what else???????????????????????

A unit of work is the amount of effort required to accomplish a task. Thusly, everything we strive for in life requires some level of work. You want to go out dancing on a Friday night, there is some work involved in getting ready and then actually getting to the dance floor. You want to eat a good healthy meal that you prepared, there is a level of work required. There are some people who have to work at being lazy; believe it or not your teenager has to put a lot of work into not cleaning his room each time you tell him to.

But the question is “What are the reasons people work?” So to that I have to answer, people work in order to solve a problem or achieve a goal that benefits them in either the long or short term. A single parent may work two jobs to solve the problem of providing just the basic necessities for their family and may love their ‘work.’ But by the same token a CEO may be looking to build a vacation home on an island in the South Seas and hate their ‘work.’ However, each of these people is working towards an ends.

One final thought, I once had a friend who told me, “I don’t want my tombstone to say ‘He was a hard worker’.” At the time I thought I didn’t want that either. However, if people understand that I am a very hard worker in my personal life with my family and friends and maintaining and building those relationships, then let my tombstone forever label me as a “workaholic.”

I also love feeling like I’ve achieve something every day, whether it is something simple or contributing to a bigger project.

The word competition means to “seek with” so work is a way of measuring one’s value to community and to oneself. Since the measure of performance is performance, work allows us to measure ourselves against our best performance in being the unique world class human I can create and instrument myself to be.

It is interesting that the word “job” which is Anglo-Saxon and means a lump was presumably used at the beginning of the industrial revolution meaning that someone could not do a job/lump of work. What one needed was the bigger picture in which the piece/job/lump existed. The old story of laying brick or building a cathedral.

Two hundred and fifty years later we are afraid of losing our “lumps” and also that in our global economy we are brought back to the fact that we are and always have been: interdependent.

Does it really matter whether or not a person finds self-actualization through the work they get paid to do? Finding self-actualization outside of the workplace, and using the workplace as a means to that end, seems a valid way of achieving personal fulfillment for some. As long as they can achieve the level of commitment and quality needed to reach the goals of the company why should a manager attempt to “transpose” their drive or reorient their career?
Not all careers can offer the satisfaction that some people need, and can sometimes find, in the limitless world outside of the workplace.