wrote my first computer program at 7 in basic on a vic 20. Always thought being a programmer was nerdy and lame(even though I liked doing it), so I tried rock music, social work (kids and mentally handicapped adults), acting, producing shows/records but eventually stopped resisting about 10 years ago and now am happy doing what I always loved doing.
I’m pretty sure my calling is either film direction or mathematics. I’ve tried throughout high school to run away from both of these careers, but it only makes my drive for them mega ultra strong. Being a mathematician means poverty and elbow patch tweed jackets, and a director requires a black beret and grad-student levels of income. However, there is nothing I’d rather do besides either solve problems or watch/learn about movies.
I’m headed off to university to be most likely a EE major, but that just isn’t what I want to do, forever. Maybe as a hobby, but not forever.
I found it at age 15 or so, but didn’t act on it until I was 28, and didn’t achieve it until I was 30. At least, that was my calling.
I found my career at age 30, too.
Lifelong dreams of being in theatre and/or being a singer for a living, blah blah blah.
Freshman year of college I discovered radio broadcasting, and fell in love. I was a DJ at the campus station all four years, took all of the radio classes offered, worked my way up to station manager by senior year, and spent my summers interning at a Baltimore oldies station. I only managed to actually get paid in radio for all of maybe 3 months after graduating (and even that was just part-time), but I think radio will always be “in my blood” and in the back of my mind. When I daydream about winning the lottery and not having to work anymore, I imagine getting back into radio somehow.
When I was about 25 I discovered public relations, and felt that I’d finally found a career. I loved it, I seemed to be good at it, and I worked full-time at it for almost a year. A Very Bad Decision (VBD) got me out of that field accidentally, and I was never able to get back in. I do PR-type-stuff as a volunteer from time to time, and that’s good enough these days.
I’ve always had strong writing skills, and at age 26 I discovered a knack for learning software and explaining it to others. I learned about people called “technical writers,” and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 8-9 years. In fact, I’m currently in grad school working on an M.A. in English that will give me a concentration in Professional Writing & Editing (“professional” meaning “in a professional setting”).
I don’t see leaving this field any time soon, but my earning potential will eventually be limited (short of running the Tech Comms department at a huge company somewhere, or something) and I don’t know if I’ll want to work in computers forever. I’m only 34, and can’t imagine doing this for another 34 years! I think that I’d like to be a magazine copy editor and/or fact-checker someday. I’ll look for a job that involves writing and editing, lets me use my M.A. degree, and isn’t a significant pay cut from whatever salary I’ll be making at the time. Not too much to ask, right? 
I wanted to be a scientist when I was about four years old. It’s funny… first I wanted to be a scientist, then a pediatrician, then I ran through a list of various things until I graduated from high school and entered college, planning to become… a pediatrician. Then I realized the pre-med schtick wasn’t my thing and majored in microbiology, and now I’m in grad school studying parasitology. I’m right back to where I started. 
I realized not too long ago that “scientist” is a pretty odd career choice for a four-year-old girl, most of whom will say “fairy princess” or “ballerina” when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up. I was lucky to have parents that encouraged me to be a science geek; if you know any other little girls like that, please be supportive of them too!
I knew I wanted to work at a newspaper when I walked into a newsroom and sat down at a desk when I was 17. I’ve changed my focus from news reporting to news design since then, but I still think it should count.
(Now, granted, I may say “screw this” five years into my career and switch to PR, as so many have, but until further notice this is what I want to do.)
True calling? I don’t think I have one. Late high school, I thought I wanted to be in TV or radio news. In college I majored in Media Communications, but I minored in economics because I just liked it.
I worked in radio (new and other areas) for about 5-6 years. Then I was tired of that so I went to work in the securities industry where I was a broker, margins analyst and later in securities lending. I did that for 8 years. Now I am working part time a dressage training barn where I am learning to work and train horses.
No one true calling for me.
I think the idea of programming, computer programming, as a career occured to me when I was 11 or so. I didn’t really understand what professional career programming was like at the time, as opposed to messing around on TRS-80s and commodore 64s. (Never mind what programming and computers would be like 20 years later!)
Not sure when I knew that was THE career for me. (Or if I’ve settled on it forever even yet.)
It depends on how specific you want to be. Like tsarina, I decided on science at a very young age (about 3, in my case, I think). Oh, sure, I went through the usual phases of construction worker and firefighter and the like (the “cool hat” jobs), but it was always “I want to be a construction worker or a scientist”. Unlike tsarina, my family was fortunately very supportive of my choice, so I stuck with it. By the time I was 6 or 7, I had narrowed it down to physics, and it was in the fourth grade when I read A Wrinkle in Time that I decided on relativity. And now here I am, almost 29 years old, about a year from a PhD in relativity, and still loving it.
BTW, tsarina, I first saw your sig line on a t-shirt about a year ago (and therefore did not literally laugh out loud just now), but it’s still very funny.
I’m 37. While I “know” my true calling, I have neither the creativity or skills to make a living at it (cartoonist.)
My calling now is to be the best father and husband I can be. How I make a buck is irrelevent. I work hard at a job I really don’t like to be a good father and husband. I do very good at my job, to earn the money to be the above.
Is a true calling something you have to earn a living at, or is it what you really want to do, even if it doesn’t make you a dime?
Peace - DESK
I’m the vine-ripened age of 24. I think my problem is that I want to do everything. It seems that what I want to do, above all (or at least one of the things that unites the frontrunners) is that I want to solve problems. I think that the most noble aim a person can have is to go everywhere, learn everything, and the use that knowledge to fix every problem. Obviously, it’s impossible, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give it a try.
Consequently, I’m trying to get into politics. I’ve run for mayor of my city (twice-ish. Getting out of school 3 days before petitions are due, and having to drive 5 hours to get back home to get the petitions from city hall and go out and get autographs and be 10 short by the deadline all by yourself isn’t fun. Thanks for the help, parents.) I sure as hell hope I get some interesting job offers or nibbles when it gets closer to graduation. It’s only a month. Damn being an English major.
At 11 I knew I wanted to be a physicist. At 14 I decided I also liked, and had some modest talent for, writing. I hoped, somehow, to make a career out of one or both of those, preferably in combination.
At 35, I try to make rockets not blow up. I guess that involves a little bit of applied physics and some amount of writing, but it’s hardly my longed-for calling. sigh These days, I’m just hoping some lovely young lass will call upon me, or at least return my call, for dinner.
Clearly, I need to review my calling plan.
Stranger
<brief hijack>
Didn’t you used to live in NYC or thereabouts, **Strange **one?
I knew I wanted to be a biologist from about age 5, when I was taken to see the Tyrannosaurus rex at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. When I was I kid, I always kept frogs, salamanders, and even bugs. It wasn’t until I was 12 that I first became interested specifically in birds.
In college, I briefly though I might go into biochemistry or genetics early on, but soon realized I really wanted to work with living organisms. It was a toss-up for awhile between herpetology and ornithology, but birds won out when I got a job as a field assistant studying hummingbirds the summer after my junior year.
I’ve known since I was 8 that I was destined to be centerfirlder of the Yankees.
I’m 45, and still haven’t been able to persuade George Steinbrenner to overlook my slowness, pathetic throwing arm, and inability to get around on a fastball.
But no matter- there’s no stopping destiny!
heh. “Calling”. That’s a good one.
I’ve had jobs ranging from retail sales, to factory work, to more sales, to real estate management to Bus Guy.
Each one - except maybe for the factory stuff, felt like something I could do forever.
For me, it comes down to this: I got skills, and an education. I can run a small business, manage people, manage assets, customers and I’m a quick learner. For example, most of the people I associate with at my level in student transportation have been doing this for 20-25 years. They started as drivers, or in some cases took over family businesses. I jumped from a totally unrelated field (real estate) 5 years ago, and had to learn the bus business on the fly, while managing a 275 bus operation in one of the largest public school systems in the country.
I use my skill, my education and my learning ability to do what I enjoy and allow me to live the modest lifestyle I enjoy. My “life” isn’t my work; my work enables my life.
Not that I don’t admire - even at some level - envy people who have a calling, and do what they do because they love it and wouldn’t do anything else. Right now I work for a school district, and most of the teachers and administrators do what they do because it’s their calling. I know teachers take a rap from some circles, but not from me. No one enters the education business for the big money. It’s a secure job, and usually comes with a decent pension, but it’s not a job you do your whole life unless you chose it from the beginning.
At about 33, I accidentally discovered my (so far) true calling. I’d originally gone to school for something else, but the bottom had pretty much fallen out of that market by the time I graduated. I ended up being a secretary for a small environmental firm (NO, not the Fringe Loonie bunny hugging type, the type that get their hands dirty and so something besides terrorize drilling platform crews).
I was asked to go up and assist on an oil spill cleanup, and just gradually was asked (and eagerly accepted) more and more responsible positions in environmental investigations and cleanup.
My secondary career, mostly for fun and income for the psyche, is in the phys ed areana, teaching aerobics and dance. That I started (well, the teaching part, dance I started at age 10) in my mid-twenties and I just turned 47, today.
I love both careers, but like others here, I wouldn’t turn down a new “true calling” if it knocked on my door.
I may have just found mine in my late 30’s. I’ve been a geek all my working life - network/database/ERP administration, website development, that sort of thing. I’ve been burned out on IT for a while, and had realized that farriery looked interesting (I like horses, like working with my hands, and hate fixing computers at midnight).
I just finished a couple of weeks of farrier training. I’m sore, bruised, burned, cut up, and (it seems) permanently dirty. On the other hand, I wish I were going back for the rest of the course. I realized this when I found myself enthusiastically stomping into a field of ankle-deep mud to catch yet another horse to trim and went looking for one with really bad feet.
Ever since I was a little kid, people told me I should be a lawyer. Something about how bossy and argumentative I was. (I have, of course, grown out of those traits.)
In high school, the idea of law school teased in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how it would work, since of course I would marry my high school boyfriend when we graduated college, then have kids, so I’d be in my thirties before I could start law school. (And, of course, to my teenage mind, thirties were ancient.)
Then, of course, I realized he was a jackass (or maybe just that I was a bigger jackass when I was with him), so we broke up. Finished college, law school kind of forgotten. Had a whole other career going on, was out with friends being chased by Hare Krishnas when a friend, out of the blue, asked me when I was going to law school. That started me thinking about it, and within two years, I was back in school.
Law school was okay, the first couple of years of practice were truly awful (and if I hadn’t had a massive debt to repay I might have bailed), but now that I have a much better handle on what I’m doing and what my talents are, I think that I am supposed to be a lawyer. I don’t know for how long, but for right now, I’m where I’m supposed to be. So to answer the OP, I’ll say sometime in my thirties is when I realized my calling.
Never me. You must be thinking of some other stranger that you met on a train somwhere.
Stranger