Times have changed.
Unlike the time of our parents and grandparents, when pleasure and work rarely went together, we are closer than before to achieving work-life balance.
But there are still some miles to go. As I argued before, the biggest challenge now is not just to avoid busy work, but also to find, among so many available options, something that can be called meaningful work.
As expected, meaningful work is hard work. Even when you enjoy it, there are times when you want to give it all up and go live in the countryside, as far as possible from civilization, to never think about it again. But after a while, you come back to work because that’s what you love to do.
But what could we enjoy doing and believe enough to embrace the difficulties and overcome the hard times that will come along the way?
There is the question.
I would like to share with you 5 lessons I learned, in the hope that they can help you, too.
1 – What would you do if you didn’t need to make money?
Basically, there are two types of meaningful work. One that mostly impacts only your life, like a hobby, for example. You enjoy doing it and is important to you, but it doesn’t go any further than your own backyard. On the other hand, there is the work that impacts not only yourself but also the lives of a group or society.
A good thermometer is how you feel when you accomplish something. It may generate a momentary joy that soon ends or generate genuine joy that lasts for a long time. The former usually is linked with achieving something physical and tangible. The latter is the result of attitudes that positively impact people’s lives and make you get out of bed in the morning.
“In thinking about optimizing how you work,” the productivity expert Merlin Mann advised, “try to distinguish between the parts of your job that are necessarily difficult versus the parts that are harder than they actually need to be. The former is the reason that you get the big bucks, and the latter is the reason why you may often feel like the bucks should be bigger.”
This doesn’t mean that a hobby can’t evolve into something bigger, or even become your main activity. Or the opposite, something that you do for a living now may downgrade to a hobby or even disappear completely. Things change and are continuously evolving.
2 – The two questions method
I was always fascinated by asking questions. There is beauty in pursuing the multiple paths a question can take you through. But more importantly, we should revisit these same questions every now and then to discover what may have changed.
For example, there are two questions I always revisit whenever I need to make a decision:
1 – what is the next step?
Sometimes life changes too fast to plan too many steps ahead. It makes no sense to define five or ten steps ahead when you haven’t even taken the first yet. Asking this question is interesting because it creates an openness to the unforeseen and gives you space to adapt along the way.
Worrying about the distant steps is a waste of time and energy. Also, you will definitely not be the same person a few years from now. The journalist Shankar Vendantam called it the illusion of continuity: the belief that our future selves will share the same views, perspectives, and hopes as our current selves. So, one way to go is to set an objective and don’t worry about the next one until you complete it.
2 – does this push me away or bring me closer to my goal?
Having a bigger goal and planning how to get there in the long run are two different things. But where bigger goals and small steps meet is what psychologist Howard Gruber called organizing purpose. As he explained,
“Think of [meaningful work as] a kind of high human purpose that begins with a vision of things as they are not, that anticipates difficulties -summoning some and avoiding others- that responds to surprises without losing sight of its goals. A system exhibiting purposes such as these can come into being only in response to the imperfections of adaptation, the uncertainties of the world, and the inadequacies of our knowledge and skills. When someone is ‘purposeful’, we mean that he or she cannot easily be deflected from the pursuit of a chosen course.”
So, given these imperfections and uncertainties that Gruber mentioned, this second question aids in understanding if it’s the best step to take right now. There may be a downfall -a dip that can be identified as the feeling that it is not for you, causing discomfort, displacement, and fear, which can pull you back into your comfort zone. It’s as if life asks: is this really what you want?
Life becomes more interesting when we don’t have all the answers and we allow ourselves to change our mind or path, so slow down and take it one step at a time.
3 – What do you pay attention to?
Imagine that, at the beginning of each day, $86,000 is deposited into your account and you can spend it as you wish. There is only one condition: at the end of the day, everything you haven’t spent is withdrawn from your account without the possibility of saving the surplus.
In this metaphor, the money is your time. Every day you get 86,000 seconds to spend however you want. Paying attention is investing time in it -and time is your most valuable resource.
Setting objectives will bring clarity to what your priorities are -and to your organizing purpose-, which means deciding where you want to invest your time. If you don’t have time for something, it’s not a priority. According to productivity expert Maura Thomas, the equation is quite simple: your attention becomes your experiences, which determine the life you live. In other words, you become what you pay the most attention to.
Also, with your priorities well defined, you will not be swallowed up by the anxiety of the world. If you protect your space and time well, you’ll be able to dedicate yourself to what really matters.
4 – Now what?
It doesn’t matter how successful one becomes or how many achievements one has on their CV. We will always ask yourselves: now what?
The author Austin Kleon argued that “the true creative journey is one where you wake up every day with more work to do.” As he suggested, one way to keep up with it is to create a routine -a daily practice that you do no matter what happens. Something that offers you a haven from the chaotic world outside. When in doubt, your routine tells you exactly what to do.
Our routine can be compared with the myth of Sisyphus, who rolls a giant boulder up a mountain to start all over again the next day. Put differently, maintaining a routine isn’t always easy. But finding what matters doing is not a straight line from point A to point B. Several tools and methodologies can help you create an action strategy, but moving forward it’s basically trial and error –there is no magic formula.
If you are looking for a technique that works, start by making a list. The good old pencil and paper allows you to view and organize your tasks, what is most important to do (or don’t), and in what order it can be done best.
5 – What are you grateful for?
Every small achievement counts. We do not climb a ladder in a single leap, but step by step. It is the sum of these small achievements that makes it truly great. Be humble with yourself and know how to recognize your victories however small, and the effort that you put into them.
Besides, one will never get there. There will always be a new goal, a new challenge, a new dream. There is no final destination, only the next question (“now what?”).
But it is good that things are so that we can keep up with them. We crave big changes, but the truth is that we can’t handle them. Big changes are sudden and violent, and we rarely go through them with ease. The subtle changes in our lives are the ones that last because they are at a speed that we can follow, that we can manage, and especially that we can pay attention to.
What does meaningful work mean to you?
What are your strategies to not lose focus on what matters most?