For all the angst that work can inspire, the fact that we even get to ask what we’d like to do with our lives
—with the working chunk of our 168 hours—is an incredible luxury. Even a few generations ago, such questions weren’t really part of the cultural conversation. I recently reviewed another book in which the author recounted his grandfather’s 40 years of labor in a quarry. That wasn’t a penal sentence. It was simply the job that was available to him at his level of skill and education that paid enough to support his children. So he reported to his shift for decades.
Now, “we live in a country that has latitude to follow your dreams,” Earle says. Not only does the Census Bureau report that 85 percent of Americans have high school diplomas, but nearly three in ten Americans over age twenty-five have finished college. The economy is more varied. And so the abundance of choice facing young men and women can be paralyzing. Looking out my window at the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan this morning, I see the headquarters of Pfizer, Citigroup, and the United Nations, all suggesting hundreds of professions, as well as the street-level delis and dry cleaners, the police officers directing traffic around the Midtown Tunnel, maintenance guys checking the roof of the condo across the street, and the barge operator directing a giant vessel north on the East River.
With so many lines of work, perhaps the surprising figure isn’t that 84 percent of full-time workers say they aren’t in their dream jobs, or that we change jobs relatively often. I serve on the Princeton University Alumni Council’s Committee on Careers, and a recent informal survey of alumni approaching their twenty-fifth reunion found that about 72 percent had changed jobs three or more times since graduation, and 41 percent had changed jobs five or more times. Only 6.6 percent of people were in the same job they got after college or graduate school. Instead, the surprising figure is that the 2002 GSS (according to writings from the American Enterprise Institute president, Arthur C. Brooks) found that 89 percent of adults who work more than 10 hours per week are either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. In other words, while most people aren’t in their dream jobs, they have managed to squeeze enough peaches at this economic farmers market to come up with something that’s not wildly off the mark.
So this chapter is mostly about optimization—about using what social science research says inspires the best performance to make the leap from a good job to the right job.
The right job turns out to have a specific definition, according to a 1997 California Management Review article called “Motivating Creativity in Organizations,” by Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor who’s studied this topic for decades. As she wrote: “You should do what you love, and you should love what you do.”
A graduation speech cliché? Perhaps. But Amabile meant two related and research-based ideas by this statement. First, “you should do what you love” means finding work that “matches well with your expertise, your creative thinking skills, and your strongest intrinsic motivations.” Intrinsic motivation means liking the substance of the work for its own sake. The second part, “you should love what you do,”
means “finding a work environment that will allow you to retain that intrinsic motivational focus, while supporting your exploration of new ideas.”
In other words, the right job leverages your core competencies—things you do best and enjoy—and meets certain working conditions, including autonomy and being challenged to the extent of your abilities.
The first part—the importance of being intrinsically motivated—is backed up with several studies. For one of them, Amabile and her colleagues asked a group of aspiring scribes to write poems, which would then be judged by writing experts. Before they could compose the poems, though, the writers answered questions about their motivations for entering the profession. Amabile found that those who were asked about the pleasure they experienced in writing something they could be proud of (that is, who were intrinsically motivated) scored higher marks than those who were asked about wanting to be rich and famous (which are external motivations). That doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with wanting to
be rich and famous, just as there is nothing wrong with bosses coaxing better work from their employees with pizza, bonuses, and other adult equivalents of grade-school gold stars. On some level, external rewards like paychecks are necessary in our capitalist society. It’s just that the best work—the most meaningful work—comes from some other well of motivation. Or as the poet Anne Sexton once told her agent, “I am in love with money, so don’t be mistaken, but first I want to write good poems.”
Chances are, you’ve seen that well of motivation somewhere in your life. Often, as with Sylvia Earle speaking of oceans as her “playground” and “backyard,” it has to do with the activities you felt great affection for as a child. While fewer than one in six Americans told Career-Builder. com that they were in their dream jobs, a full 35 percent of firefighters said they were, the highest among any profession. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that 41 percent of firefighters grew up wanting to be firefighters.
As you look over your “List of 100 Dreams,” consider whether any involve ways you played as a kid, ways that consumed blissful hours when you didn’t have to worry about making a living or impressing anyone with your job title. Writing has always been this activity for me. I wrote and illustrated my own books in kindergarten. When I was bored in high school, I wrote dozens of short stories at night. They weren’t very good, which confused the issue, because from an objective standpoint, I seemed better at other subjects such as math. But I never doodled differential equations in my notebooks for fun.
Fortunately, I realized that before I became a middling and unhappy math professor.
I do, however, enjoy writing about math and science. For about a year, I wrote a weekly column for Scientific American’s Web site called “Where Are They Now?” that profiled former finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. This competition, started in 1942 and now called the Intel Science Talent Search, identified forty top high school scientists each year based on their independent research projects. As I studied these scientists’ lives and careers, I found that, inevitably, those who spoke with the most awe of their jobs had indications of their intrinsic motivations when they were kids, too.
Ilan Kroo, for instance, now an aeronautics professor at Stanford, grew up in rural Oregon in the 1960s. He spent his childhood dreaming of flying machines. Once, he constructed a hang glider from bamboo poles, duct tape, and plastic. He and some friends took the contraption to a nearby dairy farm, ran down a hill, and got a few feet off the ground before crashing. “Any landing that we could walk away from was a good landing,” Kroo told me.
Fortunately, he survived that experiment and, in high school, with assistance from a research program at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, he decided to build a better wind tunnel to help him understand the aerodynamics of flight. One problem he saw with wind tunnels is that the object being tested requires a support structure to stay in place as air blasts around it. But these supports affect airflow, and skew the data.
To solve this problem, Kroo built a wind tunnel lined with magnets. A photo sensor monitored the test object and sent signals to change the strength of the magnets’ field so they, rather than a support structure, could hold the object in place. This design won him a finalist spot in the 1974 Westinghouse competition, and with such an honor under his belt, he never looked back. He earned his PhD in aeronautics, and over the years has created many innovations used at Boeing and elsewhere, always with an eye to the practicalities of flying, and often, trying to do more with less. One particularly fascinating creation is a vehicle known as a “foot-launched sailplane,” now licensed to the Belgian company Aériane as the SWIFT. It is, in some ways, a more elegant solution to the problem he tried to solve at that old dairy farm, of how humans can fly without the bothersome hum of an engine. No one was paying him to ponder that question as a kid. He threw himself into the work simply because he wanted to. He loved the substance of the work for its own sake. And so, like Earle talking about her ocean playgrounds, when I asked Kroo to describe flying the SWIFT, he spoke with joy in his voice. “I probably can’t do justice to that,” he said.
But, “flying at the speed of birds . . . totally quiet, looking down, seeing the mountains and desert floor
eight thousand feet below you is unlike any other kind of flying . . . It’s absolutely amazing.”
Of course, just because the stuff of your job—in Kroo’s case, planes and flying—leverages your core competencies, doesn’t mean that the second part of Amabile’s test will be met. Not only do you have to do what you love, you have to love what you do. That is, the job conditions need to be optimal to coax out your best work. Kroo’s job as a professor gives him autonomy and the constant challenge of trying to break new ground with his research. While there are other jobs that could involve his core competencies
—such as flying planes for the military—they might not necessarily fit the way he works best, though they might be great for someone who relishes the challenges of combat.
To study the effect of job conditions on work quality, Amabile and her colleagues conducted several other studies, such as one that examined the practices of a thirty-thousand-employee corporation they called “High Tech Electronics International.” They identified several High Tech Electronics projects where innovation was the desired outcome, and asked managers and workers to rate the projects in terms of whether the results actually had been creative or not. Then they asked about the presence or absence of several work conditions for all of these projects. They found that the best results required three things:
• that people be given a great deal of freedom in figuring out how to carry out the work—that is, the opportunity to make day-to-day decisions in the project
• that team members felt challenged in a positive fashion by the work
• that people felt they had sufficient organizational support (resources, a supportive work group, a supportive supervisor who communicated well, and an organizational environment where creativity was encouraged)
The first condition, autonomy, is straightforward. No one wants to be micromanaged, and if you’re being paid for your ideas, as at least some of us are these days, there’s no reason for someone else to dictate how to do the work—or even when and where you work. Indeed, there are good business reasons not to. According to a meta-analysis of forty-six studies, published in the November 2007 Journal of Applied Psychology, telecommuting—usually meaning working from home on your own schedule, though it can mean working from anywhere you choose—is associated with higher supervisor performance ratings, increased job satisfaction, and a reduction in the intent to leave one’s company. The growing proportion of self-employed Americans naturally works this way much of the time, which may be why self-employed people tend to have more job satisfaction than other workers.
Of course some work does need to be done at a certain time and place. Most second-grade teachers still report to a classroom. Policemen report to their precincts. Even so, there is a big difference between having every action dictated and being held accountable for a result (for example, high test scores) and having reasonable freedom to choose the means.
There is not necessarily a right way to work, but there is a right way for you. Think about the times when you felt most creative and productive, and try to identify the “who, what, when, where, and why”
answers we reporters learn to cram into the first paragraph of a story. Were you working closely with other people, or by yourself? What kind of work were you doing—looking at the big picture and zeroing in, or starting from the details and moving out? What time of day does your best work happen? Some people are useless after or before a certain hour, but some people have waves of concentration that come and go. Where were you? Were you in a Zen-like office space, a coffee shop, or surrounded by plants, paint tubes, or puppies? It makes sense that if there’s a way that you work best then the right job should allow you to work in that way more often than not.
The second part of the “love what you do” equation—that the right job needs to be challenging—is more intriguing. At first blush, people often seem to prefer easy tasks. But as Amabile tells me, “Most people get bored with ‘easy’ jobs.” Ultimately, you want work that’s optimally challenging, where “the
work calls on your best skills, and helps you develop new skills—but is not completely beyond your skill level.”
This is because such work puts you in a state that the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi terms
“flow.” Decades ago, in a now famous and widely chronicled experiment, Csíkszentmihályi and his colleagues decided to figure out exactly when people were happiest. They gave thousands of people pagers that would go off randomly throughout the day, and asked them to record what they were doing and how they felt (aside from being annoyed at the incessant buzzing). They found that people were happiest when they were completely absorbed in activities that were difficult but doable, to the point where their brains no longer had space to ruminate about the troubles of daily life. Time seemed to warp, as Csíkszentmihályi wrote in his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. “Hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.” When researchers interviewed people with considerable skills in certain areas—for instance, composers seated at the piano, figure skaters in the middle of intense practice—such people spoke of feeling as though they were carried along by water.
They were almost floating. Hence, “flow.”
Such a state doesn’t have to occur at work, but the structures and goals of work do provide ample opportunities for losing yourself in difficult but doable tasks. Do you ever feel this way with your job?
What are you working on when you do? When I have the skeleton of a chapter written, and I’m going in and fleshing it out, I can start typing at 7:30 a.m. and not look up until 1:30 p.m., when I realize I’m starving for lunch.
Pay attention to when you feel most absorbed at work. If you want to be blissful, your job should involve spending as much time as possible in that space where you are leveraging your core competencies, and working in the way you choose on something demanding enough that, as Earle puts it in Sea Change, “one discovery leads to another, each new scrap of information triggering awareness of dozens of new unknowns.”
If you’re spending some time in this state, then you are probably at least close to the right line of work.
The key question becomes how you can improve your ratio. What existing project could you scale up, or what new project would make you excited to come to work in the morning? If you’re not sure, schedule 30 minutes two to three times a week to think about this, and to have conversations with your colleagues, your mentors, or anyone in your network who’s thoughtful enough to get you unstuck.
Of course, if you rarely or never experience this bliss and absorption at work, or if you’re in an organization that actively or passively thwarts your attempts to focus on the substance of your work (the third aspect of Amabile’s three job conditions), then you have some hard thinking to do. If you never feel absorbed at work, are there other points in your life when you feel this way? What are you doing then? If you can’t recall, start working your way through that “List of 100 Dreams.” Do any of these activities challenge you and absorb you to the point where you don’t notice the time? Does the “stuff ” of these activities make you happy?
Write these down. Over the next 6 months, start thinking about ways that you can incorporate them into your life’s work, ways you can change your life’s work, or ways you can find a more supportive work team or organization. I can’t tell you what the answers to these questions are, but I can tell you not to dismiss this exercise as impractical. In the next section of this chapter, I want to convince you that it’s far more practical to love your work than to be in the wrong job.