job – career – vocation
fara | 3/28/2006 | 10:52 ami love morning chats. that’s when ur creative juices are flowing the most. i don’t allude to being a great thinker but when left to its own devices, the mind can conjure wonderful things.
anywho, a topic that become the focus for the morning was what do you call the thing that you’ve been doing day in day out five (or five and a half days) a week.
for me, i know what i am doing is just a job – that gets me a paycheck at the end of the month. i don’t think i can make a career out of it – how could i? when i wake up thinking ‘oh here goes another workday’…. once i wake up bouncing to get on with that day – then that’ll be when i’ve found my calling.
came across this on the net. a section of an old article, way back in 1998 but still valid, methinks.
Timothy Butler: There are three words that tend to be used interchangeably-and shouldn’t be. They are “vocation,” “career,” and “job.”
Vocation is the most profound of the three, and it has to do with your calling. It’s what you’re doing in life that makes a difference for you, that builds meaning for you, that you can look back on in your later years to see the impact you’ve made on the world. A calling is something you have to listen for. You don’t hear it once and then immediately recognize it. You’ve got to attune yourself to the message.
Career is the term you hear most often today. A career is a line of work. You can say that your career is to be a lawyer or a securities analyst-but usually it’s not the same as your calling. You can have different careers at different points in your life.
A job is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It has to do with who’s employing you at the moment and what your job description is for the next 6 months or so. These days, trying to describe what your job will be beyond 12 to 18 months from now is very dicey.
Waldroop: If you look at the derivations of the words “career” and “vocation,” you immediately get a feel for the difference between them.
Vocation comes from the Latin “vocare,” which means “to call.” It suggests that you are listening for something that calls out to you, something that comes to you and is particular to you.
“Career” comes originally from the Latin word for cart and later from the Middle French word for race track. In other words, you go around and around really fast for a long time-but you never get anywhere.
that’ll give me something to ponder on while i decide what to do for the next 5 years. the last five ain’t half bad – but definitely could’ve been better.
time for more reflection.
