Taking advantage of vocation

Charles Mathewes, a professor at UVA, recently wrote for Inside Higher Ed about vocation, calling, and work. His advice is specific to professors, but I think this is applicable far beyond that field!

But ironically the difficulty everyone faces seems, to me at least, interestingly similar: we all face an inability to distinguish between different dimensions of an academic vocation, and we do so for the same reason that so many of us find this vocation, considered abstractly, so profoundly satisfying: because those dimensions must be distinguished and teased apart subjectively, by our own individual intentional action.  We experience our lives without much internal differentiation imposed upon our lives by outside forces — it’s all up to us to do.

Here’s the whole article.