...whether you're a pimp or a president.

one's work is a good target

My view: the one predominant work is to find one's duty. However, both are cliched and simplistic platitudes. Man and life's philosophies encompass infinitely more than one predominant niche.

Best Said....

Somehow her idea of duty sounds too insipid and poor.

One of my favorite sayings goes something like:

"Work is so wonderful that you should save some for tomorrow."

This sounds like one of those quotes which you need more context to appreciate. By itself, it doesn't stand alone as great wisdom.

Since leaving the Royal Navy (Fleet Air Arm) in December 2007, I have been trying to find a second career (one's work), but have - alas - so far failed. I continue to search...

Perhaps one's work could have something to do with family.

When we are born into this world, we have a family, not a job... The notion of family is wider than that of payable activity, aka job.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman grew up in a capitalist nation. What the hell is she talking about?

The quote is probably from "Women and Economics", 1898, or "The Home: Its Work and Influence", 1903. She was an early advocate of women's
role in society going beyond housekeeping work.

"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it."

In "The Forerunner", her own magazine where she worked as editor, she recounted her postpartum bout with depression and how the treatment ordered
by a specialist--stay home and avoid more than two hours of intellectual activity in a day, drove her almost insane. She wrote:

"Then... I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power." It was then that she wrote her best known short story "The Yellow Wallpaper".

Sadly, her own remedy only worked for so long...but all in all she was right to choose being active, and was rewarded for doing her duty as she saw it.

What somebody called "simplistic platitude" here above, was very likely at the time the quotationit was written a deeply profound truth for a woman of such inspiration
as Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
You could call it lofty, if you wanted to give it any credit, particularly because it was such a novel idea: find your calling and pursue it, regardless of the custom of the day.

The irony is that in our time "to find one's work and do it" is not as simple as doing one's duty, for women and men alike. The choice may be there but how to exercise it,
and the cost of it, that is another matter. Too many of us interested in the same work, not just for the sake of duty.