LukeSnedden.com

Firstly, I’m back, I’ve had a little hiccup with my Internet access over the last week. The best thing about this is that I have been able to read some old fashioned books. 

One of these books was “Outliers: The story of Success“ written by Malcolm Gladwell.

One of the themes in this book is that the most successful people in terms of business and careers are the people that engage in “meaningful work”.

The concept of meaningful work interested me, I can’t say that any job I have had has fallen into this category. I’m not saying that the jobs I have had have been completely empty in meaning, I see them as being stepping stones with each step hopefully propelling me forward towards the entity (whether it be owned by me or someone else) that will provide meaningful work for me into the future. 

Gladwell explains that meaningful work contains three related similarities. 

These are:

1. That there is a clear relationship between work and reward. 
2. The work has a degree of complexity 
3. The work is autonomous. 

These components when combined provide you with a greater sense of purpose. With this purpose you are able to endure hardships easier than most and celebrate sucesses with greater jubilation. 

The first component states that meaningfull work must provide a clear relationship between work and reward.

This relationship is important as it allows the worker to see that their hard work can be transformed into a greater reward. I see this with my writing, the more I write and promote any posts I have done the more people read what I have written. The flip-side is also true, as I have been without an internet connection over the last week, this has meant that I haven’t been able to post comments, new blog posts or answer my emails.

Traffic to Confusion Management has taken the look of a country back-road rather than a small town main street!

Hopefully now that I am a little more settled I will be able to build traffic back to what it was. This correlation between work and reward will provide more meaning to my work. 

The second point that Gladwell talks about is complexity.

He uses the example that given the choice of earning $75,000 per year being an Architect, or $100,000 per year operating a toll booth, if you are searching for a more meaningful occupation you will choose the lesser salary for the more complex job. The more complex job will offer a greater variety and help to eliminate boredom which leads to a greater disenchantment with that world. I would add to this that a more complex occupation will lead to more opportunities in the long run.

How many opportunities do you think come from working in a toll booth?

Finally Gladwell talks about autonomy and its relationship with meaningful work.

Autonomy allows you to control what they do, and to a greater extent reaps the rewards associated with all three components. Autonomy provides you with a greater sense of achievement when a task is completed. Autonomy also allows you to accept the risk of failure if they do. This does create pressure, however for greater meaning in what you do you need to accept the potential downsides. 

What Gladwell illustrates is that for you to be truly happy in what you do, you have to take greater responsibility. This responsibility means that you will have to work harder, you will have to make sacrifices and you may lose a few friends along the way. But you should expect to be rewarded for your successes. A Salary is not a reward, my definition of a salary is “a reward that is paid to a employee that does enough work not to get fired”. As long as you do the bare minimum you will be paid.

A true reward is based on the results you produce.

In my example the reward I get from writing is the amount of page views Confusion Mangement gets, as you can see it does not necessarily relate to money, but it sure would help! 

Is your work meaningful? Are you happy with what you do? Let me know your thoughts.