At the beginning of the 1500s, the new profession of the merchant capitalist emerged. Merchants purchased foreign goods cheaply and sold them to the European aristocracy for large profits. They persuaded craftsmen to sell them their goods and then traveled from town to town in search of the best price. This meant that craftsmen now competed with

Fobazi coined a term for this—vocational awe—and wrote an academic paper about its prevalence in librarians.

BetterUp8 found that a sense of workplace belonging leads to a 56 percent improvement in job performance, a 50 percent reduction in turnover risk, and a 75

this rationale in the piece Work/Life Balance, in which he scratched out the second half of the “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” cliché in favor of a new phrase: “Do what you love and you’ll work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

I found that those with the healthiest relationships to their work had one thing in common: they all had a strong sense of who they were when they weren’t working.

do-gooder industries such as the nonprofit and public sectors, where the “privilege” to do

Following your passion works best for folks with the privilege to manage the inherent risk of doing so.

“Not everybody has the same springboards and safety nets to parlay their passions into gainful employment,” Erin Cech, a sociologist who researches fulfillment at work, told me. “If people are told to follow their passions, but we don’t provide an equal playing field in which they can do that, then telling people to

you can’t think yourself to better action, you’ve got to act yourself to better thinking.