How to find meaningful work and/or meaning in work

A longer, and long coming post on the difference between finding good work and finding the good in work.

In the past week I came across some interesting data points about work, that all loosely relate to meaning and purpose. Firstly, a new large-scale basic income trial in northern Illinois and central Texas, showed that $1,000 a month paid for three years caused 2% of participants to stop working altogether. The others did not spend the money to pursue better education, different jobs, or start side businesses. They changed nothing about their lives. As a long time proponent of UBI (based on theoretical arguments), it was disappointing to me. Oftentimes the criticisms of UBI research center around the methodology: Not enough money, time too short. Having experienced a two-year sabbatical myself, I agree that it takes at least 6 months to fully decompress from work and open up to other possibilities. That was always my criticism of earlier studies which would run for three months, or a year at most. But three years does seem like enough time to take meaningful steps.

The other trigger was coming across a masterful, and almost too detailed review of Bullshit Jobs, an old (2013) popular book. The piece on Substack tackles the question to what degree there really are Bullshit Jobs (of course there are many), and also what causes them and what we could do about it. These are some important things the original book fails to really address.

As a (very) quick primer on the book Bullshit Jobs, the author David Graeber makes the point that a large majority of jobs serve no purpose. This was a sensation in 2013 and hit home for a lot of people, who didn’t see the point of spending their days moving boxes around, whether in a warehouse or on a powerpoint slide. But once you start reading, the actual argument in the book is not very strong. That most jobs are purposeless is a bold claim to make so it would good substantiation. And Graeber’s only measure of purpose are people’s answers to the question: “I agree that my job provides a meaningful contribution to the world”. The formulation of the question itself has some issues (what is meaningful? and the world?), but by asking people whether they themselves think their job is not meaningful, and then taking that at face value to say that those jobs are in fact bullshit is quite a leap.

This leads Graeber to list as bullshit jobs obviously useful things like food delivery and corporate law. Yeah, you can cook your own food, and without companies (which the book presumes serve no purpose in the first place), there wouldn’t be a need for corporate lawyers. But again, this is quite a leap. There’s a lot of circular reasoning: without bullshit jobs, people would have more free time which they would use to buy or grow their own food, which would make even more jobs bullshit. It all starts to feel like a regressive leftist/degrowth fantasy of abolishing capitalism and everyone will live happily ever after in a subsistence farming or hunter/gatherer society. No thanks, I’d like to have roads and bridges and healthcare and airplanes and the corporate lawyers that play a key role in making that possible.

The weakness in the book’s major argument notwithstanding, it contains some interesting data and clues around the perception of meaning. According to the survey data used in the book, just under 40% of people do not believe their job provides any meaningful contribution to the world. It is that ‘sense of meaning’ that I often try to explore and solve for myself as well.

On the one hand, I get it. I certainly have some nihilistic tendencies myself. On a cosmic level, I personally do not believe that anything matters. There is no meaning to life. We are all just a bunch of naked monkeys, flying through endless space on a blue ball. Nobody chooses to be born, life can be tough. But on the other hand, none of that is very constructive. Rejecting agency and meaning is no way to live a full life. Meaning, I think, does not just show up and is not an end-state. Just like happily ever after is a myth, meaning ever after is, I think, also a myth.

I’ve actually been meaning to write about ‘meaning’ ever since I started writing, and have dabbled in it here, here, and in some of my roundups as well. Mainly because I think how to find meaning is fairly well understood and has been remarkably consistent for centuries, if not millennia. And also because the discourse as I observe seems to still focus a lot on the idea of ‘finding your true passion’ which will then solve everything. This, I have grown to believe, is unrealistic and puts a lot of unhelpful pressure on people who may not feel that their current work is that meaningful.

The source of meaning and the passion epidemic

It is clear that a certain percentage of people reject traditional work and try to find their passion. In fact, millennials grew up with this idea that there is some job out there that you can do, where it doesn’t feel like work. “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” To raise the bar even higher, for millennials and Gen Z it became more and more important that such a job has positive impact on the world (contributes meaningfully). Tim Urban made this point masterfully in this post. Millennials have been told that they are special, and that they can become anything they want. As a result they are inclined to be unhappy when they have to do any grunt work.

Loving your work, and deriving meaning from it are related, but not the same. There is a cohort of people who reject corporate work because they feel it’s not meaningful, and there is a cohort who reject it because they don’t love it.

Personally, I fit better into the second of these groups. I have a voracious appetite for adventure, ownership, learning and action. When I started in Private Equity I absolutely loved making financial models. I became a master of Excel, removing the F1 and Capslock keys from my keyboard and became able to use excel at lightning speed without ever touching my mouse. I took pride in being a ‘banker’ vs a ‘consultant. Able to run circles around my colleagues who came from McKinsey and Bain who couldn’t make a waterfall chart without Thinkcell. Begrudgingly admitting they were my superiors at Powerpoint. Several times I started an LBO model from a totally blank excel workbook instead of adapting an existing one, both for fun and to try different approaches. Apologies for these inside jokes if you don’t come from that world. The point is, it was fun and empowering, but after a while I got bored.

It was tempting to blame a lack of meaning and impact for my dwindling motivation. So I joined Rocket Internet to help build a jobs platform for young people in Myanmar, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. That was pretty purposeful! But after a while I got bored. I moved to Bali for a long sabbatical and tried to figure out what my true calling was. I wrote, I surfed, I dabbled in crypto, I build a couple of websites, I did freelance consulting projects. But I didn’t find anything that made me obsess and lose track of time for more than a few days. Poisoned by the millennial idea of finding your true passion or purpose, I was trying too hard, expecting too much, and ultimately missing the point. I started to realize that it was not that I needed my work to have some sort of grander, meaningful contribution to the world. It was simply that I needed to stop looking for that and simply focus on getting into a flow and enjoying the work for its own sake.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed.

Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning

Meaning and purpose emerges from action. You cannot find it a priori. Sitting around doing nothing is not the way to find out what type of thing you are both good at and enjoy doing. That’s why the book So good they can’t ignore you resonates strongly with me.

His experience at the monastery had freed him from the escapist thoughts of fantasy jobs that had once dominated his mind. He was able instead to focus on the tasks he was given and on accomplishing them well. He was free from the constant, draining comparisons he used to make between his current work and some magical future occupation waiting to be discovered.

Cal Newport, from So good they can’t ignore you

And this one in particular hit me:

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.

Passion and enjoyment results from the act of creation, not the other way around. That much is clear. Every time I’ve become interested in any type of activity for its own sake, I’ve gotten into that flow state easily. Every time I end up thinking I ‘have to’ or ‘should’ do something, I struggle to get started. The weird part is that I tend to enjoy even boring tasks quite a bit once I get into them. Often times for me, just getting going with any work is a virtuous cycle.

So there are only two realistic options to get to that ‘work that you love’ part of the equation. You can either keep trying things to find a type of work in which you never lose interest, or you can change your relationship to work in such a way that fulfilling a sense of duty becomes purposeful, and/or you find enjoyment in whatever work you happen to need to do that day. Based on a recommendation from Tim Ferriss I read a fine little book called Chop Wood Carry Water many years ago. It uses the journey of someone training to be a samurai to teach the importance of working for work’s sake, of just putting in the reps. I think of it from time to time as a reminder that it’s ok to do a certain number of boring tasks every day, and that there is meaning in doing that for its own sake. The ethos here is that even if you are moving boxes around in powerpoint or in a warehouse, you can derive satisfaction from moving them around very nicely. A perfectly formatted and crisply worded powerpoint slide with a great, catchy action title can be very satisfying to make. As long as you don’t go looking for some deeper purpose behind the work.

The strategy of trying to find something that will hold your interest forever seems risky. I once enjoyed building financial models and writing investment proposals, but my enjoyment waned. I think it was because it became easy. The lack of challenge and personal learning caused it to become a chore. In a way, there was a lack of purpose on a personal level. The work didn’t bring me anything worthwhile anymore. So I suppose the question for someone like me is: how do you keep bringing that spark of curiosity and challenge into your work. The second strategy of finding that spark and enjoyment in whatever work I decide to commit to is more actionable and has led me to far better results. Of course there is the tantalizing possibility that I really just haven’t found my true purpose yet, but I have already tried so many things, it seems increasingly unlikely.

There is no trend, and certainly not a crisis of meaning

The chart below shows that job satisfaction is at the highest point since 1987. I was quite surprised and encouraged by this chart! The media almost always frames bullshit jobs or a lack of purpose in people’s lives as trends or even crises, but that just does not seem to be the case.

There is this trend on Instagram normalizing a mundane, 9 to 5 existence. This guy is the poster child for it.

hubs.life_

A post shared by @hubs.life_

I find it refreshingly not r/antiwork. There is a distinct lack of negativity, urgency or hate about it that is nice. Although it does look quite mundane and boring, if 3 or 4 days out of every week look something like that, calmly working to stay ahead of the curve, would that be so bad? It’s good to know that job satisfaction has been rising quite impressively, and to take the inverse of the Bullshit Jobs statistic, that 60% of people actually feel their job contributes meaningfully to the world. But for those that have some trouble with meaning, there are some strategies that can help.

A list of things that help with finding meaningful work

Based on a fairly digestible reading list, I believe the recipe for finding meaning in work is fairly well know. The choice people have is to either find meaning in their contribution, or try something else. Here is a short list of what I think we know as a species about the recipe for finding meaningful and enjoyable work:

1. Everyone has to figure it out for themselves. For a Type A Insecure Overachiever it is likely that they will have to let go of tying their self-worth to external medals and diplomas. For someone like me it might be more like finding ways to keep curiosity and renewal going in my work.

2. If you are 20, stop looking for meaning and just get to work. Go work anywhere that seems fun and makes good money and learn as much you can from the job and about yourself.

3. Know that huge step changes in overall happiness are possible. One of the best ways is changing where you live. Move to the other side of the country, or better yet, the other side of the world. Moving anywhere is a two-way door (you can backtrack easily).

4. Concentration on and finishing tasks are inherently satisfying. If you manage to resist the instant gratification of instagram or netflix and do literally anything productive, you will become happier. I think that’s why it’s so easy to get into a flow state with writing or video games. Both are easy¹, quick feedback, and automatically suck in 100% of your attention.

5. Try to be goal oriented only every now and then. It becomes hard to find enjoyment in work if you’re trying to achieve something with it. Writing for engagement as I tried briefly on LinkedIn sucks all the joy out of it. Focus on the process. Chop wood and carry water.

6. Aim for mastery as a craftsperson. Without committing and trying to actually get good at something, passion won’t have a chance to emerge. Passion and enjoyment of an activity often follow a process of getting good at it, not the other way around. I'm often inspired by Seth Godin’s short post on what it means to be professional.

7. Try to do something creative. For many people, creating is very rewarding, although born sales people² and born managers³ also clearly exist. Odds are you’ll get to try your hand at sales and management anyway. Try to write, paint, or program something because the creative act itself has an element of purpose which may attract you or at least teach something.

8. Read and talk to lots of people about life and work. Try to gain perspective from interesting people. Something you like might be hidden away. Nobody outside of the industry knows anything about Cybersecurity but it is a large, profitable, interesting, and certainly meaningful field.

Final notes: meaning in work is not the same as meaning in life. One can exist without the other. Becoming a parent has been the single most meaning and purpose increasing experience in my life. It even, to some degree gave my work more purpose. But it did not change how much or little I love and enjoy work. I also want to acknowledge that there are many people who face real challenges in their lives. From disease, to racism, to depression, lots of people face serious obstacles to ‘just getting to work’. Thankfully I can’t say I have any firsthand experience with suffering, but ‘Man’s search for meaning’ covers that topic in lots of detail.

Here is the reading list for meaning in work that I would recommend. They approach the issue from the two different sides as I see them: “find good work”, and “find the good in work”

Books:

• Viktor Frankl - Man’s search for meaning | “find the good in work”

• Cal Newport - So good they can’t ignore you | “find the good in work”

• Joshua Medcalf - Chop Wood Carry Water | “find the good in work”

• NEW |

  Paul Millerd
  - Good Work | “find good work” does a really good job at highlighting some benefits of finding good work, and some strategies to get there. One of my favorite frameworks he introduced to me is ‘good work’ (what you really want to be doing) and ‘good enough work’ (work that is energy neutral and creates important results like paying the bills).

Blog posts and podcasts:

• Adam Mastroianni

  • Why are you eating so many frogs | “find good work”: This one plays up the side of finding something you love doing and you’ll never work again (in this case, writing)

  • Sure you can be serious | “find the good in work”: Interestingly, this one plays up the side of doing things and finding enjoyment in the process

• Shane Parrish podcast with Jerry Colonna | “find good work”

I hope you enjoyed this download of my current position on finding meaning in work. As is often the case, I find myself caught somewhere in between the perspective of searching for a type of work that you truly love, and finding the ‘good’ in a type of work that benefits you and your ecosystem. Having been at various points caught completely by playing guitar, financial modeling and a range of other smaller obsessions, I know what it’s like to find good work, albeit never lasting. On the other hand, I am happier if I’m more productive and I’m more productive if I focus on finding the good in work. The second approach has, for me at least, been a lot more impactful on my life. But the idea of finding the perfect type of work is so hard to let go of. What if I just haven’t found it yet?

1. Good writing is not easy at all, but the act of writing in general has much lower barrier to entry compared to say, project managing a bridge construction. Being really good at a video game is also not easy

2. Jordan Belfort, Tony Robbins, and Frank Abagnale (catch me if you can) come to mind

3. Jack Welch, Frank Slootman, Tim Cook