Your Calling Is Not Your Capability
How building capability through diverse experiences reveals your true calling more clearly than searching for passion alone.
CALLING ISN'T ALWAYS A DESTINATION: SOMETIMES, IT'S A DIRECTION
For most of my career, I knew one thing with surprising certainty: I wanted to work on something I cared about. The problem was that I had no idea what that was.
I learned over time, by stepping outside my comfort zone, what I didn't want, along with which environments energized me and which ones drained me. I learned that I liked learning, solving problems, teaching, organizing, and understanding why things worked the way they did. So I kept trying things.
I took different roles. I worked across industries. I developed new skills. I discovered things I was good at and things I was not. I learned what I enjoyed, what I tolerated, and what I never wanted to do again. I also learned when I had reached the limit of a role and when it was time to pivot because there was no clear path for advancement.
For a long time, it felt like I was wandering. Now, I think of it more as becoming capable. That distinction has changed how I understand calling.
Calling Is Not the Same Thing as Desire
Our culture has given us plenty of career advice:
Follow your passion.
Do what you love.
Be yourself.
There is truth in these ideas, but they often leave something important undefined. They tell us to ask what we want. They do not necessarily teach us to ask what we are for. Those are very different questions.
I have come to think of calling as more than the thing that makes us feel fulfilled. It is a direction toward a good that our particular gifts, experiences, and developing abilities can increasingly serve. Your career is not simply an opportunity for self-expression. It is one place where your abilities can be directed toward something beyond yourself.
This is where the older understanding of vocation gives us something our modern language of self-discovery often lacks. We are not merely asking, What do I want to do?
We should also be asking:
What have I been given? What am I becoming capable of? And where can those things be put toward something good?
Capability Often Comes Before Clarity
For years, I thought my problem was that I hadn't found my thing. I now think I had the problem backward. I was still building and developing a skill set. I was in the process of becoming capable.
Every role gave me another piece of information. Some experiences developed skills I would later need. Others showed me what I did not want. Some introduced me to problems I found fascinating. Others gave me enough contrast to recognize what actually mattered to me. None of those experiences were wasted simply because they weren't the answer. They were building capability. And as I've discovered, capability is different from calling.
Capability is what you can do. Calling is what you are increasingly oriented toward doing well and for a reason.
This is why I have become skeptical of the idea that we must discover our passion before we begin. How do you know what you are passionate about if you haven't encountered enough of the world to discover what captures your attention? How do you know what you are good at if you haven't tried enough things to develop your abilities? How do you know which problems are worth spending your life solving if you haven't spent enough time solving problems to recognize which ones matter to you?
Sometimes clarity isn't the prerequisite for action. Action becomes the catalyst for clarity.
The Detours May Be Part of the Formation
We often evaluate our past according to whether it directly advanced us toward our eventual destination. However, I've found that this mindset creates unnecessary anxiety.
I spent three years doing that. Was it a waste?
I changed industries. Did I get off track?
I developed all these skills, but I don't use them now. Why did I bother?
But capability compounds even when job titles don't. A skill learned in one environment can become an instrument in another. A problem you learned to solve in one industry can teach you how to recognize the same underlying structure somewhere completely different. Even discovering what you don't want has incredible value. Sometimes you need to experience enough of the wrong thing to recognize the right one.
Looking backward, I can see that this is what happened to me. I spent years becoming proficient in many different things without knowing exactly where those capabilities would eventually lead.
I left a master's degree program one semester short of graduation because I realized, ethically, that I did not align with its philosophy.
I earned a Certificate in Project Management to broaden my skill set and expand my credibility, but I never pursued an official job title in that field.
I drove an hour in one direction for a company I simply found interesting, despite management not agreeing on what my actual role would be.
I served as a Direct Support Professional at a school for children severely affected by autism. Despite getting paid peanuts, I changed the diapers of 16-year-olds twice my size, knowing they needed me and knowing I could set and stretch a budget.
None of these experiences followed a neat career plan. Yet each one taught me something. Each one added another skill, another perspective, another piece of understanding.
Now I find myself in a very different position. I am highly capable in many areas, and I have also become increasingly clear about the questions I actually care about.
I don't say this to boast, but simply to emphasize that hard work pays off, and time invested in learning skills—even without a clear direction—is still a worthwhile pursuit.
My calling has become clearer, even though its final form has not. And that has been liberating.
A Calling Can Be Clear Before Its Form Is
We put enormous pressure on ourselves to know the title, industry, job description, and five-year plan. But sometimes what becomes clear first is not the form. It is the direction.
I know that I care deeply about human formation. I want to understand how people become the kind of people who can live, work, govern, and build well. I am increasingly interested in the structures and systems that shape human behavior rather than merely reacting to its outcomes.
All the while, I don't yet know exactly what that becomes.
Research? Education? Writing? Organizational work? Something I haven't encountered yet?
I don't know.
But I don't think that uncertainty means I lack a calling. It may simply mean that the calling is ahead of the form.
In the meantime, I can continue developing the capabilities that allow me to explore it further. This is where AI architecture has become particularly interesting to me.
I didn't begin my career thinking, I am going to become an AI architect so that someday I can study human formation. The path was much less linear than that. But I can now see how the capability connects to the calling.
AI architecture requires me to think about systems, structures, governance, decision-making, human-AI interaction, organizational knowledge, constraints, and the conditions under which complex systems behave well.
The technical capability does not define my calling. It gives me another instrument with which to pursue it.
I am beginning to understand that the calling is not the position itself, but the good I am trying to serve through whatever position I occupy.
We Don't Have to Know Everything Before We Begin
Maybe the better career question isn't simply:
"What am I called to do?"
Perhaps we should also ask:
- What am I becoming capable of?
- What am I consistently drawn toward understanding or building?
- What problems seem worth solving even when they are difficult?
- What have my experiences taught me about where I flourish?
- Where might my growing capabilities be put toward something genuinely good?
The answers may not give you a five-year plan, but they may give you direction—and a first step.
I'd argue that's better.
Perhaps calling is not a destination we discover fully formed. Perhaps it is something we become increasingly able to recognize as our capabilities, experiences, responsibilities, loves, and understanding mature.
We don't need to see the finished picture before we begin painting. We need to be faithful with the colors we've been given.
Perhaps the work of a career is not simply discovering the one thing we were born to do, but becoming the kind of person capable of faithfully using what we've been given when the opportunity to serve something greater arrives.
