Worth your time on this question

TRY · 10 MIN

What Is Work For?

TAIU

Name what this job is actually being asked to provide.

Names what this job is actually being asked to provide.

READ · BOOK

Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber

Graeber on work that the person doing it privately believes is pointless. Argumentative and overstated in places, and still the sharpest account of a particular modern misery.

READ · ARTICLE

One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?

Frederick Herzberg

Herzberg argues that what makes work tolerable and what makes it satisfying are two different lists. Fixing the first will not deliver the second.

READ · RESEARCH

Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work

Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton

Evidence that people reshape the same job substantially without changing the job title. Worth reading before concluding the only route is out.

READ · RESEARCH

Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.

READ · RESEARCH

Jobs, Careers and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work

Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues

The study that found people in identical roles describe their work as a job, a career or a calling in roughly equal thirds. None of the three is the correct answer.