If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?
If the salary were the same, what job would I be doing right now? The same one.
That answer is easy for me because money has never been the main reason I have chosen a job. Of course salary matters. But whenever I have had a choice, I have wanted to work somewhere I believed in. That has mattered more to me than anything else.
I have always thought of work as something larger than a transaction. Work takes our attention, imagination, emotional energy and, over time, a significant portion of our lives. If we are going to give that much of ourselves to an organisation, it seems reasonable to ask whether we believe in what it is doing.
That is why I have always been more interested in vocation than career. A career asks where you are going. Vocation asks what is worth giving yourself to.
I love working with university students because they are at one of those stages of life when this question becomes especially important. They are choosing degrees and professions, but they are also making decisions about what kind of people they want to become, what they will value, what they will invest their energy in, and what they will eventually call success.
Education is not just about preparing people for work. It is also about helping them think about what work is for. The question “What job would you do if the salary were the same?” is really asking something deeper. What deserves your time? What kind of work is worth your energy? What kind of person do you want to become while doing it?
As I look back over my working life, I am grateful that I have spent it doing things I believed were worth doing. This prompt does not make me wish I had chosen another career. It makes me grateful that I did not wait for money to stop mattering before choosing work that mattered.
The Afterword 
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