Tag: Calling

The Map and the Compass

Why uncertainty has become so frightening to a generation searching for a vocation.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Part 3 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)

Every semester, I meet students who believe there is a correct answer to a question that has no answer key. They worry that choosing the wrong major, accepting the wrong internship, or moving to the wrong city will permanently derail the life they were meant to live. They are not simply hoping to make a wise decision. They are hoping to eliminate uncertainty altogether.

In the earlier essays in this series, I argued that this anxiety reflects a misunderstanding of vocation. We have inherited the modern assumption that meaningful lives emerge from identifying one ideal career, fully formed and waiting to be discovered. Increasingly, however, I have come to think something deeper is also at work. Long before these students ever chose a major, many were growing up in environments that gave them fewer opportunities to practice uncertainty itself.

Jonathan Haidt’s research offers a helpful framework. In The Anxious Generation, he argues that childhood shifted dramatically during the early 2010s as unsupervised play gave way to smartphones and constant adult oversight. The result was not simply more screen time. There were fewer opportunities to negotiate conflict, tolerate boredom, solve problems independently, and recover from ordinary failure. Childhood gradually became safer in many visible ways while becoming less effective at cultivating resilience in invisible ones.

Read alongside what many educators are observing, Haidt’s work helps explain an increasingly familiar pattern. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe what they call safetyism: the tendency to interpret emotional discomfort as danger rather than as an ordinary part of life. It is not difficult to imagine vocational uncertainty being interpreted through the same lens.

Ambiguity, after all, feels remarkably similar to danger when uncertainty itself has rarely been practiced.

Jean Twenge’s research points toward a related pattern. Her work documents delayed milestones of independence, from driving and dating to living alone, alongside rising levels of anxiety and caution. Read together, Haidt and Twenge describe a generation that has often had fewer opportunities to build confidence through ordinary risk. The consequences extend well beyond childhood. They shape the way many young adults encounter work, relationships, and the future itself.

Yet uncertainty is not simply an obstacle to vocation. It may be one of its necessary conditions.

If life arrived with perfect clarity, we would have little reason to experiment, adapt, or discover capacities we never knew we possessed. We would choose once and simply execute the plan. But that is not how meaningful lives unfold. They unfold through countless small decisions, unexpected detours, closed doors, surprising opportunities, and responsibilities we could never have anticipated when we were eighteen years old. The uncertainty we often resist is also the environment in which wisdom grows.

In retrospect, few people describe their lives as the fulfillment of a carefully executed blueprint. More often, they describe a series of moments that only later reveal their connection to one another. The conversation between our gifts rarely reveals itself in advance. It becomes audible only after years of faithful attention.

The pattern appears repeatedly in classrooms and advising offices alike.

Students frequently ask whether there is some reliable way to know, in advance, that they are making the right choice. They hope there is a test that can reveal whether a career path will ultimately prove meaningful before they commit to it. The realization that no such test exists rarely brings relief. More often, it creates a quiet crisis.

They came expecting a map. What they are given instead is a compass.

A map promises certainty. A compass offers direction, but it still requires judgment, patience, and the willingness to walk before the destination becomes visible. The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that vocation resembles the second far more than the first.

None of this makes students’ anxiety less real, nor does it make them responsible for the conditions that helped produce it. It does suggest, however, that vocational guidance now involves more than helping people identify their strengths or explore possible careers. It increasingly requires helping them cultivate the resilience to remain inside uncertainty without mistaking it for failure.

Perhaps that is one of uncertainty’s forgotten purposes. It is not merely the space between decisions. It is the place where character matures, wisdom deepens, and vocation slowly learns its own voice.

The conversation between a person’s gifts—the conversation this series keeps returning to—cannot happen while every unanswered question feels like a verdict. It unfolds only when we become patient enough to trust that clarity often arrives not before the journey begins, but because we were willing to walk it.

Nothing Good Is Ever Wasted

The hidden continuity beneath every career change.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Author’s Note

This is Part 2 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work.

Since 2020, our economy, our culture, and our professional norms have been in a state of remarkable change. For traditional and nontraditional students alike, the pressure to choose the “right” major, the “right” career, or the “right” place to begin has taken on even greater weight than it did when I was in college. Many people are trying to build meaningful lives while carrying a fear that one “wrong” decision will define everything that follows.

This short series is my attempt to interject a bit of hope into that conversation. My hope is not to offer a formula for choosing the perfect path, but to encourage readers to think differently about vocation, giftedness, and the ways God has equipped us to flourish in a changing world.

Midlife career change carries its own mythology, distinct from the one that shapes a twenty-year-old’s choice of major, though built from similar material. The story goes something like this: at some point, usually after a decade or two in a field, a person realizes the work has stopped fitting. What follows, in the popular version, is a kind of erasure. Somewhere in the retelling, a lawyer starts throwing pottery, and a banker ends up teaching ninth-grade English. The story treats the earlier career as a costume, something worn for years and finally, gratefully, removed.

What rarely gets mentioned in these accounts is how much survives the change. The lawyer who now throws pottery still argues, in a sense, with the material, coaxing a stubborn piece of clay toward the shape it was always capable of holding. The banker who now teaches still reads a classroom the way she once read a boardroom, watching for the moment attention drifts and adjusting the pitch of her voice to pull it back. The old skill simply changes its clothes, arriving in the new work under an unfamiliar name.

Herminia Ibarra, whose work already shaped the argument in the piece before this one, describes reinvention as a process of trying on possible selves through action, long before the identity settles into language. The self doing the trying gets assembled from what came before, carried forward from a different room, under a different title. Much of its deepest work remains the same. It simply finds a new place to express itself.

When people ask me how to reinvent themselves, I have started asking a different question back: what did you already do well, long before this job, that this job happened to interrupt? The answer usually surprises them. A marketing director recalls the elaborate treasure hunts she used to plan for her cousins every summer, mapping clues across a whole neighborhood, while an accountant remembers building furniture in his garage on weekends, following instructions so complicated that friends stopped trusting him to help with theirs. These stories rarely make it onto a resume, yet they hold real evidence of a mind that already knows how it likes to work.

We often imagine careers as collections of technical competencies, though much of what makes work distinctive lives somewhere underneath the technique. Long before someone learns accounting or teaching, medicine or design, they are already developing habits of attention. A person notices patterns before anyone teaches them to. Another organizes chaos instinctively, or feels a pull toward explaining a difficult idea until it makes sense to someone else. Occupations give these habits a context, though they rarely invent them from scratch. Reinvention succeeds when a person finally recognizes the deeper continuities that have been shaping them all along, continuities that were there well before the new job gave them a name.

Reinvention, looked at this way, is less a departure and more a continuation of the same conversation, carried into a new room, with different furniture and unfamiliar lighting, though the old habits of attention are still standing in the corner, waiting to be recognized.

The person who starts over rarely starts empty-handed. They are simply moving the conversation into a room with a better view.