Jennifer Tosti-Kharas & Christopher Wong Michaelson on the Work Worth Doing | EP 652

0:00Coming up next on PassionStruck. When we feel our work is deeply meaningful, we are less sensitive to maximizing our rewards that we get from it. For example, if I'm paid, if I'm doing a task that's deeply meaningful, and I know that I'm being paid on a per-task basis, like a piece rate kind of compensation scheme, I will do more work the more meaningful my work is. I'm not totally insensitive to money. I'm not totally clueless about money. If it stands to be more money made, I'll expend more effort. The interesting thing that we were able to disentangle in our study, though, is the same relationship held when workers were salaried, meaning I can do more work, but I'm not necessarily additionally compensated for it.

0:43Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.

1:22Now, let's go out there and become passion-struck. Hey friends, welcome back to episode 652. I'm your host, John Miles, and this is the show where we explore the mindset, science, and strategies that help you live with intention, work with purpose, and unlock your fullest potential. Whether you're brand new here or have been part of this community from the beginning, thank you. Your presence truly matters. Together, we're building a global movement of high performers, deep thinkers, and everyday heroes committed to making a difference. I do have a special announcement. This past week, PassionStruck received two Gold Stevie Awards at the International Business Awards, one for the best independent podcast and one for the best business book.

2:08That follows the same honors at the American Business Awards earlier this year. And while this recognition is surreal, what matters most is what it represents, that people all over the world are hungry to live more intentionally, to grow from the inside out, to reclaim their energy, agency, and sense of matter. That's what this podcast was built for, and it wouldn't exist without you. So thank you for listening, reading, sharing, and staying committed to your growth. Before we dive in, here's what you might have missed last week. On Tuesday, I sat down with Wolfgang Linden, one of the world's leading experts on anxiety and resilience, for a deep conversation on emotional integration and mental fitness.

2:50We discuss how to stay grounded and self-led even in the midst of chaos. And then on Thursday, neurosurgeon Dr. Kevin Tracy joined me to explore the mysterious transformative power of the vagus nerve and how a hidden network of 200 ,000 nerve fibers could hold the key to calming inflammation and revolutionizing modern medicine. If you missed either of those, I highly recommend going back. They're the perfect companions to today's episode because today we're diving into a question that sits at the very heart of our lives. Is your work worth it? My guests today, Christopher Wong-Michelson and Jennifer Toste-Karis are here to help us reimagine our relationship with work and more importantly, with meaning.

3:32They're the authors of the profound and timely book, Is Your Work Worth It? which blends decades of research, philosophical insight, and practical application to explore what it truly means to make work meaningful. Chris is a philosopher turned business ethicist. Jen is an organizational psychologist. Together, they offer a deep, unique, grounded perspective on purpose-driven work and how to navigate burnout, misalignment, and the constant pressure to achieve without losing yourself in the process. In our conversation, we'll unpack how to align your career with your core values, what success really means, and how to define it for yourself, along with practical ways to make work serve your life instead of consume it.

4:16If you've ever found yourself wondering why the work you do truly matters, or if it's time to make a change, this episode is for you. Before we dive in, a couple of quick updates. My sub stack, The Ignited Life, is live and gaining momentum. It's where I go beyond the podcast to share tools, frameworks, workbooks, and behind-the-scenes stories you won't hear anywhere else. You can find it at the ignitedlife.net or you can go to it through passionstruck.com. And don't forget, our YouTube channel is also thriving. We post full video episodes, behind the scenes clips, and exclusive bonus content every week.

4:52Just search for Passion Struck with John Miles on YouTube and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. So let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Christopher Wong Mickelson and Jennifer Toste-Karis. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

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6:19I am so excited today to welcome Christopher Wong Mickelson and Jennifer Tosti-Karras. Welcome to PassionStruck. Thank you so much for having us, John. Thank you, John. So it's always so interesting for me when I have multiple authors on the show of how you came to know each other and why this topic. So I thought to start out with, I'd ask you if you could tell us a little bit about your individual backgrounds and how each of you came to explore the purpose of work. John, I'll start. I'm a philosopher. And when I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in philosophy, I of course wanted to ask the ultimate philosophical question, what's the meaning of life?

7:03And unfortunately, I found that most graduate students in philosophy are asking much smaller questions than that, because of course, it's a huge question. I just thought five years of grad school, I'd figure it out. And it turned out that I was wrong. And I decided during that period that I wanted to keep asking the big questions. I wanted to make a real difference in the world with big questions like that. And that probably wasn't going to happen as a philosophy professor. And so naturally, as other philosophers do, I went into management consulting. So I'm half joking, but I went into management consulting in order to help try and make the world a better place through more ethical business practice.

7:49My area of specialty in philosophy was ethics. And so I really did work in a global management consulting firm based in New York City. And that's what I was doing on 9-11-2001. I was living and working in New York, but that day I was actually traveling in Washington, D.C. And of course, 9-11 was a seminal moment in history for our country, for our world, but of course, for anybody who was affected by the tragedy that day. And a lot of people reconsidered what is the meaning of my work after 9-11. And that's when I started transitioning toward an academic career away from a consulting career. And really thinking about that as a potential research question.

8:46What is the meaning of work? Which is pretty closely related to the question of what is the meaning of life. And so my path was eerily similar, actually, to Christopher's. So I was also living and working as a management consultant, different firm, different specialty area. But when 9-11 happened, I was fresh out of college, first job out of college, living in New York City for about a year, and 9-11 happened. And that really, to me, also made me consider, what am I doing for a living and why? And we saw this really echo in the wake of 9-11 and also in the wake of the COVID pandemic. We called it the great resignation because so many people decided they were unhappy with their jobs and ended up leaving.

9:32So that's what I did. I ended up asking myself that big question, realizing that I wanted to completely change careers and go to graduate school to get my Ph.D. to be a management professor one day, which I am now. And it's a question, right? Would I have come to that realization eventually anyway? It's so interesting to think about all these like sliding door moments and what could have been. But that's where I met Christopher. So I was a PhD student at NYU working with one of the big figures in the field of meaningful work and the meaning of work, Amy Resnesky. She's now at Wharton, but she organizes a small conference for researchers who study the meaning of work.

10:12And that's where I met Christopher. So he was also at NYU. He still is on the faculty there for business ethics, in addition to his full-time gig in Minneapolis. But we met at this conference for researchers on meaningful work. We realized we were both at NYU at the time, and we subsequently started a research partnership where, among other things, we studied the portraits of grief that were written post-9-11 as remembrances of the victims. And we started to ask this question of what was the meaning of their work, not through their own eyes, but through the eyes of those who knew them best within the scope of their tragically completed lives?

10:52How did people account for all that time that their loved ones spent away from them at work? What did that mean? And the portraits are such a brilliant, I can say they're a brilliant lens in because it was Christopher's idea, but I recognized a brilliant idea when I saw it. And we published several papers on that and also write about that study in the book. No, it's great. And I'm not sure if you know my background, but when I got out of the military, I also started at a management consulting firm, Booz Allen. Oh, he's PwC, you're Booz Allen, he's PwC, and I'm Accenture. We've got him covered.

11:27Well, I left Booz Allen to go to Accenture. So I've got that covered as well. Awesome. One thing that you can relate to then is that there's a lot of meaningful work done in firms like that. There's a lot of important work done in firms like that. But people work really hard and they sacrifice a lot to do that work. And sometimes it becomes all consuming. And we brought that perspective of, was that what we wanted to do for the rest of our working lives? was making partner and getting that corner office really the end all and be all for us, for anyone. And that kind of helped to inform our perspective on our work together.

12:16Well, I've got another scenario for you because I was with Arthur Anderson Business Consulting. And I had just been told I was going through the partner process. I'm literally in it for 90 days. I'm based in Houston and Enron hit. So all of a sudden, all this stuff that I had worked so many years for all disappeared before my eyes. And I, like many of the people I could have gone to productivity or KPMG, but I, at that point, it was just so disillusioned with everything that had happened, how it could be taken away in such a short period of time that I really lost that meaning for me of what made management consulting the path to follow.

13:05And I went a completely different direction. So around the same time, of course, there were headlines being made by the Enron failure and by the demise of Arthur Anderson. And that was right at the time when I started teaching in a visiting professorship at Wharton in 2002. So a year after 9-11, I'd gone from full-time consulting to full-time academia and part-time consulting. And I was literally teaching the Enron case out of the headlines. And my students who maybe at one point when they entered business school, hadn't really been thinking about ethics as the thing they needed to learn most were suddenly slapped in the face with this idea that, wow, ethics can really make a difference in, first of all, the viability of a firm, but also the desirability of a firm to work in.

14:00Well, it absolutely can. And coming from PwC, the one difference that Arthur Anderson had compared to the other major accounting firms was that in all the other firms, the quality control partner would always overrule the engagement partner. Arthur Anderson gave that responsibility to the engagement partner. And that's where everything came to a complete, epic, disastrous, humbling because the quality control partner, I knew both partners, but the quality control partner was like screaming, we need to be doing things differently. We need to change directions. And he got overruled and And the rest is history.

14:42But I want to talk about another type of career direction change in the form of Christopher, your grandfather, because this is interesting. For me, I had a change from being in the military, like your grandfather was, to going into the civilian world, thinking I'm going to have this career as a management consultant for the rest of my career. And that disappears, and I have to start over again. But your grandfather rose to be a general. And then with communist China taking over, basically lost his identity and had to start over again. And I was hoping you can share that story because I think it really does tie into the book we're going to talk about today, Is Your Work Worth It?, which I'm going to hold up right here.

15:30Congratulations, Next Big Idea Club Must Read. came out May of 2024, but I'd love to hear that story. Thank you for bringing up my grandfather and for plugging our book, John. I said a moment ago that 9-11 was one of the forces that led me to think about the meaning of work, but if I think back further, I credit my grandfather with making his entire family, all of his descendants, think about the meaning of our work. As you said, he had a rise in his career and then he had a precipitous fall. And whereas I got to choose after 9-11, whether I wanted to change my career, he didn't really get to choose.

16:14It was a choice that was forced upon him. So he was born a peasant and was self-made person in the sense that he found a school to go to as a child that had been forced to leave his own home because of lack of money, found a school excelled there and then found the military as a way to move up the social hierarchy as somebody who didn't come from status. And he excelled there as well. And if you know anything about Chinese history in the 20th century, it was tumultuous. So first of all, He was part of the first democratic government of a country that had long been imperial, but they were invaded by the Japanese army.

17:05And that sort of morphed into World War II, which then morphed into the communist revolution. And it was the communist revolution that defeated the army that my grandfather rose to promise in, the nationalist army. And so he lost his first wife, his first two children. He lost a war, his home, his wealth, his sense of self-worth, and of course his country. And moved to Brazil to raise his surviving eight children with his second wife. And starting over in a new country where he didn't speak the language and he had no prospects for a military career, he went into business. And he always taught us that in Confucian teaching, there's a hierarchy of professions.

17:57Those that are highest on the hierarchy are those that help other people. So he was proud of his government service in China. He exhorted his sons to become doctors and his daughters to become teachers. So in that way, maybe he was a little bit sexist, but in another way, he was exhorting his daughters in a patriarchal world also to make a contribution through their work. And in fact, my mom became a teacher. And so I credit my mom in many ways with inspiring me to help make the world a better place through teaching. But unfortunately, my grandfather never succeeded in business. He tried and failed many times and ultimately was supported for the rest of his life by his children.

18:45But in some ways, I think that might have been his most successful work to bring a family from one country to another, for them to find a way and for them ultimately to pay back their father with their support. I remember when I was growing up, my maternal grandmother went to the University of Michigan and was going to go to medical school. And then I got pregnant with my mom and ended up becoming a stay-at-home mother. And I remember her telling me how disappointed she was in my mom for not making a career out of her life like my mom's sister did when she became an attorney. But it's interesting because that was the fundamental decision that we had in the family when our kids were born.

19:37Would my ex-wife work or would she stay at home with the kids? And we decided to, because we could afford to, have her stay at home with the kids. And I think it made such a profound difference on their upbringing to have that continual support around them. But as we look at society, we don't really treat what used to be a common job, the homemaker. I think it's becoming less common as really a meaningful job because it's not a paid job in the way that we see them. Oh, absolutely, John. In the book, we define work. We tackle this head on because we start with a very philosophical question. So I'm not the philosophical half of our co-author duo.

20:21But I have sat in on panels at, for example, the Society of Business Ethics, where in a two-hour long panel, if you let the philosophers run the show, we couldn't even talk about meaningful work because they'd spend two hours defining what do we mean when we say work. So we wanted to nip that in the bud in the book early on. So we define work as that which has a purpose. There's some point to it. It's effortful. It requires effort. And here's the key one to differentiate housework. It is recognized as work by society. So of course, in our certainly our American society, we define work as typically overlapping with paid employment.

21:04It's not something that we do for free or necessarily for fun. And that's where I think domestic work really does get left out. It's extremely purposeful. It's extremely effortful. And as anyone who has taken care of a house, especially with little kids in it knows, but also if you've taken care of maybe an aging parent or a relative or something like that, uncompensated domestic work is a heck of a lot of work. but we don't treat it as such. We don't recognize it as such in society. And the gendered, the differences in that, was it undervalued precisely because it is women's work and because status was afforded to those who were allowed to work outside the home.

21:47And historically that was men. I think that's part of it, certainly. But we note in the book that when you clean someone else's house or take care of someone else's kids, that's work because you get paid to do it. Same exact tasks, you do them for yourself. And so many working couples do have to negotiate. Who stays home with the kids when they're sick? Is anyone going to stay home full time? This is something that I think any working couple with kids can relate to, this question of whose career is going to take the front seat or the back seat, even if you don't have kids. We're two people with careers, and we're in a couple, and someone gets a job offer that's going to require a move, who compromises, whose career takes the front seat and the back seat, I think is relatable and just as much of an issue today as it ever has been.

22:45Christopher, I wanted to turn this over to you. One of the fundamental ideas you have in the book is we only have one life to live. So what are we doing with it? And the book opens up with that powerful question, what makes work worthwhile? And I really thought it was interesting that you profiled a very famous person at the beginning of the book and their work habits. And this person is really interesting because I had another guest on this show. I can't remember if it was Terry Cole or Susan Cain, but one of them lived in the same condominium complex with this individual and talked about, and I'll let you tell the story here in a second, but they would talk about this very famous person and how introspective and reserved they were, but how they would go out of their way for them to help them carry groceries up to their house or other packages or other things.

23:36And they just said that they saw a different part of them that we typically saw. But this person lived and breathed through the work that he did. So I was hoping that you could share that story. Well, the person of whom you speak is none other than David Bowie. And Jen and I are both fans of his, as well as our editor, Colleen Lowry is a big fan of his. So we decided to open the book with his story. And of course, David Bowie had a long and illustrious career, but it was ridden with youthful mistakes. So it sounds like by the time your friend knew him, that he was the mature David Bowie that we remember.

24:18And one thing that was so poignant about David Bowie's life was that he was working until the very end of it. So he died tragically at age 69. He knew that he had terminal cancer. And when he knew that, he was actually recording his last album, Black Star. And And to choose to spend your last months actually working says something about the relationship to your work that it actually might be one of the most important contributions of your life. And according to documentaries that have been written about him, of course, he didn't work as hard in those final years. He knew he was sick. He knew he wanted to spend time with his family.

25:11and of course he had to give time to his medical care but he chose to spend some of that time working and making what some people consider to be his greatest album and then he released the album on his 69th birthday two or three days before he died and so it stands as one of his legacies this work of art that, of course, outlives a human being. One other thing that we say about David Bowie is that he was famous for having said when he was a little bit younger, I'd like to be remembered for having had great haircuts. And that just shows how tremendously funny he was. But what he might not have actually recognized at that point when he said it was that Actually, a lot of people owe their sense of belonging in this world to David Bowie's crazy gender bending haircuts.

26:12A lot of people saw his strangeness as making their own feeling of otherness to belong in a society that was accepting of all this difference. So an amazing legacy from his work. And when I think of actors and actresses, I always think of shapeshifters. And to me, David Bowie is the iconic shapeshifter of music. Man, he changed his identity so many different times. It was uncanny. Yeah, including that last album, which was his first full-length album jazz collaboration, was still innovating until the very end. Well, that's one thing I love about Elton John's latest album, is that he is still trying to push his comfort zone as well, like David Bowie was with this new album.

27:00So it's interesting and great to see famous artists like those step out of their comfort zone, especially as they reach later stages of life. Jen, I'm going to direct this one to you. One of the key things that you guys talk about is the connection between happiness, work, and earning power. And I felt this personally. I had reached the point where I was a senior executive at Dell. I was running all their technology. Earning power was at that point the highest I had ever had it until that point. And I was the most miserable I had ever been in my life. In fact, I was prioritizing work so much because I had this global role.

27:44I was traveling a couple of weeks per month, catching up when I got home, that everything else in my life got completely out of balance. And I think that this is a common thing that we see happen to many people, not just myself. Why do you think it happens and how can we navigate this paradox in our own life? So not only are we often, they say money can't buy happiness, So up to a certain point, happiness and income co-vary. But the general thinking is that above a certain threshold, more money does not necessarily equal more happiness. Obviously, if you are not earning a lot and below the poverty line, that's unlikely to correspond with happiness.

28:31But we also know that we often ask people to take pay cuts to do work that is the most meaningful in society. We don't tend to pay. For example, our teachers, our social workers, our nonprofit workers who are working to advance good causes, our government workers, certainly. We ask them to basically accept less pay because the meaningfulness of the work is supposed to compensate. It's supposed to be its own compensation. And I've done a little research into this actually myself. So I can know the state of the literature and also what I found in my own study. And it is true that to a certain extent, when we feel our work is deeply meaningful, we are less sensitive to maximizing our rewards that we get from it.

29:20For example, if I'm paid, if I'm doing a task that's deeply meaningful, and I know that I'm being paid on a per-task basis, like a piece rate kind of compensation scheme, I will do more work the more meaningful my work is. I'm not totally insensitive to money. I'm not totally clueless about money. If it stands to be more money made, I'll expend more effort. The interesting thing that we were able to disentangle in our study, though, is the same relationship held when workers were salaried, meaning I can do more work, but I'm not necessarily additionally compensated for it. these were mundane, low-level tasks, but they were framed as being meaningful to people, I will still, if my work is deeply meaningful to me, work harder, even though I stand to make no additional compensation for it as a result, compared to someone who does not feel the work is as meaningful.