This essay began as a Lunch & Learn session I recently delivered. It was titled Beyond the Job Title: Practical Reflections on Finding Meaning in Work.

I had been asked to speak about my career and some of the projects I am building. When I began putting the session together, it felt like a blind man walking through fog. My working life did not feel like a tidy sequence of events, at least from the inside.

I have moved through engineering, business, marketing, technology, startups, strategy, social impact, education, podcasting and events. For a long time, I saw these as separate chapters. Some were deliberate. Others were false starts, accidents or attempts to make a living while I figured out what came next.

Only recently have I begun to see the pattern.

At IBM, my job was developer marketing, but the part I cared about was building communities and bringing people together around new ideas.

In entrepreneurship education, I teach people how to test business models and speak to customers. But what matters more to me is helping someone move through uncertainty and take themselves seriously enough to begin.

In consulting, the work was about strategy and organisational problems. I was drawn to the moments when people saw something more clearly, spoke more honestly or found a way to work together with greater trust.

Even the projects I am working on now, which may appear unrelated, come from the same place.

The Disruptive Business Network explores technology, culture and the future of work. Finding Meaning in Work is a podcast and workshop. Stories & Salsa, a singles event built around dancing and guided conversation, is an experiment in creating the conditions for strangers to connect

On the surface, these are different projects. Underneath them is the same preoccupation: how do we create the conditions for people to act with greater courage, feel less alone and become more human?

The path has not been linear. But perhaps it has not been random either. As Steve Jobs famously said, we can only connect the dots looking backwards.

One of the great sporting autobiographies is Andre Agassi’s Open. In the opening pages, he makes a stunning admission: he hates tennis and has hated it for as long as he can remember.

He was pushed into the game by his father. Later, his own compulsion and toxic ambition kept driving him forward. By the time he wrote the book, his body had broken down, and he was looking back on a life that had also included drug use, shame and collapse.

His story raises an unsettling question: what happens when you become exceptionally good at something you no longer know how to care about?

You can be capable. You can be respected. You can be the reliable person who gets things done. You can be promoted, paid reasonably well and considered successful by almost every external measure.

And still find yourself wondering: what is this all in service of?

Competence is useful, but it can also become a trap. Once you are known for being good at something, people keep asking you to do more of it. Your identity begins to gather around your usefulness. You become the person who presents well, manages the difficult client, fixes the spreadsheet, runs the meeting, absorbs the tension or delivers at the last minute.

There may be pride in this. There may also be security. But the fact that you can do something does not answer the harder question of whether it remains worth giving yourself to.

Most of us are taught to optimise our working lives before we have worked out what the work is for. We become efficient before we become discerning. We learn to progress before deciding whether the direction is wholly ours.

This does not necessarily mean that we should quit. Leaving is sometimes an answer, but it is rarely the only one. The problem may be the role. It may also be the pace, the culture, the boundaries we have failed to set or the part of ourselves we have left unused for too long.

Before asking, “Should I leave?” it may be better to ask, “What is no longer honest here?”

A useful way to think about work is to distinguish between a job, a career and a calling.

A job is what pays you. There is nothing inferior about this. Rent matters. Food matters. Stability matters. Work does not need to fulfil your soul before it is allowed to have value. But you do it primarily to get paid

A career is what develops you. It involves mastery, progression, opportunity, reputation and growth.

A calling is different. I do not mean a voice descending from the heavens. A calling is the part of work that asks something meaningful of you. It taps into something elemental: your deepest strengths, your values and your innate talents. It may ask for your courage, care, patience, judgement, imagination or sense of responsibility.

Most of us need some relationship with all three. The trouble begins when we ask one of them to carry the entire weight of our lives.

We expect a job to provide our identity. We pursue career progression long after it has stopped leading us anywhere we want to go. Or we romanticise calling and forget that meaningful work can still involve boring admin, difficult people, compromise and days when we would rather stay in bed.

Meaningful work is not dream-job mythology. It is not loving every task. It is not monetising every passion or transforming your life into a personal brand. The most meaningful work may still contain frustration, rejection, administration and difficulty. The difference is that the difficulty is connected to something you believe matters.

Happiness asks, “Do I feel good?”

Meaning asks, “Is this worth it?”

Some of the most meaningful things we do will not make us happy in the immediate sense: raising a child, caring for an ageing parent, building an organisation, telling an uncomfortable truth or creating something that may fail. These experiences can exhaust us. They can also make us feel that our lives have substance.

During the Lunch & Learn, I asked everyone to think of a moment when work had felt unusually alive.

It did not need to be impressive. It could come from paid work, study, volunteering, care, creativity or helping someone through a difficult moment.

The question was simple. Perhaps pause for a minute and give it a try.

I like this exercise because meaning often leaves clues.

The moments that stay with us may reveal the people we care about serving, the problems we are drawn to, the conditions in which we come alive or the kind of responsibility we are willing to carry.

They do not necessarily tell us to change careers. Not every meaningful moment should become a business. Not every private interest needs to be turned into a public identity. Some activities should remain hobbies. But these moments are evidence. They show us where some deeper part of us was present.

We tend to treat career decisions as predictions. What should I do for the next five years? Which industry will grow? Which skill will be most valuable? What title should come next?

Perhaps we should also treat them as acts of attention.

The answer may not be resigning, blowing up your life and moving to Spain. Though it may be.

It may be a conversation you need to have. A boundary. A neglected project. A different way of approaching the work already in front of you. It may be a truth you have been avoiding because admitting it would require something from you.

A better question than “What should I do with my life?” might be:

What is life asking of me? What is my work inviting me towards now?

The Lunch & Learn was a brief introduction to these ideas.

In the longer Finding Meaning in Work workshop, we have the time to go further. We look at the experiences that have shaped our relationship with work, the stories we have inherited about success, the moments in which we have felt most useful and the parts of ourselves that may be asking for greater expression.

The workshop involves structured writing, reflection and conversation. It is not career coaching, and nobody leaves with a five-year plan imposed upon them.

The aim is to listen more carefully. To notice what you may be moving away from. To name what you want to move towards.

And to write a personal manifesto for the kind of working life you want to build.

If this essay has stirred something in you, I will be running a longer Finding Meaning in Work workshop on Saturday, 29 August, from 11 am to 3 pm at Sanders Place in Richmond.

You can find the details HERE

Use the discount code DBNAUG when booking.

You are warmly invited.

New episode alert!

Sita Sargeant has built her work around a simple question: Where are the women?

That question became the foundation of She Shapes History, a social enterprise making women’s history more visible, accessible and central to the way we understand Australia.

In the latest episode of Finding Meaning in Work, Sita and I talk about how the idea began, how it grew from a weekly walking tour into a national organisation, and what it means to build something with both purpose and ambition.

We also explore:
• Why the stories we tell about the past shape who is valued in the present
• The difference between seeing work as a job, a career or a calling
• The tension between meaningful work and overwork
• The loneliness that can come with being a founder and CEO
• Why leaders sometimes need to step back and let other people do their best work
• Why a meaningful life ultimately needs to be bigger than work alone
Sita is thoughtful, candid and refreshingly honest about the rewards and costs of building something that matters.

This is a conversation about history, identity, leadership, ambition and what it really means to find meaning in your work.

About Sita:

Sita Sargeant is a social entrepreneur, author, and one of Australia's leading voices in women's history. In 2021, she founded She Shapes History, a feminist experiences company on a mission to make women's history accessible, engaging, and relevant. They currently operate in four cities: Canberra, Sydney, Wollongong, and Melbourne, with plans to be in eight cities by the end of 2027.

In 2025, she published a book by the same name sharing the stories of over 250 women who helped shape 31 towns and cities across Australia. In 2026, she was named the ACT Young Australian of the Year. She was named the 2026 ACT Young Australian of the Year. She is a 2025 Snow Foundation Entrepreneur Fellow and AMP Foundation Tomorrow Maker, recognised through both the IGNITE (2025) and SPARK (2024) programs.