You Don't Have a Calling, You Have a Direction

For most of my adult life, I believed calling was an event.

I was waiting for the moment — the burning bush, the Damascus Road, the unmistakable divine download that would remove all ambiguity and tell me exactly what I was supposed to do with my life. I assumed that clarity was the prerequisite for commitment, and that the right move was to hold still until that clarity arrived.

What I've learned, often by doing it wrong, is that calling doesn't work that way. Not for most people. Not most of the time.

Calling isn't an event. It's a direction.

The Problem With the "One Big Calling" Framework

The idea that every person has a singular, specific, God-ordained purpose waiting to be discovered is deeply embedded in both religious and secular culture. It shows up in church altar calls and TED talks and commencement speeches. "Find your passion." "Discover your purpose." "You were made for this."

It's compelling language. It's also quietly paralyzing.

When you believe there's one right answer to the question of your calling, every decision becomes freighted with existential weight. Taking the wrong job isn't just a career mistake — it's a destiny detour. Pivoting to a new venture isn't just a business decision — it's a potential abandonment of your true purpose. The search for calling becomes a kind of perfectionism, and perfectionism, as any honest entrepreneur will tell you, is just fear with better branding.

I've watched gifted leaders spend years in analysis paralysis, waiting for certainty that never came. Meanwhile, the people who were actually building things — organizations, businesses, movements — weren't waiting for a calling. They were following a direction.

Direction, Not Destination

Here's the reframe that changed the way I think about this: a calling is less like a destination on a map and more like a compass heading. It points you somewhere. It orients your decisions. It gives you enough to move toward without requiring you to know every turn in advance.

For most entrepreneurs and mission-driven leaders, that compass heading tends to cluster around a few consistent themes: the kind of people they want to serve, the kind of problems they're drawn to solve, the kind of work that feels like an expression of who they actually are rather than a performance of who they think they should be.

You don't need to know the destination to follow the heading. You just need to keep moving in the right direction, stay curious about what you're learning, and be honest with yourself about what's working and what isn't.

Calling Is Confirmed in Motion, Not in Stillness

This is perhaps the most practically useful insight I've found: calling is almost never confirmed in a quiet room waiting for a sign. It's confirmed in motion. You discover what you're called to by doing things, noticing what comes alive in you, and following that energy forward.

Entrepreneurs understand this intuitively when it comes to business. You don't fully know if a market exists until you try to sell to it. You don't know if a model works until you run it. The most important intelligence you gather is gathered in motion.

The same is true of calling. You often don't know what you're made for until you've done enough things to see the pattern. The pattern is the calling. And you can only see the pattern looking backward, which means you have to be willing to move forward without it.

A Portfolio Calling Is Still a Calling

One of the most liberating ideas for the kind of leaders I work with is that a calling doesn't have to be singular to be real. The entrepreneur who runs a consulting practice, oversees a business acquisition, writes books, and mentors other leaders isn't scattered. He's integrated. Those aren't competing callings — they're facets of one directional life.

This is increasingly true for a generation of leaders who are building portfolio careers and fractional lives. The old model — one organization, one role, one clear lane for forty years — isn't the dominant model anymore. And the "one big calling" framework doesn't serve people who are leading multiple things simultaneously.

If you're living a portfolio life, your calling is the thread that runs through all of it. The common denominator. The thing that, when you strip away all the different projects and titles and organizational affiliations, remains.

Find that thread. Follow it. That's your direction.

What to Do With This

If you've been waiting for a calling event, I want to give you permission to stop waiting. Start moving. Pick the direction that feels most true to who you are and what you care about, and take a step toward it. Then another. Adjust as you learn.

Ask yourself not "What am I called to?" but "What direction am I already facing?" The answer is usually closer than you think. It shows up in what you read when no one is watching, in what problems you find yourself solving even when you're not getting paid, in what kind of people you're drawn to help.

Your calling is probably already underway. You may just be too busy looking for the event to notice the direction.

For more information on this subject, stay tuned for my newest book (Coming January 2027, The Myth of One Big Calling, Whitaker House 2027

). The goal is to help readers discover their current "Assignment" instead of their overarching "Calling". Discovering your purpose is much more about discerning your assignment in this season of your life than it is about discovering a singular calling for your life.

If you're building an organization with a long horizon and want strategic help finding your vision and current direction, Advance Partners would love to be part of that conversation.