For the past few days I’ve been editing a podcast interview I did with Prof. Andrea Veltman, who teaches philosophy at James Madison University. Her book, Meaningful Work, is a philosophical treatment of work. Thorough and thought-provoking, it was one of my favorite reads this year.
What work means to us is changing rapidly, perhaps faster than ever in history. While we still need work to make a living, more people than ever can pursue work as a calling. Instead of salary, the future of work will be measured by things like meaning, virtue, and impact.
We’re already most of the way there. For example, one study found that a staggering 9 in 10 employees surveyed would accept lower pay if they had work with more meaning. There’s also an impression that this desire for meaning is especially pronounced for younger workers, but research shows that older workers may be more cause-oriented than younger people at the start of their careers.
What’s behind this momentum? Perhaps it’s that we see better than ever what our work means to the world around us. Connectivity gives us context and reasons to contemplate our place in a human family with abundant needs. Is there any wonder that we’d want our work—where we spend the bulk of our waking hours—to do some good?
A job doesn’t sprout purpose overnight, though. If you are hunting for more meaning at work, here are three ways to start:
Help the people you work with. Few people in the world will have the same opportunities that you have to help the people around you.
Build things, even if it’s beyond your job description. Don’t just clock in every day. Look for transcendent work, the kind that improves things long after you’ve left.
Master a problem. Something at work vexes people. Understand it better than anyone else so you can help fix it.
If you make meaning at work a practice instead of a mere desire, more opportunities will find you. Before long, you’ll be blazing the trail for others, too.
What can you do this week to add impact to your work?
Finding Good at Work
If you’re ready to dive into finding work with impact, I strongly recommend 80,000 Hours, a program at the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford, England. The idea in the name is that you have 80,000 hours of work in your life. Their goal is to help you make that time as impactful as you can.
I recommend starting with their Key Ideas. I also enjoyed their book, which you can get in digital form for free.
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I’m always interested in good ideas for topics to address or organizations to highlight. If you have something to share, please send me a message.
When it comes to helping, we automatically think of solutions. Is there anything more basic to helping than that? Right now, the person that helps me is the one who can get me to stop grinding my teeth at night, or that can make me crave junk food less, or that can fix email (a tortuous system we impose on each other).
In other words, we think of helping as making problems go away.
But look at the bias that underlies this kind of thinking. Problems aren’t to be understood, just eliminated. What is the point, after all, of deeply understanding something that’s meant to go away? That goal, disposing of problems, gives us a bias for solutions. Thinking about solutions just makes sense, and feels a lot more exciting to boot.
Have you ever owned a Swiss Army knife? Those little devices are brimming with solutions. There’s a doodad for just about any situation. The one I own (purchased in my 20’s) has the typical pair of knife blades and a can opener. But it also has a Phillips-head screwdriver, three different flathead screwdrivers, a pair of scissors, a pair of pliers, a serrated saw, a file, a hook, a ballpoint pen, a corkscrew, tweezers (now missing), a watch (long dead), a magnifying glass, two other tools defying description, and a fish scaler.
I bought my Swiss Army knife not simply because it might be useful. I remember at the time feeling like I would use it to conquer the world.
But if you own one, you know the thorny truth about a Swiss Army knife: it’s mostly just a big empty promise in an awkward little tool. I, for example, have never once scaled a fish, let alone scaled one with my Swiss Army knife. Perhaps the most delightful absurdity is the tiny three-inch ruler etched into the side of my fish scaler, handy for measuring the three-inch-or-smaller fish I may someday catch. (Yes, I know I can measure the fish in sections. But c’mon.)
So why the appeal? Why do people buy Swiss Army knives? It’s because we love solutions. We love them so much, we’re willing to overlook their weaknesses, and how inapt they can be for any given problem. For any given problem, there is always a better solution than a Swiss Army knife.
The truth is that if I was serious about scaling fish, I would take much more seriously the problem of fish scales. I would learn how they work, what makes them hard to remove, what differences there are between different kinds of fish, and why the scales need to be removed anyway. If I was serious about scaling a fish, these are things I should know before I even thought of what kind of tool would do the job.
Unfortunately, when we encounter problems our minds turn first to the solutions we have on hand; let’s call that Swiss-Army-Knife thinking. We do this rather than understanding the problem first, knowing it well enough to discover the tools we really need.
Here are a few examples of Swiss-Army-Knife thinking:
Taking a group of teenagers to build a school in a developing country, where plenty of experienced builders could easily be hired. (For less than the cost of the trip!)
Grounding your child for yelling at you without understanding why they were yelling.
Developing a phone support script to more conveniently manage staff, not to better solve customers’ technical problems.
In each of these examples, the solution is more enticing than actually understanding the problem. And so the solution—every time—falls short to everyone’s disappointment.
When you encounter new problems this week, resist the urge to reach for anything resembling a Swiss Army knife. Instead, take some time to ask questions and understand the problem first. Then figure out the right tool for the job.
Seeing Good at Work
One of the best organizations for providing access to clean water is also one that looks deeply at problems. Water for People has thus far provided clean water to more than 3.6 million people, an amazing feat. But even more impressive, Water for People only works on water programs that can be owned and maintained by local organizations so that they never again need outside assistance. This is critical, as many parts of the world are littered with broken-down water equipment that was installed then forgotten by aid groups.
Water for People also actively measures their impact, and provides constant up-to-date access to their data through the Everyone Forever tracker. (“Everyone Forever” is their mission when it comes to clean water.) They estimate that a $10 donation results on $107.45 in benefits to the communities they serve.
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This week, I’d like to tell you about University Impact, a nonprofit that provides paid internships and fellowships to students who then conduct due diligence for seed-stage impact investments and provide consulting services for impact startups. (I’m on the board and investment committee for UI.)
We’ve recently launched a new product for donors that use Donor Advised Funds (DAFs), something we call the Triple DAF. A DAF managed by UI not only offers competitive management terms, but also brings three big advantages:
You can use your DAF to both donate and invest in startups with high social impact.
You get customized recommendations for your donor priorities, highlighting some of the most innovative solutions out there.
Your support helps train students in the best practices of impact assessment and investment due diligence.
If you are interested in connecting or would like to move a DAF to University Impact, please reach out to me or visit: www.uitripledaf.org.
We’re on the cusp of a Covid-19 vaccine rolling out to the public, even if in limited supply at first. As we reflect on how essential this accomplishment will be for the world and how many lives will be saved, consider also the following fascinating and inspiring facts about vaccines.
1. Women and immigrants have played a critical role in the development of vaccines
In a Bloomberg column this week, economist Tyler Cowen drew attention to the critical work done by Dr. Katalin Karikó, who was born in Hungary before she moved to the United States. Her tireless work on mRNA-based vaccination made possible the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that will be among the very first available. This innovation is partly responsible for the speed at which the researchers moved from design to testing.
Karikó isn’t the only woman or immigrant involved, as Cowen notes. Nor is this pattern uncommon for vaccines in history. Women and immigrants have repeatedly been pivotal to vaccine development. The polio vaccine, for example, would likely have been delayed for years if not for the work of Dr. Isabel Morgan. She led the team that showed how a killed virus, not only a weakened one, could produce an immune response. In fact, historians have argued that Dr. Morgan could have arrived at a vaccine before Jonas Salk had she not left her research to care for her disabled stepson.
2. A malaria vaccine will be historic, and it’s just around the corner.
Malaria currently kills over 400,000 people per year, the majority of them children under 5. Inventing a vaccine requires almost completely new science because the disease is caused by a parasite. Unlike with a virus, getting sick with a parasite often doesn’t grant immunity in the future. This means the basic process of a vaccine needs to work differently. In fact, no parasite vaccine is commercially available today.
The same team at Oxford testing a Covid-19 vaccine is also now entering final human trials for a malaria vaccine. Should they prove successful, it could be ready for full-scale production by 2024. Vaccines for other rampant parasites—like hookworm and schistosomiasis—are also on the horizon.
3. We can’t measure how many lives vaccines have saved, but it’s surely many millions per year.
There is no way to reliably calculate how many lives vaccines have saved, but there is every reason to think that vaccines are the most live-saving invention in medicine, if not in all history. Perhaps only modern sanitation and clean drinking water could take credit for saving more lives.
The smallpox vaccine alone probably prevented a current death rate of five million people per year. We owe a great deal to all who have made vaccines possible and available throughout the world.
Seeing Good at Work
Malaria isn’t defeated yet, but one of the best groups working to prevent it is the Against Malaria Foundation. They provide long-lasting, treated bed nets, which randomized control trials have shown to reduce malaria infections in children.
GiveWell, a sophisticated rater of charity effectiveness, recommends them as a top charity. Just $5 provides a net to a family.
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I hope these weekly messages have been interesting and uplifting. Please consider sharing Good at Work with others.
Despite all of this, we might be tempted to look cynically at practiced gratitude, especially when we live in a world with too much suffering and injustice. Gratitude can feel like a naive distraction from the difficult work of solving real problems. It also can feel like little more than an expression of privilege that many people do not enjoy.
But more recent research is showing that gratitude makes things better for others, not just for the grateful people.
Gratitude enhances our empathy and compassion
A 2018 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology and Wellbeing evaluated patterns of gratitude, empathy, and compassion in over 200 respondents. The authors found that “those who are more grateful tend to have greater empathy and compassion toward others.” These results reaffirmed previous research showing that gratitude predicts prosocial behavior, forgiveness, a sense of meaning, and empathy.
Expressing gratitude increases helping behavior in others
Adam Grant and Francesca Gino revealed in their 2010 paper that showing gratitude to others—in this case with a thank-you note—increased the likelihood that the recipients would offer help to the person who wrote the note. But even more interesting, it also increased the chances that the recipient would help others as well. These results held up outside of the lab in two different field experiments. People who are thanked are more likely to feel social validation and want to help others in return.
Two practices that help
So how do we make this happen in ourselves and others? Here are two simple, research-backed practices that consistently produce gratitude and its benefits:
Every day, recite three good things you are grateful for. This can be in a moment of meditation or prayer, in a journal, or in conversation with someone else. (I do this as part of a daily journal practice and it works for me.) Even just a few weeks of this practice has repeatedly shown significant results.
Write more thank-you notes. Research has shown that we consistently underestimate the positive benefits that come from expressing gratitude and we overestimate the awkwardness of doing so. And thank-you notes have a measurable benefit to the sender, too, not just the recipient.
So the next time you feel an urge to dismiss gratitude as naive or privileged, remember that it helps you better help others. If you don’t want to practice gratitude for yourself, do it to help someone else.
Seeing Good at Work
This week instead of highlighting an organization, I simply want to draw attention to the good work in the sacrifices so many are making during the Covid-19 pandemic. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to healthcare professionals, researchers, and front-line workers for their tireless efforts.
As we head into the holiday season we won’t have the same opportunities to be with our loved ones. But doing our part by following health guidelines is the best way for us to show gratitude to the people that are keeping us alive and well and leading us out of this struggle.
