarly, people with a calling might ignore good advice. People in love can be blind to reason. And if having a calling that doesn't work out, can leave you broken-hearted, failing at love can also leave you grief-stricken. And I'm wondering, psychologically, do you think in some ways there are the same processes that are at work here?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: I think they are. I think that is so well said. And I think they are very similar processes. I want to remind listeners who maybe haven't heard the Steve Jobs commencement speech in a while, he makes this parallel. He says, don't settle, keep looking until you found that perfect fit, that job that you love. It's as important in your work life as it is with your romantic partners. I mean, he makes this literal parallel to a romantic search and the search for the perfect job. And just as this is a very high bar to live up to in your romantic life, this is a very high bar for any job to live up to. And again, the research bears this out. So people with stronger callings tend to be, so again, we've talked about how they're all in on work, they're very, you know, go above and beyond, think outside of the box. The flip side of this is they can be extremely critical of those around them, whether it's the organization, leaders, coworkers, have a view that differs from their own. But in terms of actually performing the work, they can be quite tough to work with. They can have strained work relationships. They will be, you know, the first to sign up if someone needs to work extra hours, but also the first to complain if a decision is made that they don't agree with or that they... Because again, it runs counter to my calling. So to have this lofty ideal of what the perfect job is going to feel like is just as sort of unrealistic an assumption as thinking when I find my perfect life partner, every day will be roses and sunshine and will never quarrel and will, you know, nothing will ever feel hard again. These are myths.

Shankar Vedantam: You know, some time ago, we had the researcher Eli Finkel from Northwestern University on Hidden Brain, and he was making a very interesting argument. His argument was that as our expectations of our romantic partners have gone higher and higher and higher, fewer of us are actually able to meet those expectations. So many of us, because our expectations for marriage have now become so much higher than they were two centuries ago, fewer of us are actually able to reach the level where we are satisfied or we say that we're in a happy relationship. But for those of us who actually are able to meet that standard, who are actually able to put in the time and the effort to cultivate great relationships, they're probably having much happier marriages than people two centuries ago. But it also means that there are many, many people who feel like they're falling short. And again, I can't help but see the parallels here with having a calling. If you have a calling, you happen to be lucky enough to achieve that calling. You're doing work that's meaningful. You're doing work that transforms the world. I mean, you're clearly happier than almost everyone in human history who's ever had a job. But if everyone aspires to that very, very high standard, lots of us are going to be disappointed.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah, that is a perfect parallel. So first, I think someone should do that study about exactly how do people feel about the expectation of the calling versus the real. I want to see that, you know, that type of study. But I also think that's right because we know that there are so many jobs that need doing that are unlikely to feel like people's callings. And so where does that leave people who are left out of this ability to, you know, choose work freely, work in areas that have a reasonable enough degree of autonomy that there's something that they can tap into. I think that phenomenon will absolutely play out in a very similar way.

Shankar Vedantam: I have to say that I feel torn here after this conversation because I think I want to live in a world that has Marie Curie's and Steve Jobs's, but I can also see the great costs that come from being so single minded. After doing all this research and thinking, where do you come down, Jen? Are callings a good thing?

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Yeah. So what I like to say is absolutely people should not be doing work that feels meaning less, that is drudgery and that you believe is not just not making the world a better place but might actually be making the world a worse place. That's a fate I wouldn't want for anyone. So my great hope would be that we as a society figure out how to offer jobs that provide a path to a sense that the work is meaningful and worthy of respect and human dignity. I do also want to say I don't think that feeling that work is a strong calling is the only path or the best path to feeling that you have a good life or a meaningful life. So there are lots of people who find the meaning in their life outside of the meaning of their work. So in some ways, it's sort of like what you had said. If you're lucky enough to find work that you love doing, that's great. But I think for those who haven't yet found it or maybe will never find it, don't despair. That's not a personal or moral failing as we sometimes make it seem. And there are so many ways that we can feel like we're making a difference in a contribution. It doesn't only need to be through our work or primarily through our work. And there are lots of things that give our lives meaning that have nothing to do with work.

Shankar Vedantam: Jennifer Tosti-Kharas and philosopher Christopher Wong-Michelson are the authors of the book, Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work. In our companion story on Hidden Brain+, we look at how all of us, people who have a calling and people who don't, people who want a calling and people who don't, can derive greater meaning and satisfaction from our work. We'll explore psychological techniques that can change your relationship to your job, your co-workers and your profession. If you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain+, that episode should be available in your feed right now. It's titled, How to Make Work Meaningful. If you're not a subscriber, this is a great time to check out Hidden Brain+. All through the month of September, listeners who subscribe on Apple Podcasts will get access to an extended 30-day free trial. To access that 30-day trial, find Hidden Brain on Apple Podcasts and click the Try Free button, or go to apple.co.uk/hiddenbrain. Your support helps us make research-based insights accessible, relevant, and engaging to a broad audience around the world. Again, that site is apple.co.uk/hiddenbrain. Jen, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas: Thank you so much, Shankar. It was a true pleasure.

Shankar Vedantam: Do you have follow up questions or stories that you'd like to share with Jennifer Tosti-Kharas? Have you found a calling that gets you up in the morning each day? Are you a skeptic of callings? Or do you have questions about how to make work more meaningful? If you'd be willing to share your questions, stories and comments with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line calling. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. I'd like to call out some unsung heroes on this 10th anniversary show. Kara McGurk-Allison played a central role in getting the show started, and Maggie Penman was one of our first producers. Jenna Weisberman helped build several pilot episodes. Lots of others helped as well. Lynette Clemetson and Anya Grunman provided a lot of guidance. And Lauren Embry, Paul Haga, Paul Ginsberg, and Kimilla Smith provided some of the initial seed funding. We're so grateful to all of them. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week on the show, we're going to kick off a new series. It's a topic that almost everyone cares about, a topic that has inspired great songs and poems and works of fiction. That topic is love. Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about what happens when the heady first phase of infatuation is done, and the harder work of navigating the day-to-day with your partner begins.

Shankar Vedantam: That's Love 2.0 starting next week. I hope you'll join us. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.