Find your dharma by combining passion, expertise, and usefulness where you are

A senior analyst felt stuck. She was great at spreadsheets but didn’t love them. Her Quadrant map showed most of her week in “good at, don’t love.” She didn’t need a dramatic career jump. She needed one square to the right. She circled the tasks she loved and was good at: explaining complex ideas to new hires and streamlining messy processes. That pattern whispered “teach and improve.”

She job‑crafted a week. Without dropping core duties, she created a ten‑minute onboarding tip for interns and rebuilt one clunky template. The result? Her afternoons felt lighter, and her manager noticed that incidents dropped. Over a month, she became the go‑to for process guidance. She didn’t change companies, she changed her square.

Job crafting works because purpose is not all or nothing. You can inject passion and usefulness into your current role by small, repeatable actions. You test for two signals: your energy and others’ response. Energy tells you you’re using your strength. Response tells you it helps. When both are high, you’ve found a dharma ingredient worth scaling.

Organizational psychologists have documented this in hospitals, schools, and tech teams. People who tweak tasks, relationships, or how they see their role increase engagement and resilience. The key is to keep core duties solid while you experiment. Over time, small moves become your new job description, and your map fills with more of what you love and do well.

Draw the Quadrant map and place your major tasks and hobbies honestly. Circle the boxes where you both love and are good, then look for patterns like teaching, organizing, or building. Pick one tiny job‑crafting experiment this week that uses that ingredient without dropping your core duties, such as a ten‑minute mini‑training or a cleaner template. After a week, check your energy and any feedback, keep what worked, and plan the next small move. Do this for four weeks and notice how your square shifts.