Current generations have greater freedom in career choices, among the cultural messages about the value of pursuing one’s passion. These dynamics converge with existing literature suggesting that answering a calling means pursuing the activity one feels a calling for as a full-time job and to build a career on it. The alternative, i.e., not answering one's calling, has attracted much less attention from management scholars. We suggest that conceptualizing callings as either answered or unanswered in terms of a full-time job obscures important complexity in how people relate to and enact their callings. Through a qualitative, inductive study of 81 professional musicians whose full-time jobs are in domains unrelated to music, we introduce the construct of “non-work callings”, i.e. activities perceived as callings which are pursued outside of the domain of work. We differentiate non-work callings from constructs such as hobby/leisure, side hustle, and gig. Based on our data, we illustrate the experience of answering a calling outside of work and explain why and how people enact their callings, including the surprising number of ways in which they perceive this experience to be superior to the option of having pursued their calling in the work domain. Finally, we outline how this novel construct changes the way we understand callings, meaning, professional identity, and the meaning of work and nonwork.
