According to Howard C. Cutler and the Dalai Lama when one has a job one is just working for money. When one has a career one is working for money, but also prestige and recognition from peers. The Dalai Lama deems a calling as " a higher purpose or meaning in one's work [that] involves being of some help to other people." This could mean many things other than directly helping people as a social worker would, such as an engineer completing excellent work that ultimately improves the lives of others or a banker supporting their loved ones with the money they make.
I appreciate the Dali Lama's definition of a calling for it allows almost any type of work one does to be elevated to the status of a calling. One might ask why does one need to think of their work as a calling, when it is not something tangible and cannot be seen by others? I believe it is good for the self: a part of good being and being content with one's place in life. The beauty of the concept of a "calling" is the determination of work being a calling purely dependent on the individual completing the work. This is unlike a career, for the happiness one attains from having one depends on external sources which may fail to materialize.
Honestly I have made the mistake of only looking at my current work as just a job, and I now recognize this has been detrimental to my own happiness. Now that I have been introduced to the idea of a calling I am going to try to reconfigure my definition of my job in my own mind. The reason I originally looked at my internship in the university's communications department negatively is I did not see any value in my work on the schools Facebook. However I should value my work for multiple reasons:
1) the money I am making is allowing me to go to this school, which I love
2) the improvements I have made to the school's social media may eventually indirectly help the school someday which would not only benefit me, but many others
3) I have an opportunity to pick up many new skills and while they are not directly related to the type of work I would like to do in the future, a skill is valuable no matter what and I trust that eventually I will get to use them for something I am truly interested in.
You do a great job of playing the believing game with the Dalai Lama in this post. You're right that one of the benefits of his philosophy is that it enables any job to be considered a calling.
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