Live Each Day Page 6
Here’s her list:
“Regret 1: I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Regret 2: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
Regret 3: I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Regret 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Regret 5: I wish that I had let myself be happier.”1
These regrets all have profound implications for what we’re discussing in this book, but right now I’d like to focus on Regret 2: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” What do you think was the percentage of the men in Ms. Ware’s work who mentioned this? According to the author, it was 100 percent! That’s right, every single man she cared for at the end of his life — on his actual deathbed — told her that he wished he had worked less.
Granted, Ms. Ware’s book is more anecdotal, observational, and inspirational than it is rigorous scientific research. She does not report what percentage of women said they wished they had worked less — or whether she asked this question to women at all. One could seek to isolate variables such as age, social class, country, race, and many other factors. Men and women dying in 2040 might give different answers than men and women dying in 2012. But the fact remains that many people regretted working too much during their lives. Or, as the common sentiment goes, “No one was ever on their deathbed and wished they had spent more time at the office.”
The Importance of Meaningful Work
“How much should I be working?” is a basic question for each of us.
“What work should I be doing in the first place?” is a related but distinct question. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) beautifully lamented in The Voiceless:
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!2
What is that music which is inside of you? That which is beautiful, amazing, loving, brilliant, smart, compassionate, genius? What talent, skill, gift, experience, or expertise can you give to the world, which is the greatest reflection of your unique essence? Are you in the process of giving your “music” to the world? Have you already done so, and continue to do so every day? Or have you given up on this hope?
Throughout my life, I have always had a deep desire to learn and then share what I’ve learned. But many times I did not have the courage, conviction, or grit to honor my passions. So for some of the earlier years of my career, I jumped from unfulfilling job to unfulfilling job, somehow thinking that I’d have forever to keep hopping around. I was fortunate to finish my MBA in 1996, just as the internet revolution was taking off in Silicon Valley. Since then, I have been passionate about internet product management, marketing, and leadership — which have all involved a large dose of challenge, learning, and teaching. (This is sometimes called “management.”) I’ve tried to give different “pieces of music” from my soul to the world. At this point in the opera of my life, the song I’m singing, which feels best to me, is to write this book and share it with you. (Thanks for reading!)
What does “meaningful” mean, anyway? Writing in The New York Times, journalist Emily Esfahani Smith and Stanford Professor Jennifer L. Aaker say, “Although meaning is subjective — signifying different things to different people — a defining feature is connection to something bigger than the self. People who lead meaningful lives feel connected to others, to work, to a life purpose, and to the world itself.”3
Finding meaning in your work is closely associated with increased happiness. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in her outstanding book, The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, that the happiest people “are deeply committed to lifelong goals and ambitions (e.g., fighting fraud, building cabinets, or teaching their children deeply held values).”4
Just how important is it that people view their work as meaningful? Wharton psychologist Adam Grant conducted research on this question. He studied a call center — perhaps like the one I worked at in Omaha during my winter holiday breaks from college. The control group did their normal work on the phones, without any special instruction. In contrast, for the test group, Grant brought in a person who had benefited from the work of the call center to speak briefly about its impact.
So, which group did better? That’s right — the group that was reminded of the benefits of their work to others.
How much more efficient was the “high meaning” group? According to Grant, the group showed more than a 400 percent spike in weekly productivity. In other words, when people are able to connect their jobs to something meaningful, their productivity increases by as much as five times.5
That’s an incredible boost in productivity. Many businesspeople spend their entire careers trying to improve efficiency or profitability by 5 percent or 10 percent. Lots of people are given raises and promotions if they work nine hours per day, when all of their colleagues only work eight hours per day.
Find the meaning in your work, and you’ll increase your success. Laszlo Bock, the former senior vice president of people operations at Google, notes in his book, Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, “Over the coming decades the most gifted, hardworking people on the planet will gravitate to places where they can do meaningful work and help shape the destiny of their organizations.”6
Meaningful work is not just important for individuals like you and me. It’s also vitally important for employers who seek to retain their most talented people. In a 2015 interview with Bloomberg, Bock described what made Google successful. He said, “You want people to feel happy, and motivated, and committed. There’s all this data that suggests that when people are enjoying what they do, and when they feel it’s meaningful [emphasis mine], they’re more productive, they stay longer, and they have more impact. And those are all good things for the company, eventually … So all this data and surveying is harnessed with the purpose to first ‘How do you make people happier?’, and then goodness comes from that.”7
So what makes a job “meaningful”? And do you have to switch jobs if your job right now isn’t meaningful for you? The next section addresses this.
Screw Your “Job” — Define Your “Calling”
Are you employed?
What do you work on?
And why do you do this work?
Are you there just to get paid, and for no other reason?
Are you seeking to achieve and advance?
Or does your work fill you with purpose?
You can think of your work as any of these three scenarios, according to Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. She describes three types of “work orientation”:
•“A Job” — you are focused on the paycheck, because it supports other important aspects of your life
•“A Career” — you are invested in your work, and you want to experience the trappings of success
•“A Calling” — you feel your work contributes to the greater good, draws on your strengths, and gives you meaning8
All of us can relate to having a job. And many of us can relate to having a career. But how many of us really feel like we have a “calling”? And if we are not yet working on our calling, what can we do about it?
Dr. Wrzesniewski’s amazing finding was this: Your work orientation is independent of the sort of work you do. In a Yale School of Management publication, she notes that “I’ve studied surgeons who have a ‘Job’ orientation — the work is a paycheck and not much else. I’ve studied people who scrub toilets for whom it is a ‘Calling’ and they feel the work is an end in itself and that it makes the world a better place in tangible ways.”9
Consistent with these finding
s, author and Harvard lecturer Shawn Achor notes that in one study of 24 administrative assistants performing the same role, roughly one third viewed their work as a job, one third as a career, and one third as a calling. He concludes that “a calling orientation can have just as much to do with mindset as it does with the actual work being done … unhappy employees can find ways to improve their work life that don’t involve quitting, changing jobs or careers, or going off to find themselves.”10
Why is this such good news for you and me? Because it means that how you think about your work is more important than what work you do. It means that you can actually bring meaning to your work, as long as you manage how you think.
For example, in 1991 I decided to quit working as a business journalist in Madrid, so I could return to the U.S., gain a few years of corporate experience, and then try to get into a good business school. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my girlfriend at the time lived. California was in a terrible recession. The first job I got was sweeping the garage of an acquaintance of mine. Then I got a job selling display advertising at The San Francisco Business Times, earning about $24,000 per year.
Soon thereafter, I realized that developing sales skills would be helpful for my long-term career, and I could potentially earn a lot more. I got a job selling phone systems and voicemail to businesses door-to-door, because I viewed this as working on what was then called the “Information Superhighway” (which blossomed into the internet we know today). Overall, I disliked the work, but I found meaning in seeing how these phone systems could help my customers. And I found meaning in developing my sales and negotiation skills, which taught me the importance of positive self-talk and positive psychology. (We discuss this more in the chapter on Affirmations.)
Since business school, I have spent most of my career in Silicon Valley working in e-commerce and online advertising. Some people would say “advertising is nonsense” or “I hate online ads because they interrupt my user experience” or “it’s creepy how online advertising stalks people.” (This was before social media started being used to destabilize our politics.) Honestly, none of those objections ever bothered me. The way I looked at it, products and services need to be sold. Marketing and advertising are part of that sales process. Most online companies can only exist through an advertising revenue model. And it was really challenging, fun, and innovative to figure out how to deliver increasingly effective online ad campaigns. Those reasons were good enough for me to really love the work I did on the internet. For me, at the time, in my own mind, according to my own criteria, the work was highly “meaningful.”
As another example, a close friend of mine manages budgets and financial grants for a group of medical researchers and scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. I tend to view her job as “bean counting” — it’s not work that I would personally enjoy doing.
But my friend does not see it this way. Instead, she defines her role as enabling world-class scientists to focus on their research, so they can help UCSF in their mission of “advancing health worldwide.” My friend might sometimes complain about aspects of her work, but she always finds meaning in how her work supports her organization’s main goal.
Product managers, software developers, designers, marketers, and salespeople all play an essential role in their companies, building and selling products and services that help others and create jobs. In those same organizations, there are accountants, recruiters, administrative assistants, trainers, and infrastructure and facilities people who keep the business running. Similarly, a bus driver can think that they are helping public transportation and reducing greenhouse gases. Teachers, parents, and home care providers play a vital role in our society.
Every one of these people can define their work as a job. Or a career. Or a calling. It’s up to them.
Writing Activity 5:
Do you have a “job,” a “career,” or a “calling”?
What makes you think this way?
If you have any colleagues you can trust with this kind of inquiry, I encourage you to grab coffee or have lunch with them, and discuss this question. You might be inspired by their answer. Or you might give them sorely needed encouragement. It helps to be part of an organization where people share some common mission.
What Does the World Need from You?
“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how’” wrote Dr. Viktor Frankl in his seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning.11
Frankl spoke with the authority of intense personal agony and courage. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1905, Frankl grew up to become a psychiatrist. The Nazis murdered his father, mother, brother, and wife in concentration camps — just four of the 6,000,000 Jewish people and millions of others killed in the Holocaust.12
Frankl wrote, “the prisoner who lost faith in the future — his future — was doomed.”13 While Frankl was himself imprisoned in the death camps, he sought to help his fellow captives. He tells the story of two other inmates who were suicidal, given the horrific loss and suffering which surrounded them.
When Frankl sought to save them, he did not ask, “How can I help you?”
He did not ask, “What do you need to keep living?”
Instead, he asked, “What does the world still need from you?”
One man responded by saying he wanted to survive the death camps so that he could be reunited with his beloved child, who was waiting for him in a foreign country. Another prisoner replied that he wanted to keep living so that he could finish and publish a series of scientific books.14
Despite the horrible circumstances, these people found a way to define new meaning in their existence, keep hope alive, and survive.
What does this have to do with your work? I certainly don’t want to compare your workplace to a Nazi death camp. But it’s extremely helpful to be aware of Frankl’s advice: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”15
In the previous section, I described how you can determine your own “work orientation,” and how you can bring meaning to your work — independent of the work that you do! Similarly, I encourage you to think “big picture” about the work you do — whatever that may be — so you appreciate the special impact that you already have in this world.
Whether work is “meaningful” or not depends on your unique perspective. For instance, in one of my interactive keynote talks, a middle-aged man said, “I have not been thrilled with the work I’ve done, but I’ve earned a good income, which made it possible for my family and me to live in a good neighborhood, and I was able to send my kids to a good college.” On the other hand, some people will only find meaning in their work if they’re at a nonprofit organization that is doing direct service: helping refugees, fighting malaria, or bringing clean drinking water to places without it.
It’s not up to me to tell you what’s meaningful in your work. You need to figure it out for yourself.
Writing Activity 6:
Without changing your work at all, how can you bring more purpose or meaning to it?
How can you think about your work differently? What is the most positive way to think about it?
Ask yourself, “How does my work or my organization help people?”
Then, “How does that help people?”
Then, “How does that help people?”
If you. And then, I hope, you’ll be able to view your work less as a job just for the paycheck, and more as a calling that contributes to the greater good.
After going through this exercise, if you still can’t bring meaning to your work — even for the short
term — then what sort of role could you find, which would be more meaningful to you? What sort of trade-offs could you make in order to make your dream a reality?
To make this decision, it helps to know what I call your “nonnegotiables.”
Use Nonnegotiables to Overcome FOMO
I’ve coached and mentored many people who have struggled to decide what to do with their careers and their lives. Sometimes they’ve been working for a few years and already have hit their “quarter-life crisis,” when they realize they’re now doing the work that they studied for since the age of four — but they can’t see themselves laboring at it for 40 more years. Or even 40 more weeks. In other cases, they’re trying to decide if all their problems would be solved if they simply relocated to another neighborhood, city, state, or country.
While many people would be grateful to have any job at all, I’m describing what I call “The Curse of the Well-Educated, Geographically Mobile Person.” I’ve worked with people who have degrees from some of the top schools in the United States. Upon graduation, they can choose to go into investment banking on Wall Street, do management consulting in London, found a tech start-up in San Francisco, or work for a microfinance nonprofit in Bolivia.
Thanks to the internet and social media, it’s now easier than ever to switch jobs, careers, and countries. Although immigration laws have been in flux for the past few years, it’s still relatively easy for someone to grow up in Poland, study in Paris, and work in Rome. As for myself, I worked as an English teacher in Frankfurt, a business journalist in Spain, a phone salesman in San Francisco, and a McKinsey consultant in Munich — all pre-internet.
Some call this the “digital nomad” lifestyle, which can be truly appealing for many. But having so many options can also be frustrating and paralyzing. As psychologist Barry Schwartz describes in his excellent book, The Paradox of Choice — Why More Is Less, a person can feel a lot of stress when they have a huge number of choices on aspects of life — both important and trivial. (“Get the toothpaste that’s with or without fluoride? Buy a condo or keep renting? Marry and settle down, or keep dating more and more people you’ve found on Tinder?”)