What Job Should I Have

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Figuring out what job you should have is one of those questions that sounds simple and turns out to be enormous. I’ve spent a lot of time with it— both in my own life and in conversations with people who are trying to figure out what they’re doing and why it matters. What I’ve found is that the question isn’t really about job titles.

Research by Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale identified three orientations workers have: a job (source of income), a career (path to advancement), or a calling (work that’s inseparable from your sense of purpose). The right job for you aligns your values, uses your core strengths, provides meaningful contribution, and supports the life you want to build.

Key Takeaways

• Job fit is multi-dimensional: The right job aligns values, strengths, meaningful contribution, and lifestyle— not just skills or salary.
• Your orientation toward work matters more than your job title: Research shows calling orientation predicts higher life satisfaction and engagement regardless of what industry you’re in.
• Passion is cultivated, not discovered: You’re more likely to grow into meaningful work than to find a pre-existing calling— small experiments accelerate this.
• “Nothing sounds appealing” is a signal, not a verdict: If everything feels gray, that’s useful data about your current state— and there are concrete steps for what to do next.

Why This Question Is So Hard {#why-this-question-is-so-hard}

If you’re carrying around the sense that you should be doing something different— something that actually fits you— you’re far from alone. Only 18% of employees describe their current job as one that has a purpose they personally believe in, according to Gallup’s 2024 research on purposeful work. You’re not failing at this. You’re in the majority.

If you don’t know what you want to do, you’ve probably already tried the quick fixes. You’ve taken three career quizzes and gotten three different answers. You’ve googled “what career is right for me” and read the same generic lists. You know your Myers-Briggs type but still feel exactly as lost as before.

Here’s the thing about that experience: it’s not a personal failure. It’s a reflection of how rarely we’re taught to think clearly about work.

Most career advice treats the question like a matching exercise— figure out what you’re good at, find a job that needs those things, done. But that’s not why the question feels so heavy. It feels heavy because it’s not just “what role.” It’s “what kind of life.” And that’s a much bigger question.

Gallup also found that 45% of workers are primarily motivated by a paycheck and benefits. That’s real and valid. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably not fully satisfied with that answer.

The most useful thing I’ve found for thinking through this question is a framework that has nothing to do with job titles.

The Three Orientations: Job, Career, and Calling {#the-three-orientations-job-career-and-calling}

Research by Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale found that workers don’t just have different jobs— they have different orientations toward work itself. Understanding yours is the most useful single step in answering the question “what job should I have?”

The research identified three orientations:

As Wrzesniewski put it: “People see their work as a Job (focusing on financial rewards and necessity), a Career (focusing on advancement), or a Calling (focusing on enjoyment of fulfilling, socially useful work).”

Here’s the part that stops people cold. Calling orientation is distributed roughly equally across all professions— even among college administrative assistants doing identical work, roughly a third experienced their role as a job, a third as a career, and a third as a calling. The calling isn’t in the job title. It’s in the relationship the person builds with their work.

That’s so, so important. It means a plumber can feel called and a doctor can feel like they’re just punching a clock. Job title is almost beside the point.

And here’s the hopeful part: orientation isn’t fixed. Research by Mantler, Campbell, and Dupré in 2022 shows that calling orientation can develop and shift at mid-career. If you’ve been forcing yourself into the wrong kind of work relationship— feeling like a square peg in a round hole— the problem may not be your job title at all. It may be the kind of work relationship you’ve been building.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 98 studies (N=50,009) confirmed that calling orientation is linked to higher job satisfaction, lower burnout, and more proactive career behavior.

But orientation is just one dimension of fit. There are several others— and most career advice ignores most of them.

What Actually Determines Job Fit {#what-actually-determines-job-fit}

Here’s what most career advice gets wrong: it treats job fit like a single variable. Either you’re in the right job or you’re not. But job fit is actually five overlapping dimensions— and most people who feel drained at work are missing on more than one of them.

Here’s what people get wrong: they try to solve job fit by optimizing for one dimension— usually compensation or job title— while ignoring the rest. Then they wonder why they still feel drained.

The five dimensions:

• Values alignment — Does this work reflect what actually matters to you? Work that conflicts with your values drains energy, regardless of everything else. A strong salary doesn’t fix a values mismatch— it just delays the reckoning.
• Strengths — Are you using your core character strengths? The VIA Institute’s research shows workers with high strengths awareness are 9.5x more likely to be flourishing.
• Meaningful contribution — Do you experience your work as contributing to something beyond yourself? This is Wrzesniewski’s calling orientation in practice. It’s also the “purpose” component in Dan Pink’s Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose framework in Drive.
• Autonomy — Do you have enough control over how you work? Pink’s book Drive grounds this clearly: autonomy is a core prerequisite for intrinsic motivation. Without some degree of ownership over your work, sustained engagement is nearly impossible.
• Lifestyle fit — Hours, location, pace, earning potential. Not the whole answer, but a real dimension. Don’t ignore it.

What a dimension failure looks like:

Think about someone who’s technically excellent at their job— the skills are there, the work is interesting. But the organization keeps asking them to be vague with clients, to soften bad news into something more palatable. They’re firing on three dimensions and completely missing on values alignment. And they will not sustain it. Not for long.

A 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed that character strengths fit with your work environment predicts wellbeing beyond standard personality measures alone.

If you’re only satisfied on two of five dimensions, engagement won’t hold. That’s not pessimism— that’s just how fit works.

There’s one more thing to address before we get to how you figure out your own fit— and it’s probably the advice you’ve heard most.

The “Follow Your Passion” Problem {#the-follow-your-passion-problem}

“Follow your passion” is mostly bad advice. Not because passion doesn’t matter— it does— but because it implies passion is something you find rather than something you build.

Cal Newport’s argument in So Good They Can’t Ignore You is direct: passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. Newport calls this “career capital”— rare, valuable skills you develop through deliberate practice. The problem with the passion hypothesis isn’t that passion is fake. It’s that it tells people to wait for a feeling of certainty before acting— and that feeling rarely arrives in advance. Passion is downstream of mastery and autonomy, not upstream of them.

Wrzesniewski’s research adds something important here. Calling orientation isn’t a fixed property of a person— it can develop and shift, especially at mid-career. So you’re not looking for a pre-existing calling waiting to be discovered. You’re asking what direction you’re willing to move in and build toward.

The reframe matters. “What am I already passionate about?” is usually a dead end. “What am I willing to get good at?” opens something.

If you want help thinking about this more, there’s useful material on how to find what you love to do— but notice that even the framing there is about process, not predetermined discovery.

(And yes— if you need a paycheck right now, optimize for that. A job orientation isn’t a failure. It’s honest.)

So how do you actually figure this out? Here’s a practical framework.

How to Figure Out What Job Is Right for You {#how-to-figure-out-what-job-is-right-for-you}

Start with what you don’t want. Most people find it easier to identify what drains them than what energizes them— and that’s useful data.

This isn’t the same as giving up on finding meaningful work. It’s using the clearest signal you have. If you’re feeling lost about your career direction, an energy audit is the best starting point I know.

Think through your current or most recent role. What drained you most— and was it the tasks, the people, the pace, the mission, or something else? That question matters more than it sounds. Someone who discovers they hated the work structure (no autonomy, constant oversight, decision-making divorced from them) learns something totally different than someone who hated the product they were building. The problem wasn’t the industry. It was dimension four.

From there, the process looks something like this:

Values clarification — What actually matters to you in work? Use the five dimensions from the section above as a checklist. Which ones feel non-negotiable? Which could you live with at 70%?

Strengths inventory — What are your top character strengths? The VIA Character Strengths assessment is free and worth doing. CareerOneStop’s Interest Assessment from the U.S. Department of Labor is also free and grounded in Holland’s research on person-environment fit. Use both as data, not as verdicts. (Tools like MBTI and career quizzes are conversation starters, not final answers.)

The ikigai check — The National Career Development Association describes ikigai as four intersections: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. These rarely all overlap completely— but partial overlap, moving toward fuller alignment, is the real goal.

And if you’ve already tried the introspection angle and still feel stuck— that’s a different signal. When thinking harder hasn’t worked, action is almost always the unlock. Not big action. Small experiments.

Before you move on, sit with these three questions:

1. In my current (or last) role, which of the five dimensions did I experience most strongly?
2. Which dimension was most absent— and how much did that matter to me?
3. What kind of work relationship am I moving toward— job, career, or calling?

Career clarity typically develops over 6 to 18 months through iterative exploration— not a single decision. That’s not discouraging. It’s permission to move imperfectly.

Knowing the framework isn’t enough. You need to test it.

Your Next Steps— Experiments, Not Just Reflection {#your-next-steps-experiments-not-just-reflection}

Career clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from testing small hypotheses about what kind of work fits you.

Thinking more will not get you to clarity. Only action generates new data.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the economy will add 5.2 million jobs from 2024 to 2034. There’s room to move. The job landscape isn’t closing— it’s expanding. That context matters when you’re deciding whether to experiment.

Here are four experiments worth running:

1. Informational interview — Talk to someone doing a role you’re curious about. One person discovered through this process that the job she’d been eyeing for two years had far less autonomy than she imagined— the decisions all ran through a senior manager. That discovery reframed her entire search. Fifteen minutes of honest conversation saved her from a costly pivot.

2. Side project or volunteer work — Something small, time-limited, in a direction you’re curious about. The goal isn’t to build a side hustle. It’s to generate real data about how that type of work feels.

3. Strengths assessment + reflection — Take the free VIA assessment at viacharacter.org, then reflect: which of your top strengths are being actively used in your current or target role? Which are being ignored?

4. Role design conversation — Before concluding you need a new job, ask whether your current role can be adjusted. Can you shift toward more autonomy, more mission-relevant work, different tasks? Sometimes the answer is yes— and it doesn’t require starting over.

A few things I hear most from people working through this:

Frequently Asked Questions {#frequently-asked-questions}

How do I know if I’m in the wrong job?

The clearest signs are persistent energy drain (not just bad days), regular conflict between your values and your organization’s actual behavior, and the inability to imagine thriving in a similar role in five years. One bad week isn’t a verdict. But if the pattern holds across months, it’s worth taking seriously.

Is it too late to change careers?

No. Research by Mantler et al. (2022) shows calling orientation can develop and shift at mid-career. And the BLS projects 5.2 million new U.S. jobs from 2024 to 2034. Career transitions are both psychologically possible and economically viable at any stage.

What if nothing sounds appealing?

If every career direction feels gray, that’s almost always a burnout signal or a sign of insufficient exploration— not a sign that nothing can be meaningful. Start by identifying what you don’t want. Then experiment with small tests in directions that spark even mild curiosity. Building skill in any direction generates more data than waiting.

What is a calling?

A calling is a work orientation where your job feels inseparable from your sense of identity and purpose. Wrzesniewski’s 1997 research documented this orientation across all professions, and the 2025 meta-analysis confirmed it’s associated with higher life satisfaction and lower burnout. And it can develop through engagement and skill-building— not just be discovered.

What are the best tools for figuring out what career is right for me?

The VIA Character Strengths assessment (free at viacharacter.org) and CareerOneStop’s Interest Assessment (free, Holland-based) are both useful starting points. Treat them as conversation starters, not final answers— the goal is to generate hypotheses to test, not to receive a verdict.

The Question Behind the Question

The question “what job should I have?” is really asking something deeper— what kind of relationship do you want with your work?

That reframe matters. It shifts the search from “which job title fits me?” to “what kind of work am I building toward?” One question is about matching. The other is about direction.

Three things worth doing from here: identify which orientation you’re moving toward— job, career, or calling— and whether that matches what you actually want. Audit the five dimensions of fit and find where the gaps are. And then experiment. Small, time-limited tests in directions that interest you. Not once. Over and over, in small increments.

You don’t find the right job. You build toward it— one experiment, one honest conversation, one small adjustment at a time.

The clarity you’re looking for is on the other side of action, not the other side of thinking.

If you want to go deeper, questions to discover your purpose and connecting to your purpose are good next reads.

I believe in you.