CHAPTER 4

DO YOU NEED TO FIND MEANING IN YOUR WORK?

THE CAREER COACH WHO SUPPORTS BORING JOBS

Lindsay Gordon brands her services as “career coaching for analytically minded people.” After all, coaching has a reputation for being touchy-feely, and not especially results-oriented. In 2014, Gordon started her company, A Life of Options, for people like her, who think strategically and want to know that their time with a coach will have immediate, practical applications to their work lives.

Gordon’s work caught my attention a few years ago, when I read a blog post she’d published about how it’s OK to have a boring job.¹ “If it works for you and your life, a boring job can be just what you need,” Gordon wrote.

It wasn’t a perspective I’d heard often—as conventional wisdom goes, if you feel unfulfilled or uninspired at work, you should aim to switch to something more enlivening. But Gordon’s take is that if your boring job allows you to provide for your family, or if it gives you enough free time to pursue your passions and interests (and those things are important to you), there’s no pressing need to leave it. Gordon told me that when she shares this logic with her clients, they’re often visibly relieved to avoid a taxing career transition that they don’t really want.

What I love about Gordon’s approach to career coaching is how much she emphasizes self-awareness and agency in your career. Sure, your friends (and a slew of self-help material) might be urging you to find work that’s more rewarding. But ultimately, the definitions of descriptors like “rewarding” are yours to create—and the decision to pursue a new career or not is up to you.

Gordon told me that a lot of her clients show up to their first meeting with her because they feel disappointed in themselves. They’ll say something about their day job like, “I’m not saving the world!” Gordon typically pauses to acknowledge their grief. Then she prompts them to really think, “What does that even mean?” Gordon told me that holding yourself to such broad standards as “saving the world” just “gives people room to beat themselves up a lot about what they are not doing.”

From there, Gordon spends the next few sessions helping her clients craft career goals that are, in her words, “narrower but less restrictive.” In other words, they’re customized to the individual, and they give that person more freedom to find jobs that allow them to achieve that goal. If your goal is literally saving people’s lives on a daily basis, there are only a few jobs out there that allow you to do that—think firefighter or emergency room physician. But if your goal is to make someone smile every day, you can probably be anything from a receptionist at a dentist’s office to a certified financial planner.

This kind of reframing makes practical sense, too. After all, we can’t all have jobs where we save lives on a daily basis. And many of us don’t have any desire to do that kind of work. Even people who do pursue careers in medicine can become disenchanted with the work and want to change careers.² (This happened often among exhausted healthcare workers during the pandemic.³) There’s room for everyone to build careers that suit their goals and personal preferences.

Some of Gordon’s clients have come up with statements like, “I want to produce something I feel good about” or “I have a desire to impact how the world is run, surrounded by people who feel the same way.” Those goals may evolve over time—and in fact, Gordon has heard many new parents say that what’s important to them right now is spending time with their kids and bringing up the next generation, who will in turn contribute to the world.

Gordon’s ideas about identifying what’s important to you are especially relevant given that many professionals today are hungry to do work that is more “meaningful”—sometimes without knowing what that buzzword means to them. In 2018, coaching platform BetterUp released a survey that found nine in ten Americans would sacrifice part of their paycheck if they could do more meaningful work.⁴

Assuming these survey respondents were being honest, and not just saying what they thought was socially appropriate, I understand this impulse. People don’t want to sit at a desk every day feeling like a cog in a wheel or like they’re helping an evil corporation get richer. But do most of us know what exactly we’re searching for when we say we’re on a quest for greater meaning at work? Gordon encourages her clients to gain this kind of clarity by considering their unique values and strengths and how closely their current job aligns with those.

There are plenty of intensive exercises and frameworks you can use to identify your values and strengths. But for people without a lot of time on their hands, you can also take a few minutes to come up with some ideas about what “meaning” or “impact” might look like in your own career, or in the context of what you’re uniquely skilled at. That will help give you some necessary clarity.

A few years ago, Gordon crunched the numbers to see how many of her clients left their jobs after being coached by her. As it turned out, more than half ended up staying because the shift in mindset around meaning and impact was enough to help them feel more positive about their work. “You get to define ‘what does it look like to make a contribution,’” Gordon said. Hearing that bit of wisdom, she added, can sometimes jolt her clients out of a funk, noting that “it sets people free.”

MEANINGFUL WORK: IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN JUST YOU

Even before the pandemic, there was plenty of research on the drivers of meaningful work and advice on how to choose a meaningful career. There was also some thoughtful criticism of the quest to find your life’s purpose in your work. This quest can contribute to phenomena like “hustle culture”⁵ and “workism”⁶—essentially the pressure to dedicate as much of your time and energy to your day job as possible.

But the pandemic accelerated the workforce’s collective search for meaning. For many of us, the global crisis was a turning point that showed how fragile life can be and how you get just one chance to make your impact on the world. Articles in outlets like Insider,⁷ the Boston Globe,⁸ and the Wall Street Journal⁹ described professionals at every stage of their career abandoning traditional corporate life for something they felt more connected to.

More than half of Gordon’s clients stayed in their current job after considering what was most important to them in their lives.

Ideally, people would be doing work that’s lucrative, that meets their lifestyle needs, and that they find personally meaningful. But we know that’s not always the case. So what do you do if you’ve achieved expertise and financial success in a particular line of work but you don’t feel that your work makes a positive impact on the world? Is it worth driving yourself up the wall every day trying to figure out what else you could do and feeling bad about not doing that?

Perhaps one big problem inherent in our search for meaningful work is that no one quite knows what meaningful work is “supposed” to look or feel like. Which means it’s easy to fall into the trap of always thinking your work could be more meaningful, no matter whether you’re a publicist, a small bookshop owner, or a veterinarian. Does bringing joy to your customers when you recommend a book by an author you know they’ll love count? How about saving the life of a puppy who’s just swallowed a pen cap?

To be sure, everyone defines meaningful work differently, and a person’s understanding of what constitutes meaningful work will likely change over the course of that person’s career. But the most succinct articulation of meaningful work I’ve heard so far came from Fraser-Thill, the career coach we met in Chapter 3. Meaningful work, she told me when I interviewed her for an Insider article in 2018, comes down to feeling like it’s about more than just you.¹⁰ Making your coworkers or clients smile counts, and so does providing for your family. Fraser-Thill told me the same thing she used to tell her students at Bates College’s Center for Purposeful Work: If we expanded our definition of meaningful work, we’d have a much more satisfied workforce.

A growing body of research supports this observation, too. A study led by Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of the bestselling book Give and Take, found that university call center employees who met student beneficiaries of scholarships were more productive than their counterparts who didn’t meet those beneficiaries.¹¹ And a Harvard working paper found that when cafeteria workers could see the students they were serving, they worked faster and prepared food that customers found tastier compared with a group of workers who couldn’t see the students.¹² That may have to do with the fact that the cafeteria workers who could see students eating their food also said they felt more appreciated.

Studies like these suggest that one way to find greater meaning in your work is to know that your work is helping people. It goes back to Fraser-Thill’s insight about seeing beyond yourself. In the case of the university call center employees and cafeteria workers, the job may literally involve, respectively, dialing alumni or frying up hamburgers. And maybe those activities are satisfying in and of themselves. But if they’re not really, it helps to remember that those tasks are only the means to an end goal of making people’s lives better.

Another study, led by a researcher from the WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Management, found that when women in a Mexican factory thought about how their work was benefiting their family, they performed better, even if they generally saw the work as dull.¹³ The researchers write, “By reminding themselves of how their work contributes to their family lives, employees can reframe it as more meaningful and motivating.”

It’s as though it’s easier to tolerate tedium when we can visualize the greater purpose of that tedium—in this case, supporting family members financially.

Understanding how your work benefits others can help you to reframe your job in a more positive way and even to perform better.

Seeing work as a paycheck won’t necessarily make you feel great. But it helps to be able to draw the connection between a seemingly boring job and your core values, which might include caring for your family. Yes, eventually you might want something more out of your day job or your career. And that’s OK. But if we’re talking about ways to tolerate a job that’s not so creatively stimulating, at least for the time being, it helps to remind yourself that you’re not working in a soul-sucking vacuum. Instead this work is a way for you to take care of the people who are most important to you.

HOW TO FIND MEANING IN MONEY

I want to go one step further in dispelling the pernicious myth that only certain types of people in certain types of jobs can do meaningful work. For that I’ll turn once again to Kerri Twigg, the Manitoba-based coach (introduced in Chapter 3) who wrote the book The Career Stories Method. Twigg encourages her clients to think about three types of values in particular: money, status, and making a difference.¹⁴

As for status, Twigg advises readers to go for whichever rung on the ladder makes them happiest. She writes: “Some people are content to do their work behind the scenes. Others like to lead, but also do the work alongside colleagues in similar positions. Some people like to plan and then dictate what the next move is. Status matters.”

The key is to be honest with yourself about which type of role appeals to you most—you can do meaningful work in all of them.

Twigg takes a similar stance on making a difference. “Some people are happy to have a career that allows them nice things: they can buy a car, a cottage, and donate the rest. They don’t need their jobs to make a difference for a lot of people, just for people in their company or community,” she writes. But “others need to make a difference in the larger world, and to be able to see that difference. They don’t want to just donate to a cause, they want to be the one doing the work for that cause.”

Again, figure out which type of impact-making suits you best right now, and remember that you can change people’s lives in any of these capacities.

The final value Twigg addresses—money—is perhaps the most complex because it can seem gauche to care about it (or to say you care about it).

But Twigg writes in her book that it’s crucial to be honest with yourself about how important money is to you and how much money you need or want right now. Once you acknowledge those preferences, you can use them to inform your career development going forward. Twigg writes that if you ignore how much you value financial freedom, you’ll wind up like some of her clients, who consistently burned out and job-hopped because they kept taking roles that didn’t support the kind of lifestyle they desired.

After all, wanting to earn a comfortable salary doesn’t automatically make you a money-mad monster. There are plenty of other motivations that have to do with your upbringing, your personality, and other areas to potentially explore in psychotherapy. Some people just don’t want to worry constantly about how they’re going to pay the bills or whether they can afford to attend their friend’s birthday dinner. That’s not shameful—that’s striving for peace of mind.

I’d also argue that being in a cushy financial situation is often what allows you to make a bigger social impact than you could otherwise. You can, for example, regularly donate a chunk of your earnings to a philanthropic cause of your choosing. And while writing a check to a local children’s charity may not feel quite as gratifying as rolling up your sleeves and working there five days a week, anyone who does work at the charity will tell you that your financial contribution absolutely makes a difference. Not to mention that, as we saw earlier in this chapter, money allows you to provide for your family, which to many people is their most important responsibility.

Some people want to make enough money so that they don’t have to worry about whether they can afford their friend’s birthday dinner. Think of that as striving for peace of mind—not as shameful.

Which is to say that money can be a path to meaning, if you use that money to give your kids the ballet lessons they’ve been begging you for or if you donate it to your community. Money can also be a kind of meaning in and of itself if earning it allows you to finally feel independent, calm, and happy.

So if money is important to you and you’re currently in a job that pays reasonably well, but you’re worried that you’re not making a positive impact on the world, consider two things: One, maybe your current role is a good fit for you right now, given your personal values. And two, maybe you can still make the kind of difference you want to make.

Though I hope this book will speed up the process, it takes some professionals years to internalize this wisdom—professionals like Danielle.

THE SOCIAL JUSTICE CRUSADER AND THE GOOD-ENOUGH GIG

Danielle had always been career-driven. But while on maternity leave with her first child, she kept calling the public relations agency where she worked to ask for more time off.

Danielle, who asked to use a pseudonym to avoid damaging her professional relationships, liked her job well enough. The pay was pretty good, too. And Danielle relished the opportunity to delve into new technologies and explain the ins and outs to reporters. “There was so much to learn,” Danielle said. “It was, in a way, like being in school.”

But after becoming a mother, Danielle acknowledged what she’d been subconsciously thinking for months—that this work just didn’t make the kind of impact she wanted to make on the world. Danielle primarily worked with CEOs of high-growth tech startups, helping them land press coverage of their innovative products and services. She’d much rather have a similar role within a social enterprise fighting gender and racial inequities—the kind of work she’d be proud to tell this baby about one day.

Even beyond the nature of the work, the PR job was exhausting. Danielle couldn’t imagine being the kind of attentive, involved mother she hoped to be if she came home every day feeling completely depleted (and still on call for any urgent emails that came in).

Working in PR was like sitting in a pressure cooker all day, racing to meet urgent (and sometimes arbitrary) deadlines. Danielle told me about one particular incident that disillusioned her about the reality of working in PR. It was 11 p.m., and Danielle was on the phone with her boss at a PR agency asking him to ease up on one of her junior colleagues who’d been crying because of the stress she was under.

“Your priorities are messed up,” Danielle told her boss. Instead of taking care of his employees, he was trying to meet the unmeetable demands of an irrational client. Danielle knew this wasn’t an isolated incident, either—she said it could be pervasive in PR.

So by the time Danielle was on maternity leave, she was feeling ambivalent about staying in PR. Yes, she saw a career path for herself that involved climbing the corporate ladder and becoming a VP at an agency. But she also knew how little flexibility that type of role afforded. She also wondered if helping tech startup CEOs get more attention was really the kind of impactful work she aspired to do. Danielle kept asking for more time on maternity leave, which her managers readily granted. Finally, she told them she wouldn’t be returning to her position.

For the next three years or so, Danielle focused on raising her kids (she had another child shortly after the first). Then, to make some extra money while her then-husband pursued an entrepreneurial venture, she started doing subcontracting work for PR agencies and picking up some of her own clients.

“I was always in a state of tension with that feeling like, ‘This is not what I want to be doing,’” she told me. The problem was that “I never did answer that question, ‘Well, if you don’t want to go back to that, what are you going to do?’”

When Danielle and her husband divorced, she realized just how precarious their financial situation was, having by her own admission had her “head in the sand” about their finances. Danielle went through a personal bankruptcy as she worked furiously to build her own PR business and support her two young kids.

Four years later, Danielle is 41 years old, in a new relationship, and on solid financial footing. She’s still wondering about the possibility of making a career transition to something she views as more impactful. But now that she has some greater financial security, she can see her options more clearly. And her thinking around the decision to leave PR has changed somewhat.

Now, Danielle is more inclined to stay in the PR industry, but as an individual contributor on a team instead of a manager. That shift would presumably give her more flexibility to take care of her family. And she knows that there’s work available for individual contributors, especially for skilled writers like her. She’s also thinking about ways to do PR work for companies that focus on issues that are important to her, specifically mental health and financial literacy. She wonders, “How could I leverage the tech sector, where there’s so much power and interest and money, for the things that I think are really important?”

Lately, Danielle is focusing less on transitioning out of PR because it’s clear to her how much subject-matter expertise and earning power she’s built up over the course of her career. Switching to something else that seems more personally fulfilling could mean taking a pay cut while she gets up to speed. That could be both demoralizing and impractical, since she’s still supporting a young family.

She’s also been meditating on the concept of meaningful work. It’s something she’s been craving for a long time, though she never really stopped to ask why. Now, whenever she starts feeling guilty about not doing something like nonprofit work, she reminds herself that meaningfulness “is not a human right.” That might sound harsh, but Danielle tries to feel grateful for important things like her family and her romantic relationship, and for being able to pay the rent again. Coming home every day feeling like she’s making the world a better place would be nice—but she told me it also seems like something of a luxury that she isn’t necessarily entitled to.

Not to mention the fact that constantly fretting about whether she has the “right” job according to some arbitrary standards of meaning and impact is exhausting. “How much better is my life going to be if I wrestle with these questions?” Danielle asked. It’s a dilemma she’s still trying to resolve.

I’ll admit that something in me lifted a little when, at the end of our second phone conversation, Danielle told me she’s beginning to see her PR career as enough.

Maybe I wanted Danielle to stop feeling guilty about doing work she excels at, gets recognized for, and, at least when she has some schedule flexibility, enjoys. That kind of guilt is a heavy existential burden to bear on a daily basis. And I didn’t relish the thought of Danielle, a hardworking person who cares about her family and the people around her, waking up every day and chiding herself for the life choices she’s made so far.

It will be great if Danielle is able to recraft her career and do PR work for companies in the mental health and financial literacy space. But if for whatever reason that doesn’t work out, I want to give Danielle and people like her a little freedom from self-flagellation. I’ll say much the same thing here that I said about Ed, the university media relations director, in Chapter 2. Even if Danielle doesn’t achieve her ideal career, I don’t want her to feel like a failure. To all the Danielles out there in the workforce: Do the very best you can, but cut yourself some slack.

REMEMBER THIS

•   There’s no shame in staying at a “boring” job if it allows you to dedicate time and energy to other life priorities.

•   You’ll likely find your work more meaningful if you can see how it benefits people other than you.

•   Don’t pretend that money and status aren’t important to you in your career right now if they are.

TRY THIS

DRAFT AN IMPACT STATEMENT

Pretend you’re one of Lindsay Gordon’s clients, and try defining meaning and impact for yourself. Remember Gordon’s mantra about coming up with statements that are “narrower but less restrictive” than the common refrain, “I want to save the world.”

In a LinkedIn post published in fall 2021, Gordon offered a few more examples of statements that her clients have come up with.¹⁵ One person said that meaning and impact involve “earning money and producing something I feel good about.” Another said, “I don’t need to be saving the world, but I want my work to have a fast and direct impact on the consumer.”

What do meaning and impact look like for you?