We spend about a third of our lives on the job. Like many, you may find yours boring and stressful. About another third of our lives is spent sleeping—assuming job stress isn’t keeping us up all night. That leaves the remaining one-third—slightly more than two days a week—to devote to the people and passions that make your life most worth living.
Alan Patterson, the guru of workplace meaning and happiness, has devoted much of his career to helping people find as much meaning in their jobs as he has found in his. In Burn Ladders. Build Bridges., he shares decades of insights and conclusions about why so many people are so unhappy in their jobs and what they can do about it.
Patterson’s personal background is filled with the twists and turns he describes in this work. After college, he went to medical school and immediately dropped out, then went back to school, this time in education. He taught for a few years, jumped to leadership consulting, and eventually created a leadership development practice, his “home” for the next four decades.
Among the problems, Patterson argues, is that career benchmarks often fool us into thinking we’re successful when we’re not and trick us into thinking we have failed when nothing could be further from the truth. This is because the materialistic reward system in our jobs is at best skewed and at worst rigged. It’s one of those “some people are more equal than others” games. We all know that the workplace is rarely a level playing field or an evenhanded meritocracy. Striving to success in this coliseum of ambition has little to do with genuine happiness or meaning.
As one who has sometimes struggled to keep happiness and meaning at the core of a peripatetic career, I find the genius of Patterson’s postmortem on workplace is his forceful realization that job unhappiness is not an either/or proposition. One needn’t forgo financial rewards or shun promotions to find greater meaning. The question, he insists, is not so much what we strive for at work but how we strive for it and who we choose to surround ourselves with.
According to Patterson, this situation is summed up in the most nefarious symbols of career success, the corporate ladder. When climbing the ladder becomes our goal, it is self-defeating. After all, becoming a leader at work should not be about becoming a leader. It should be about nurturing relationships and helping others find meaning each day. This is his message: If you focus on your relationships at work, you will not only find greater meaning but emerge as that leader. You are not waving from the top rung of a ladder to all the peons left behind. You are a powerful presence among your peers—and a key person to the higher ups.
“Relationships transform everything, powerful beyond the course of doing everyday business. This is not about collecting people for business purposes like a ladder climber collects personal achievements. Your relationships are the source of strength, motivation, and opportunity,” he writes. “Burn ladders and build bridges instead.”
These are a few of the many lessons the author shares. Patterson doesn’t offer tricks, gimmicks, or slogans of ten steps to happiness. This is a book of deep wisdom as well as practical advice. Anyone who reads it will be wiser—and happier on the job—for it.
—Mark Jerome Walters, D.V.M.
September, 2021