Secret #38: Is Your Work Worth It with Christopher Michaelson & Jennifer Tosti-Kharas
In this episode, we are joined by special guests Christopher Michaelson & Jennifer Tosti-Kharas. As co-authors of "Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work," they provide a compelling examination of how to find purpose and value in one's career.
The episode explores the privilege of questioning the worthiness of work and the generational shifts in work perception. From Christopher’s poignant reflections on his grandfather's and mother's work experiences to the societal undervaluation of critical roles like delivery workers and cleaners, the discussion dives deep into what truly makes work meaningful.
Listeners will hear about the impact of historical events like 9/11 on work motivations, and the persistent dilemma of working for love versus money.
The discussion emphasizes the liberating notion of not having all the answers and the importance of curiosity in navigating work life. Michaelson introduces the concept of 'dancing with work,' promoting a healthier and more flexible relationship with our careers.
Join us as we unpack the intricate relationship between work, happiness, and societal contribution, encouraging a mindset of adaptive curiosity and practical fulfillment.
Highlights:
Meaning & Fulfillment:
Understand why examining the meaning of your work and questioning your purpose is more beneficial than seeking absolute answers.Societal Values:
Reflect on the societal undervaluing of certain essential jobs and the overdue reevaluation prompted by the pandemic.Employer Motivation:
Discover why highlighting the importance of work can be more motivating for employees than punitive measures.Privilege of Passion:
Realize the privilege linked with finding a “calling” and the potential burnout from societal pressure.
TIMESTAMPS
[00:47] Meet the Authors: Dr. Jennifer Tosti-Kharas and Christopher Wong Michelson
[02:45] The Privilege of Questioning Work's Worth
[06:11] The Pressure of Finding Your Calling
[07:50] The Complexity of Loving Your Work
[15:51] The Impact of 9/11 on Work Perception
[20:11] The Unsung Heroes of Everyday Jobs
[29:12] Navigating Career Choices and Expectations
[42:09] Embracing the Journey of Work and Life
[45:14] Conclusion: The Unexamined Work is Not Worth Working
Resources
Secret #11: Moral Injury with Ana Waddington
About Christopher Michaelson & Jennifer Tosti-Kharas:
Link to the book Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work
Follow Christopher on LinkedIn
Christopher Wong Michaelson is the author of Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2024) with Jennifer Tosti-Kharas. Christopher is a philosopher with 25 years of experience advising business leaders pursuing meaning and providing work with a purpose. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and then joined the New York office of Price Waterhouse (now PwC) as one of the first five consultants in a business ethics practice. When he accepted a full-time faculty position teaching corporate ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he kept a foot for several more years at PwC working on its Global CEO Survey and as its first Strategy Officer to the World Economic Forum. Christopher went from Wharton to NYU's Stern School of Business, where he still teaches, and later joined one of the largest business ethics faculties in the world at the University of St. Thomas, where he is the Opus Distinguished Professor and Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, three kids, and two dogs.
Jennifer Tosti-Kharas is the author of Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2024) and The Meaning and Purpose of Work (London: Routledge, 2025), both with Christopher Wong Michaelson. Jen is the Camilla Latino Spinelli Endowed Term Chair and Professor of Management at Babson College. She teaches, researches, and coaches others about what it means to craft a meaningful career, and appreciate the risks and rewards of work as a calling. Jen lives outside Boston with her husband and two kids.
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Reach out and let us know you are listening and what you would like to hear on the show - email:lifesdirtylittlesecretspodcast@gmail.com
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Secret #38: Is Your Work Worth It with Christopher Michaelson & Jennifer Tosti-Kharas
Emma Waddington: [00:00:00] Welcome to life's dirty little secrets. I'm Emma Waddington and
Chris McCurry: Chris McCurry.
Meet the Authors: Dr. Jennifer Tosti-Kharas and Christopher Wong Michelson
Chris McCurry: And today we are deeply pleased and privileged to have two guests. First one being Dr. Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, who is the author along [00:01:00] with our other guest of Is your work worth it? How to think about meaningful work, which has recently been published, and also they are the authors of an upcoming book, The Meaning and Purpose of Work, which will come out next year. Jen is the Camila Latino Spinelli Endowed Term Chair and Professor of Management at Babson College. She teaches, researches, and coaches others. About what it means to craft a meaningful career and appreciate the risks and rewards of work as a calling, and she lives outside of Boston with her husband and two kids.
Welcome, Jen.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Thank you so much.
Emma Waddington: I'm introducing Christopher Wong Michelson. so Christopher is a philosopher with 25 years experience advising business leaders, pursuing meaning and providing work with a purpose, which I think is wonderful.
He earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota. And he currently teaches one of the largest [00:02:00] business ethic faculties in the world at the University of St. Thomas, where he is the Opus Distinguished Professor and Academic Director of the Melrose and the Toro Company Center for the Principled Leadership. Awesome. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, three kids and two dogs. Welcome, Christopher.
Christopher Michaelson: thank you so much, don't you love long academic titles?
Emma Waddington: I do. It's pretty phenomenal. And the Toro company center. I love that name. Toro being bull in Spanish.
Christopher Michaelson: That's right. And also most well known as a maker of lawnmowers and snowblowers, which is something we need in Minnesota. I'm not sure if you. Need those in Singapore.
Emma Waddington: It's probably just as much. This is amazing.
The Privilege of Questioning Work's Worth
Emma Waddington: Well, thank you both for being here and for giving us the opportunity to talk about work and meaning. Really, today. So I guess what we'd love to do is to first kick off thinking [00:03:00] about you know, why is this an important conversation? Why do we need to think about work and meaning?
Chris McCurry: And, and, and I would just like to start off by saying that there aren't many books, and, and, and yours is one of them. where the dedication stops me in my tracks. For those before us who worked without asking whether it was worth it so that we could, I
Emma Waddington: Oh yeah.
Chris McCurry: that just floored me, you know, and I, I had to just ponder that for a while that it, and you mentioned that several times in the book, you know, what a privilege it is to be able to even consider is my work worth it when so many people historically and in the world today. They just they just show up and they do what they do. So this is a great opportunity and a privilege to have this conversation.
Christopher Michaelson: Thank you for even reading the dedication. I wasn't sure that many readers do it. But Jen and I did think carefully about the [00:04:00] dedication. And, you know, in my case, when I think about that dedication, I think about my grandfather, who we do write about in the book. And it doesn't mean to suggest that he never thought about whether his work was worth it.
I think quite the contrary. He was I'm very adamant that work was one of the most important things that we can do. And he taught that to his children and grandchildren and other descendants. But I think as you suggested, it is a privilege of sorts to be able to choose to do particular work or not, whether to work or not.
And he didn't always have that choice.
I also think about my mother who's been a language teacher all her career and she. Didn't really so much choose to be a language teacher as much as she was chosen for it She has this incredible facility for [00:05:00] languages. She speaks six. She has taught for just this amazing Natural ability, but I don't think that she Did that so much because she was looking for her purpose or calling as much as it just sort of found her
Emma Waddington: yeah, it is so true. As I was reading your book, I was thinking about that. The fact that it is such a privilege. We're so lucky to get to ask that question. And I found that very moving throughout your book. The fact that we are, I mean, I love the setup, all the questions that you keep asking. I mean, we'll talk more about that.
I really like that. It makes us think there's no answers. But the, the fact that we can even ask ourselves if we are doing worthy, air quotes, worthy work and that maybe we could do some other kind of work is incredible. It is incredible. So having this conversation is because we're lucky, so we can start from that place.
And [00:06:00] absolutely. Thank you, Chris, for that reminder of the dedication and that we are all in these positions because many before us gave us this opportunity by simply working hard.
The Pressure of Finding Your Calling
Chris McCurry: So what is the dirty little secret?
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Well, I was going to say, I think that simultaneously sort of how we got to this point. It's certainly largely on the backs of those who came before us. And even though we have the privilege to ask these big questions all too often, we don't. We get involved. We get on career paths or in jobs. We get involved in the day to day.
Many of us have, you know, family responsibilities or life outside of work. We're busy. We're overtaxed. And we just don't stop to ask these big questions about why am I doing the work I'm doing and is it serving my life? But then I think alongside that more recently, there's been [00:07:00] another trend. And that trend has been this push to find your calling, love your life, do what you love, and the money will follow and basically make your, your passion into your work.
And that as Steve jobs said, the late great Steve jobs in a commencement address to Stanford university the only way to do good work is to find what you love to do. And if you haven't found it yet, don't settle. Keep looking. And that put an enormous amount of cultural pressure on people to find a calling.
And it was really positioned as this sort of, you know, silver bullet to both good work and a good life. And so I've spent my research career studying what it means to view work as a calling.
The Complexity of Loving Your Work
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: And what I've found is that It, you know, it cannot easily be summarized in a pithy commencement speech or a title [00:08:00] of a book and it's certainly not a, so the dirty little secret I want to touch on here is that loving your work can help you love your life.
It can help you feel like your life as a whole is good. Calling it work can lead to overall well being. It can do so via two paths. One is self actualization. So this feeling that, you know, my very fundamental needs for self acceptance and self esteem are being met and calling does that. And also through an external path, which is about feeling like there is a true purpose to my work.
And a lot of us spend a lot of our waking hours at work. So I'm doing good in the world. I may be helping others. I'm contributing to success to society. And there's some recognition for that. So callings matter and they can be good and they [00:09:00] can lead to engagement going above and beyond at work, helping others at work and all these kinds of things, which are really good and sound really good both to an individual job holder and certainly to an organizational boss, right?
Like these are the good employees. But again, the picture, the dirty little secret is the picture is much more complicated than that. And especially when you have people who are maybe at the more extreme end of feeling that this is their passion, but just like passion can be veering into the obsessive territory, if it's sort of too strong or too all consuming.
Callings work the same way. So there are reports of people with strong callings having very strained, if not outright dysfunctional relationships with others at work, whether it's coworkers or bosses being extra critical about how an organization handles things, because I love it the most. I [00:10:00] know better.
And going all in on work to the point of. The exclusion of everything else in their life. So not maintaining a work life boundary, letting work not being able to disengage from work at the end of the workday, which we know is healthy. I mean, we saw that in covid when we couldn't disengage and all our work and life boundaries blurred.
A lot of people really felt stress and strain from that, if not outright burnout, because how long can we go without really breaking from our work breaks? Breaks we know are healthy, even when we love something, right? We still can need a break from it. And then the last piece I'll mention, and this is, I think, a segue to a dirty little secret that Christopher will pick up.
But this notion that. Loving your work is a surefire path to like riches and great wealth or something like that. And even to doing good work. I think we all know you can do great work without [00:11:00] loving what you do. The two are not necessarily so closely interdependent. And also, and again, maybe a little psychological detachment is, is really good for doing good work or approaching things from a distance or creatively or from a, a perspective you hadn't considered.
But also, and this is where some of my own personal research comes into this I and my co authors have found that people with strong callings will exert extra effort toward their work. Even and actually explicitly when it's uncompensated. So this notion of I can't leave it at the end of the day, I'm going to keep going.
At what point do people with strong callings set themselves up for. Unfair pay or not, you know, not getting compensated for what effort they're putting in and even potentially and not to sound totally, you know, cynical or I'm looking on the dark side here, but even being exploited by employers who [00:12:00] essentially say, I want to hire this person because I know that I can work them into the ground.
They will basically never say no. And it's because. Of that strong passion a study it's not mine but a recent study came out showing people believe it's fair in fact to pay people who are passionate about their work less because that passion should compensate for monetary monetary compensation which again I mean we know in society often we pay the jobs that do the most good in society we pay them the least.
And we don't bat an eyelash when we see highly paid executives who we don't kid ourselves are doing good in the world, we're paying them a lot. And that, for some reason, seems very acceptable to us, but there is there are these sort of psychological underpinnings driving these relationships. And so I just want to, you know, by by sort of illuminating these relationships, my hope [00:13:00] is that people Who are fortunate enough to find work that they love can also be on guard against maybe some of these more negative sides of something that society has decided is unilaterally positive.
Christopher Michaelson: So Emma you mentioned that the book has a lot of questions and one of the questions is should I work for love or money and And If you listen to Jen, then you might be inclined to think, well, the answer to that question is maybe I shouldn't do what I love, or at least it's not as simple as it seems. So then, the alternative is, well, I guess I should work for money.
But I think another dirty little secret is that that's not as simple as it seems either. For one thing, as Jen suggested, oftentimes the most valuable work. Doesn't earn you much money. Another part of this dirty little secret Which is really not a secret is that money can't buy [00:14:00] happiness. I think we all know that and yet we often behave as it can and that is to our peril because we can just sort of slide along sleepwalking through life and just work for the money and then realize, you know, years have gone by and money hasn't bought us happiness.
There's a phenomenon that sociologists and psychologists over the years have studied about the the sort of shape of happiness throughout human life. Historically, we are happy when we are young before working life begins, even that's being questioned now because of an anxiety and depression.
Endemic among young people, but in theory, we are happier before working life begins. And then once working life begins and our earning power begins to grow, our happiness gradually decreases, [00:15:00] ironically, until we reach retirement, at which point, if we are lucky enough to get there. We might be happy again.
Unfortunately, some of us aren't lucky enough to get there. Some of some of us are not lucky enough to get there healthy. Some of us are not lucky enough to get there in an economic condition where we can actually retire from work. And so that idea of chasing money, which we all know is not the surefire way to happiness is still seductive, and we often follow it.
And don't realize until it's too late that our happiness is not correlated with our earning power.
Chris McCurry: I've heard it said that you buy your money with your time or you pay for your money with your time.
The Impact of 9/11 on Work Perception
Chris McCurry: And yeah, and a lot of your book centers on the. Individuals who [00:16:00] perished in the 9 11 attack, and you were both in New York City working and living at that time, and yeah, I think that, that shook us all up, and, and you were close to that, and really took that as an inspiration to find out, you know, what, what's going on with this This work life thing,
Christopher Michaelson: Yeah, we started writing this book right around the 20th anniversary of 9 11. And as you said, we were both working and living in New York City at the time, but we weren't academics at the time. We were both in management consulting, which, Was a more monetarily lucrative kind of occupation than the one that we are in now.
Academia. We weren't the richest people in Manhattan far from it. And sadly, some of the people in the financial district among the wealthiest citizens of Manhattan [00:17:00] perished, but 9 11 didn't discriminate by income. It took the lives of people from more than 90 countries. Citizens, immigrants people from all walks of working life from facilities, workers, cleaners, custodians, security guards to accountants and bond traders and investment bankers. And one thing that we learned from 9 11, as people who were fortunate enough to be able to go home to our families or to our homes that night, was that those who weren't lucky enough to survive They had worked for a reason just like anybody. And some of them were working just to make ends meet.
Some of them were working in order to climb a ladder. Some of them were working in order to [00:18:00] save the lives of others. And we found in the stories of victims of 9 11 that the people who survived them, usually their family members, their coworkers, their close friends, who remembered them in. Portraits that were written for the New York Times about the victims of the tragedy. We found that those people always found a reason for why that person's life was worth living. And sometimes it had everything to do with work. And sometimes it had nothing to do with work.
Emma Waddington: That part was incredibly moving. I was particularly struck by the, he was just a delivery boy. That was really touching and,
Christopher Michaelson: Yeah, I think you're talking Emma about one of the victims. His name was Juan Ortega Campos,
and he was Delivering food for a restaurant in the World Trade Center and the one of the things that [00:19:00] touched us about the New York Times portraits that actually led to our research partnership. That's how we began writing together as academics.
And then eventually that led to this book was just the, the poetry in the lives that was captured by the journalists who wrote these short portraits based on these conversations with loved ones. In this particular portrait, Juan Ortega Campos was depicted as, as you said, quote, just a delivery boy to the suits in the World Trade Center to whom he was delivering food, you know, who may not have paid him any mind when he was delivering their lunch.
But, The portrait goes on to say to his family back home in central Mexico. He was a hardworking adventurer, who called home every day and sent back money to build a dream. And that really impressed upon us that we [00:20:00] have this cultural bias, as Jen suggested toward doing glorious work, heroic work, work that we love.
The Unsung Heroes of Everyday Jobs
Christopher Michaelson: But the humblest work of delivering food can be heroic, as in this story, I
Emma Waddington: yeah, it's really moving. Have you seen Portrait of a Day?
Ooh, it's a Japanese movie. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking of this movie and it's of a it's a day in the life of a toilet cleaner and it is so moving. He takes such immense pride in his job. And, and yeah, it, as I was watching the movie and I was reading your book, it just so happened that it was at the same time, I realized that just like the delivery boy, right, his.
The delivery boy's job is really important. This man's job of cleaning toilets is incredibly important. But we walk past people doing these jobs, and we don't [00:21:00] look twice. Yet it's thanks to them that, I mean, the toilets are impeccable. You'll see it. He just, it's almost operatic as he does it. And, It was so humbling. And it's a reminder that you're absolutely right, that we give certain jobs, yeah, we can, they can appear to be somehow more important than others because they are Yeah. Even I'm thinking of the, the, the the idea that we find our passion, there's something very noble about sacrificing your life for something that is your passion.
Like if you're, you know, working in advocacy or, you know, you're saving lives, there's something so noble about that and sort of people, you may not be given a decent salary, but you'll get lots of accolades. And then you have jobs who don't give you either, not a decent salary and no accolades, [00:22:00] and yet they're so critical to society. And your book got me thinking about those people in the world, the toilet cleaners, the rubbish bin collectors. My goodness, so important. Like I remember in Italy regularly has strikes. What a nightmare when the, the, the rubbish collectors go on strike, it stops. The country, like they have phenomenal power and yet do we go about thanking them?
Not really. So yes, thank you for getting me to think about how jobs can be important in ways that perhaps we don't think about, like they have meaning and worth in ways that are really important and may not be either financial or I don't know what the word I'm looking for is, but recognized perhaps by a community as worthy jobs, right?
And that's the vast majority of jobs, to be honest.
Chris McCurry: well, or daycare providers and, and some of this obviously, [00:23:00] you know, is cleaved into gender and or, or, you know, immigrant status, whatever it may be which is a whole, whole nother topic. But yeah, what, what is valued and what is not,
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: So I think Emma, your point greatly resonates with me about when we take, we know we take jobs, essential jobs for granted when they go away. And that happened for many of us. In the pandemic, seemingly overnight, so our kids were sent home from school and suddenly we realized that in addition to educating our Children that our primary schools and those teachers are providing child care and when that went away, we lost a great amount.
And when there are strikes or when there are, you know, Labor movements or blocks preventing immigrant workers for come from coming in and taking some jobs and we see the impact of that loss. [00:24:00] That's when we start to recognize it, but otherwise we pretty much go go around taking these jobs for granted.
I think your story. I have to check this movie out. It
sounds amazing. And I think the, so the, the, what it reminds me of is a famous study in my field of organizational behavior and one that we, we talk about in the, in the book which does look at hospital cleaners. So these are basically, I mean, like any cleaner, we could see them as a janitor, And the holders of these jobs could see themselves as janitors.
And in fact, some did. So some said, I'm a room cleaner. I'm gonna, you know, tidy, dump the trash. That's it. You know, go on, go on with my day, get this over as soon as possible, collect my paycheck and leave. But there were about half of the cleaners who had a very different idea about what that work meant.
And they elevated their status and their role. And again, just in their own minds, but to being not just [00:25:00] a janitor and I could be doing this anywhere, but I am in a hospital and I am cleaning patients rooms and therefore I am an essential part of the care team just as nurses, doctors and everyone else working at that hospital.
And so the better that I do my job, yeah. The faster this patient will heal and the and and get out of here and the more comfort will be provided to their families. And again, this was an intra psychic shift. This was not a controlled experiment whereby half the bosses said. You are just a janitor. You are an essential part of the care team.
I mean, in all likelihood, people didn't necessarily know who was walking around with what script in their head, except that it came out in the way they approach their work. So go, you know, sort of elevating that work. And so sometimes people will ask me questions like if I'm in a sort of what you what you described is like the.
It's low status seems like it's low meaningfulness, you know, hopefully not meaning [00:26:00] less, but it's, you know, not a, not an elevated job. It doesn't pay that well. You know, do I have any chance of, of considering my work meaningful? And I always think about these hospital cleaners. I mean,
Emma Waddington: Hmm.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: can transform.
This notion of what they're doing, who they're doing it for, what the ultimate impact is in really sort of profound and powerful ways. That we externally may not be able to see, but in that person's own mind and also and here's where the 9 11 portraits of grief pick up on it to their those who are closest to them to their friends, their families, their spouses, and maybe even their coworkers.
It does come through. You see that person. Who has turned what could easily be deemed a meaningless job or a less meaningful job into one that is somehow powerful and profound. So, again, I have to check out this this movie and see, you know, see what [00:27:00] happens, what happens here and how the, the sort of art of the toilet cleaning gets achieved.
But I would believe that there is something really powerful happening that really does help to transform that work in the person's mind.
Christopher Michaelson: So, Jen, while you were talking, you, you called this an intra psychic shift, I think, if I'm not butchering the terms.
And
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Yeah, just, meaning in that person's sort of cognitive, you know, cognitive script.
Christopher Michaelson: yeah, and you, and you made me think about the connection between that and sort of outside perceptions of our work in ways that I hadn't quite thought about before. So one thing that we've talked about and you alluded to is that our families can influence the ways in which we might recognize or appreciate our own work.
But hand washing studies in hospitals actually suggest that if you put a sign by the sink that says you are mandated to wash your hands or else or something like that, Handwashing rates [00:28:00] are far lower than if the signs say something like handwashing supports human health. And so, I think this is also a lesson not just for ourselves as workers to make that reframing, that, that intra psychic shift, but also maybe to employers to think about the ways in which we message the importance of work and motivate employees in a non trivial way to do. recognize why their work matters.
Chris McCurry: Well, it's, it's a, it's, it's tricky because, you know, that could shade into the you know, this is your calling and that's why I'm paying you a lot. Yeah.
so it's, it's, there's a, there's a balance here that needs to be, be achieved.
Christopher Michaelson: Absolutely. It can be manipulative.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Well, yeah,
Chris McCurry: no, I mean, you know, the carrot versus the stick sort of approach, or, you know, in my work, it was, you know, patch the, patch [00:29:00] the kids being good.
You know, praising the positive behaviors rather than punishing the negative behaviors tends to work a little bit better. Although, you know, the occasional timeout is, is necessary.
Navigating Career Choices and Expectations
Emma Waddington: I, I can't, I, I've, I wanted to backtrack a minute because I think what you said, Jen, right at the beginning and then, and Christopher, you want to, the dirty little secrets that we're talking about here, I guess, recognizing our privilege and being able to ask these questions. There really is so much pressure on finding your calling. And this idea, I think that, you know, you alluded to in the book that, you know, there's been so many conversations and books written about, you know finding your, your calling and your passion and don't stop until you find it. And the pressure that it puts on. You know, young graduates or even sort of teenagers are now talking about finding the, their career.
And it does create [00:30:00] incredible amount of pressure. And what's really interesting is what you're saying that finding your calling doesn't necessarily make you happy. It's actually a risk factor for burnout and it actually can end up with you having a pretty miserable life. And, and, and I think of those who sort of.
Work in advocacy and who work in with NGOs and they do, they do burn out because what they're looking after and the people, you know, working with refugees. I have a sister who has been on our podcast. We did a, an episode on moral injury and you know, she works at the moment. She's working with the homeless in London and she used to work with knife crime with teenagers. Massive amounts of burnout and, and obviously incredibly dedicated and is out there because we're talking about people's lives. [00:31:00] And so, yes, you know, it is a risk factor to find your calling. it can get you into a place where you are not happy and then. You know, I love that chapter where, you know, are you going to work for love or for money?
You know, working for money doesn't actually answer that question either. So here is this position where we can see how often these big topics are very complicated. Where do we go from here? So, you know, the, the, the calling piece, the passion is what feels most inviting, but it's nice to be, you know, rich enough to do the things that you love, but maybe you won't get to a time in your life where you can actually enjoy your riches.
This just sounds really difficult. So how are we going to solve this for our listeners? Yes.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: me of conversations I have with my students who are at a business school at a business school [00:32:00] in particular. My college is known for entrepreneurship. So they all simultaneously want to be mark zuckerberg and steve jobs and maybe not elon musk anymore but they used to want to be him and they all think that they are going to not all but many of them.
Their desired ideal is find what you love start a business around it be wildly successful in your twenties and make enough that then you will retire at age thirty. And then you will really live, you know, then you'll just be jet setting around the world and life will be wonderful. And so that creates a lot of pressure if they say, so all of this has to start with what I love and I don't know what that is or I don't know how to turn that into a business and it really creates the sense of existential crisis.
So they're in my office saying, you know, have I already fit, you know, 18, 19 years old, have I already failed basically that I'm not coming [00:33:00] in. Ready, locked and loaded to do my business. Now, let's take a side that I'm not sure Mark Zuckerberg, you know, loved the idea of starting a, you know, college Facebook and that's why he created Facebook and it became what it is.
You know, I think that that the, the, I, again, I want to get away from this notion that the only way to have do great work or have a great life. Okay. Is to find your calling and somehow find it early. And if you don't feel it was predestined, you've already failed. Their research has shown there are two sort of paths to callings.
One is like that. One is I was the kid taking apart my toys. This is my husband, by the way. I knew I wanted to be an engineer. I have it in my bones and now I'm an engineer and I feel this is an unbelievable fit for who I am. So I knew what my calling sort of was and I journeyed toward it. You know, I, I, it was predestined and I went for it.
But another equally common [00:34:00] path is I stumbled into something I love doing. I had no idea. I just tried things. I just saw what fit, what didn't fit. And finally, something stuck, and I never would have said that, okay, I'm here, this is my story, that I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a college professor, researcher, and writer, and teacher, but here I am, and I love it, and I feel like it was luck that got me here, but I got here.
So there is no perfect calling journey, and there is no, you know, we need to sort of get, get away from that. But then the other thing that I want to encourage students, and especially again, they're in, I teach outside of Boston. The cost of living is unbelievably high housing prices in the area student loan debt.
I mean, if students want to prioritize making money. I feel that's a justifiable choice, especially early in their careers when maybe they could gain a foothold of stability that allows them to take risks or do something different later. So the point that I [00:35:00] try to make and I literally teach a class called crafting a meaningful career is not that there's one, you know, this is their fear.
There's one perfect career archetype out there. And if I don't have it, I missed it and I failed, let's take that off the table. There is no one perfect thing. There is no easy answer. Anyone who says there is be, be cautious of that. You have to figure it out by yourself, you know, on your own, largely through experimentation and, and trial and error.
And the important thing that I want students and really anyone to focus on is. Why am I in this job now? It could be for money. That's a again, a valid choice. Equally valid. I would say it could be for deep meaning, love or passion. It could be about. We haven't even really talked about the sort of middle ground, which is more about establishing my career or advancing and gaining status or respect within a within an occupational or organizational hierarchy.[00:36:00]
It could be any of those things, but know what it is. Be intentional about it. If it's not where you, you know, it's this, this job, this meeting for this time. But if that's not going to serve you in the long run, have a plan for when and where potentially to move to. So this sort of notion of continually checking in, Being reflective being intentional and not a one size fits all I mean that's really the I think the this is almost feeling like another dirty little secret right but it's like we all think someone's figured it out and I'm doing it wrong right that's like just our existential fear I feel like always but because work.
Is so elevated in a lot of our again privileged societies what you do is who you are. We're all concerned we're doing it wrong and someone else is doing it better that's why there's an allure of. The one size fits all, you know, here's how to do it. Here's how to find your calling. Here's how to love your life. But I think to recognize no [00:37:00] one's got it figured out. Everyone's doing the best they can. And just to be able to sort of understand my why for now. And that's often that's good enough. I think that's that's plenty justifiable in terms of what work provides to life.
Chris McCurry: well, that's
that's been our our theme from the beginning is we're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides and somebody
Emma Waddington: Yeah.
Chris McCurry: else came up with that, but it, it fits and we, you know, we always think everybody's like smoothly gliding through life and you know, we don't know what dark nights of the soul they may be experiencing.
Or, you know, what troubles they had to overcome to now be on the cover of, you know, some magazine,
Christopher Michaelson: So as a case in point,
Emma Waddington: Yeah.
Christopher Michaelson: they loved and struck it rich [00:38:00] once they did And no longer have to work. We think, well, that's the perfect life that we should strive for. You know, Jen Jen said that every one of our students is unique, and that's true.
And yet they probably all share the same kind of anxiety, not only about finding work after college, but. Then the added pressure of finding work they love and finding work that will support you know, the, the lavish rents and mortgages required in a place like Boston or New York, or even, even Minneapolis, St.
Paul. But one thing that we often talk about as a counterpoint to just loving your work is. Kind of reframing, as Jen suggested before, reframing why we why we work, our motivations to work. [00:39:00] Also reframing not just what makes me love my work, but what about my work might be lovable. So, what I'm, what I mean by that is Even if you don't love your work every day, there may be a good reason for doing it.
And that reason might be as basic as to support one's family. It might be have something to do with the social contribution that you make. It might be having company at work. One thing that we found in our research was how many people were said to have loved their work because they loved the people that they work with that they found camaraderie.
It can be lonely not to work. We talked about how Jen and I both worked in management consulting firms before we became academics. And one of the interesting things as we reflect on the past in those firms is that the ultimate [00:40:00] goal of those firms was to make partner we were supposed to as young associates to kind of aspire to the lives of partners, which from our vantage point, when we were new, Kind of looked frazzled and yeah, they had better homes and better cars than we did, but they were also really busy.
They were on planes all the time. They rarely slept in their beds at home. And, the ultimate goal of making partner was. Something that led to the ironic privilege of being able to retire early, so it's, it seems sort of ironic to work so hard for the privilege of no longer having to work and because few of us will actually reach [00:41:00] that goal of, retiring early.
Sometimes it just seems to make more sense to embrace today and what makes our work worth doing today in the context of a life worth living.
Chris McCurry: Well, and you mentioned in the book how so many lottery winners go, you know, continue to work. People find that retirement is kind of boring or lonely
Christopher Michaelson: Yeah, imagine, you know, those things that you might long to do on weekends when you're working really hard, like golf or, some people love to sew, et cetera. Imagine if you had all the time in the world to do those things all the time and, and your golf games still sucked, You know, that would probably be really frustrating and not not the happiness that you imagine if you could do that all the time.
Chris McCurry: or [00:42:00] just lost some of its value as, you know, a refuge and something. Rare and precious
Emma Waddington: So true.
Embracing the Journey of Work and Life
Emma Waddington: I love this conversation and in particular this kind of attitude where we see work. Asking ourselves the question about worth and happiness, but also giving ourselves permission to be where we are in this point in life and that we may work for many reasons and that that's okay. And I think that's something else that we've.
Sort of encountered in many episodes here. Is that permission to just be and to make room with room for all the feelings and the experience and to be curious? And the more we can make room. The more permission we can, the more we may find in this job the more meaning we may attribute to [00:43:00] it. But giving yourself permission to just work, just an inverted promise, work because we need to earn money.
It feels quite freeing. If that's the stage I'm at where, you know, I know some parents who choose to take a part time role to be a parent as well. As earning some money, but that's important at that stage to have permission to do that and not be in this pressure cooker to find the perfect role with the most meaning that's paying us enough to justify it.
Yeah, because it's unfolding and we change throughout life so much. We've got different priorities at different stages and. Our body also changes and we can do more or less of certain jobs. And so it feels really wonderful to give ourselves this permission to journey with work, not to expect that it will be the job when you come out of university and [00:44:00] that you will know it all and have it all and, and actually allow life to unfold.
One of our guests use a metaphor of dancing with life. And it feels like, you know, that's. Dance with life and dance with work and see what, you know, work can bring us. And, but always keeping an eye on. You know, how are we feeling towards this? You know, we don't need to lose sight of that.
Christopher Michaelson: I love that metaphor of dancing with work because I think probably what we more literally do very often is fight with work. And that's not only unhealthy but, you know, Emma, you were sort of alluding to the dance with work and life and children and family and If you are a working parent, then Your dance with work or your fight with work is going to set an example for your children and shape their perceptions of what work could be or must [00:45:00] be.
And even if we don't find all the answers as working parents, we can hope to help our children find even better answers than, than we have found.
Conclusion: The Unexamined Work is Not Worth Working
Christopher Michaelson: We were talking earlier about how our book is full of questions. And I guess we should reveal the dirty little secret that our book doesn't have a whole lot of answers, but it's in the questions that we hope that our readers find answers.
We kind of cheekily. Riff off of Socrates famous statement, the unexamined life is not worth living. You know, we, we'd like to believe that the questions that we that we pose help people examine their work. And so we, we say the unexamined work is not worth working
Emma Waddington: Yeah. And to hold that lightly, which is one of our sort of mentors in the world of acceptance and commitment [00:46:00] therapy. He talks about holding thoughts lightly. It feels like holding that lightly as well. So not to sort of grasp and hold it too tightly because that can strangle us. Have it and hold it lightly and just, Just keep pondering and asking yourself the question and then letting it unfold
Chris McCurry: and keep showing up.
Emma Waddington: And keep showing up
Christopher Michaelson: and keep dancing. I love it.
Chris McCurry: keep
dancing.
Emma Waddington: Absolutely. Wow. This has been a great conversation.
Chris McCurry: Yeah. Thank you so much. And We'll be looking forward to your new book coming out next
Emma Waddington: Yes.
Yes.
Chris McCurry: Well, will that have the answers?
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: spoiler alert that will also not have
Chris McCurry: Oh, man.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: that book is meant to be in some ways, a companion to this, this one the, the is your work worth it is really aimed at a [00:47:00] very broad audience ambitiously of anyone who works or will ever work or has ever worked, you know, basically everyone.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Whereas the new book is a little more academic, it's something we imagined either colleagues in the field or students reading but that's not to say it couldn't be insightful to anyone. But I guess that is a caveat. We wrote it a little, a little more academically focused and a little less broadly focused and applicable.
And there we really try to to delve into the theory for theory's sake. So if anything, it gets even further away from answers and even more into the question territory. So I think that's a pretty realistic preview of, of that book.
Emma Waddington: I think it's quite liberating not to have the answers. It's kind of gives us permission to be curious and to be at peace [00:48:00] with our experience, right? And I think, yeah, Oh yeah,
All 60, 000 of them.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Absolutely.
Christopher Michaelson: that. sentiment. You're both, you're both so calming and reassuring.
Emma Waddington: Oh, thank
Chris McCurry: Thank you Well, we should finish up, but now this is, this has been a privilege and Yes.
We'll put a link to the book in our show notes. And if there's anything else that you think our listeners might find interesting in terms of resources please send us, send those our way and we'll make sure they get into the show notes.
And we'll let you know when this drops.
Jennifer Tosti-Khara: Thank you
so
so much. This was just an unbelievable conversation and so enjoyable.
Chris McCurry: excellent.
Christopher Michaelson: love that we're able to have it across the world.
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