Can Work Bring You Joy? Should It?

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1:01People often ask me, does work make you happy? And the answer is it can. But we have to understand how. It's a real skill. The biggest mistake that people make about work and happiness is thinking that success in worldly terms is going to bring happiness. And it's not true. The worldly success from work has to do with money and power and the admiration of other people and job titles, etc., etc. And a lot of people mistakenly think that those markers of success will bring happiness in its wake. In other words, be successful, get happy automatically. That's exactly wrong. I've done research for years as an economist on labor markets and the characteristics of work.

1:43And it's true that you need to make an income where you can support yourself and your family. But that doesn't bring happiness. That just eliminates the sources of unhappiness. To get actual happiness from work, you need to seek two things. and really two things only. We call them earned success and service to others. Service to others is pretty self-explanatory. I can talk about that in a second. Earned success, not so much. That's the opposite of what psychologists refer to as learned helplessness, where nothing you do really matters, and so you kind of give up. It's also associated with depression and loneliness in the workplace, et cetera.

2:18You don't want learned helplessness, that's for sure. You want earned success, where you feel like you're creating value with your life, value with your work, value in the lives of other people through your work. And it's being acknowledged and recognized. That's how earned success works. That's why it's so critically important that people who are bosses, people who are managers, that they help other people to earn their success and they recognize the value that people are creating. That's why meritocracy is so critically important for people to get actual joy from their work. The second is service to other people.

2:48You have to feel like your job matters to others and you're lightening somebody else's load, then you'll go to work with joy. It's weird. The data are pretty clear that it doesn't actually matter to a certain extent what the job is. You know, I've done experiments with people where they say, I feel like I'm a drone. I feel like I'm a cog in a machine. And then they'll do something like through the experimentation process, they'll start getting coffee for the people in the next cubicle at two o 'clock in the afternoon. You look like you could use a fresh cup of coffee. And mysteriously, they start to like their jobs better.

3:20Why is that? because we're made to serve other people. If you can build your work into something that's meaningful to you because you're truly earning your success and recognized for it, and you're serving other people, and on top of that, you're doing something you're really good at, work's going to bring you joy. 100 % guaranteed.

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