Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
想在亚瑟的写作中保持最新吗？每次出现新专栏时，请注册以获取电子邮件。
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.
我最喜欢的禅宗佛教故事 - 我承认，我以前提到过一次，这是一个新手僧侣的泰尔斯，他在修道院的第一天就站在头和尚面前接受他的工作任务。大师或吉基吉说：“在实现启蒙之前，您将砍伐木头并携带水。”尽职尽责的是，年轻的和尚或UNSUI所做的那样：日复一日，一个月又一个月，年复一年地，他砍木头并拿着水。这是令人反感的工作，他很多时候都梦想着，在他获得启蒙后，他的生活将是自己成为一名老师。或者，也许他将是一个纯粹的沉思，将自己的时间花在祈祷和冥想中。无论哪种方式，他的工作都将涉及在室内坐着，而无需手动疼痛和肌肉酸痛。
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.”
经过几十年的修道院，通过艰苦的研究和劳动来履行职责，僧侣（现在还不那么年轻）被认为具有所需的知识水平：他已经提高到了禅宗大师的水平。他站在老年前僧侣面前，问道：“这些年来，我一直在忠实地从事我的工作，砍伐木头并载着水，因为我努力成为一名大师。现在我的工作将是什么？”Jikijitsu微笑着回答：“切碎木头，拿着水。”
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.
一年中的这个时候，我从职业生涯开始的学生那里得到的最常见的问题是关于工作的想法。我的回答与禅宗的故事的课程相同：不要等待生活的呼唤才能找到完美的工作；将您找到的任何工作都变成您寻求呼叫的方式。
Read: When the status quo doesn’t cut it
阅读：当现状未削减时
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.”
您不必是一个痴迷于职业生涯的人，就可以相信工作应该不仅仅是财务上的成功，或者只是支付租金的必要邪恶。在创世纪中，上帝将亚当置于“进入伊甸园的衣服并保持它的衣服”。换句话说，即使在原始的天堂（在与蛇和苹果的所有不愉快之后），God设计了以他的形象制作的第一个人，可以工作，而不是撒谎。圣经没有提及亚当的日常工作很容易或有趣，但显然这是有意义的。在花园里工作是他生活在创造者的形象中。印度教的教导非常相似：“通过进行自然职业，人们崇拜所有生物实体的创造者。”
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.
尽管他们表面上是世俗的取向，但仍被教导要帮助客户找到对特定职业的“超凡传票”。这是因为客户要求他们应该做这项工作的不可言喻。心理学家对这种所需的职业召唤感进行了深入的研究。波士顿大学的两名研究人员在《组织行为杂志》上写作，将“客观职业”区分开来，他们将其定义为出于完全实际的原因（例如薪水）和“主观职业”而定义为工作，这些职业是为了召唤的。他们认为，即使在艰难时期，主观职业也能带来更大的满意度。考虑一下：在非常糟糕的一天，您可能会在愤怒中辞职，但是即使在最糟糕的日子里，您也不会退出呼叫，因为您没有选择它 - 它选择了您。
The definition of success in an objective career generally revolves around money, power, or prestige. In a subjective career, the definition of success is much more profound than these worldly rewards. That goes deeper than just “I love my job,” as a matter of fact. Researchers demonstrated this in 2012 by devising a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with such statements as “I have a good understanding of my calling as it applies to my career.” The higher the subjects’ scores on these questions, the researchers found, the more those people felt meaning in their life. This is not to say that their life’s purpose was work per se; that would be plain workaholism. Rather, their work was a vehicle for that purpose, not an impediment. And a sense of purpose is precisely where meaning begins.
在客观职业中成功的定义通常围绕金钱，权力或声望。在主观职业中，成功的定义比这些世俗的回报要深刻得多。事实上，这比“我爱我的工作”更深入。研究人员在2012年设计了一项调查来证明这一点，该调查要求人们同意或不同意诸如“我对我的职业生涯的呼吁有很好的了解”。研究人员发现，在这些问题上的分数越高，那些人在生活中的意义就越多。这并不是说他们的生活目的本身是工作。那将是简单的工作狂。相反，他们的工作是实现此目的的工具，而不是障碍。目的感正是含义开始的地方。
Derek Thompson: Your career is just one-eighth of your life
德里克·汤普森（Derek Thompson）：您的职业生涯只是您一生的八分之一
You might conclude, then, that the luckiest people in the world are those who are sure of their calling. You might look at a terrifically gifted athlete or an amazingly talented musician, and assume that they’re blessed to be born with this knowledge. That assumption would be wrong, however, because children who choose their path in life according to an unusual vocational talent can easily wind up quite unhappy. I speak partly from personal experience: For a dozen years, I pursued a career as a classical French-horn player, which I was sure was my calling from the age of 8. By the time I was 28, being a musician felt less like my vocation and more like a prison sentence.
那么，您可能会得出结论，世界上最幸运的人是那些确定呼唤的人。您可能会看一位有才华的运动员或一位才华横溢的音乐家，并假设他们很幸运能够天生就拥有这种知识。但是，这种假设是错误的，因为根据不寻常的职业才能选择生活道路的孩子很容易使人感到不高兴。我的一部分是从个人经历中讲话的：十多年，我从事了一个古典法国人的职业，我确信这是我8岁起的呼唤。到我28岁时，我的音乐家就不像我的职业一样，更像是徒刑。
The secret is not finding the perfect job but making your work, whatever that happens to be, your calling. This involves three steps:
秘密不是找到完美的工作，而是要使您的工作，无论发生什么，您的呼唤。这涉及三个步骤：
1. Look within.
1。看。
The first step is to home in on what economists dryly call “intrinsic compensation.” This is in contrast to “extrinsic compensation,” or the material benefits of employment, such as wage, benefits, and prestige. Intrinsic rewards include the inherent psychological recompense you get from working. Although you do need extrinsic rewards to pay the rent, intrinsic rewards are what give you meaning. Researchers have consistently shown that when people are intrinsically motivated, they like their job more, work harder, and stick with it longer than when they are only extrinsically motivated.
第一步是要回家经济学家干燥地称为“内在薪酬”。这与“外部补偿”或就业的重大利益（例如工资，福利和声望）形成鲜明对比。内在的奖励包括您从工作中获得的固有的心理补偿。尽管您确实需要外部奖励来支付租金，但固有的奖励才是您的意义。研究人员一直表明，当人们内在的动力时，他们更喜欢自己的工作，更加努力地工作，并且比外在动机时更长的时间。
The intrinsic-reward step holds true for life more generally, not just for your work: Studies on students, for example, have shown that when they do puzzles out of purely intrinsic motivation—in effect, for fun—they persevere at them longer than students who are set the same task with only the extrinsic motivation of achieving a performance goal, such as course credit. Similarly, you may have noticed that your relationship with your partner is better when you do nice things for each other purely out of love, rather than for some purpose such as avoiding a fight or winning favor.
本质上的奖励步骤不仅在您的工作中不仅仅是一生：例如，研究学生的研究表明，当他们出于纯粹的内在动机而出现难题时（有效，娱乐活动），他们坚持不懈地对他们的工作更长的时间，他们比只有实现绩效目标（例如课程学分）设定相同的任务。同样，您可能已经注意到，与伴侣的关系纯粹是出于爱，而不是出于某种目的，例如避免打架或赢得胜利，您与伴侣的关系会更好。
2. Focus on fascination.
2。着眼于迷恋。
One intrinsic reward that especially corresponds to calling is interest. Interest is a basic positive emotion that has a clear evolutionary root: Ancient humans who were motivated to learn were surely more inclined to prosper from exploration, and were therefore more likely to pass on their genes than incurious troglodytic layabouts. So seek a job that is intrinsically interesting to you. Interest is highly personal, of course: One of my sons is an obsessed data scientist; the other talks nonstop about his work as a construction manager. Neither one of them can imagine wanting to do what the other does—or what I do, for that matter.
一个尤其与通话的内在奖励是利益。兴趣是一种基本的积极情绪，具有明确的进化论：被激励学习的古代人肯定更倾向于从探索中繁荣起来，因此，比不可思议的troglodlodlodtic Bayabouts更有可能传递其基因。因此，请寻求一份对您来说本质上有趣的工作。当然，兴趣是高度个人化的：我的一个儿子是一个痴迷的数据科学家。其他人不停地谈论他作为建筑经理的工作。他们俩都无法想象想做另一个人或我所做的事情。
Understandably, you might be in a particular work situation out of necessity, and would note that you don’t have the luxury of being fascinated by what you need to do for a living. That is fair, and no job is interesting all of the time. But even a job taken out of sheer desperation may have some interesting facets. A musician friend who’d taken a temporary job in food service while auditioning for a position in symphony orchestras told me that he’d managed to make his work interesting by focusing on how people around him behaved, as if he were an anthropologist, and keeping a journal at night of what he observed.
可以理解的是，您可能出于必要而处于特定的工作状况，并且会指出，您没有对自己需要做的事情着迷的奢侈。这是公平的，而且没有工作总是很有趣。但是，即使是从绝望中获得的工作也可能有一些有趣的方面。一位音乐家朋友在试镜中在交响乐团中的职位时从事临时工作，他告诉我，他设法通过专注于周围的人的举止，好像他是人类学家，并在晚上保持日记，从而使他的工作变得有趣。
3. Be that person.
3。成为那个人。
A second, important type of intrinsic reward can be found in service to others. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that researchers have found the highest satisfaction and morale in workplaces where a strong culture of helping and reciprocity exists. They have also shown that an impulse to assist your co-workers will raise your own job satisfaction. In other words, if you avail yourself of opportunities to help others, your job will become more satisfying—more like a calling, in fact.
可以在为他人服务时找到第二种重要的内在奖励。得知研究人员在工作场所中发现了最高的满意和士气，在强烈的帮助和互惠文化中，您可能不会感到惊讶。他们还表明，帮助您的同事的冲动将提高您自己的工作满意度。换句话说，如果您利用自己帮助他人的机会，您的工作将变得更加令人满意，实际上更像是一个呼唤。
Helping others at work can take many forms. One young man, seeking my advice, said he feels like a drudge in his cubicle farm, surrounded by people who got no more meaning from work than he did. I advised him to look for ways to engage, unbidden, in small acts of kindness throughout the day. For example, I said, bring the guy in the next cubicle a fresh cup of coffee after lunch, and notice his happy reaction. Write an email of appreciation to someone for no extrinsic reason. Being that person, I reasoned, would surely change for the better how he sees his role in the workplace.
帮助工作中的其他人可以采取多种形式。一个年轻人寻求我的建议，他说他在他的隔间农场里感觉像是一个乱七八糟的人，周围是没有比他从工作中获得更多意义的人的包围。我建议他全天寻找，无限制的善行，以无限制的方式参与。例如，我说，在午餐后把那个家伙带到下一个隔间里的一杯新鲜的咖啡，并注意到他快乐的反应。不出于外部原因向某人写一封赞赏的电子邮件。我认为，成为那个人肯定会改变他在工作场所中的角色的更好。
Read: Career advice: give
阅读：职业建议：给予
When, in my 30s, I finally broke away from music and went back to school in order to change professions, I had a gnawing fear that I was simply a chronic malcontent who would wind up as dissatisfied a social scientist as I had been a miserable French-horn player. I needn’t have worried—because what I do now truly feels like my calling, and it’s a deep source of satisfaction.
当我30多岁的时候，我终于摆脱了音乐，回到学校以改变职业时，我担心自己只是一个长期的不满，他会像我是一个悲惨的法国人一样对社会科学家感到不满意。我不必担心 - 因为我现在所做的事情确实像我的呼唤一样，这是一个深切的满足来源。
But something else occurs to me: I now see that if I could have shown this column to my younger self, I might have found much more meaning as a musician. I could have appreciated the intrinsic reward of playing some of the greatest music ever written. I could have shown more interest in learning about that music and the people who wrote it. I could have found ways to lighten the daily load of my fellow musicians through small acts of kindness and consideration.
但是我发生了其他事情：我现在看到，如果我可以向年轻的自我展示此专栏，那么作为音乐家，我可能会发现更多的意义。我本可以欣赏播放有史以来最伟大的音乐的内在奖励。我本可以对学习音乐及其写作的人们更感兴趣。我本可以通过小小的善良和考虑来找到方法来减轻我的音乐家的日常负担。
To find a calling is not about the actual work of chopping wood and carrying water. The sense of calling comes in how we make the act of chopping wood meaningful, and in how we serve others by the water we’re carrying. That is the path to true enlightenment.
要找到一个呼唤，这与砍伐木头和载水的实际工作无关。呼唤的感觉是我们如何使木材有意义的行为以及如何通过所携带的水为他人服务。那是实现真正启蒙的途径。
