Productive work and happiness

Productive work and happiness

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Pause for a second and think what makes you happiest. Good health? A satisfying romantic relationship? Your children thriving? Spending time with friends and family? Traveling to interesting places? Being engrossed in an entertaining hobby?

All of these are undoubtedly important values (some of them optional) that make us happy. However, I argue that the most fundamental daily source of happiness is productive work, and more specifically, work that we love. See the link to an interesting article with some practical advice about finding and doing that kind of work: http://paulgraham.com/love.html. (I found the link on the Thinking Directions discussion group on LinkedIn).

Why is productive work the most fundamental source of happiness? Because work gives us purpose—and purpose is an essential human need. We survive by pursuing and achieving values, but values cannot be achieved through haphazard, random efforts. First you have to decide what values are important to you and then identify how to achieve them—how much time, effort, and resources are needed.  But we cannot know what values are important and how to pursue them unless we have some standard by which to judge. The standard, or a central purpose, that allows us to put the rest of our values in a hierarchy, is productive work.

Why is productive work the central purpose for humans? Why cannot family, friends, or recreational pursuits take the place of productive work as the central purpose? These are potentially important values, but if we allocated most of our time and effort to pursuing them instead of work, we would not be able to survive. We need to work in order to gain material values necessary for our survival and flourishing, from food and shelter to health care.

And the need for material values is continual: eating a meal once in your life, or wearing one shirt, is not enough. Achieving the material values we need to support our life is a major effort, and for most of us working for an hour every once in a while is not sufficient to accomplish that. See Tara Smith (2006): Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 210-211 for further explanation as to why productive work is the central purpose.

Despite the importance of material values for our survival and enjoyment of life, productive work is not needed merely to earn a living. Producing material values—from insurance policies to health care services to restaurant meals to mobile phones—requires us to apply reason (in any job), to think for ourselves to find ways of always improving our work and products and services we are creating, and to deal with others honestly and fairly. In other words, productive work requires us to apply virtues and do our best. And if we strive to do just that, self-esteem and happiness will be our reward. As an added bonus, we will have developed capabilities to solve problems in other areas of life, such as social relationships and recreational pursuits.

To commit to do our best at something that requires a major part of our time and energy and is the most important source of self-esteem, the work we choose must be interesting and enjoyable (the criteria for which may vary in the different stages of life). Sometimes it takes a while to cultivate an interest and enjoyment in a line work. Sometimes interesting and enjoyable work is not available (temporarily), or we may not be able to earn a living doing it. But the key is to strive for interesting and enjoyable work or to cultivate interest and enjoyment in work, by learning or upgrading the qualifications for it so that that eventually we are able to do the work we love productively and make a living from it.

Originally posted 19 July 2012

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Jaana Woiceshyn teaches business ethics and competitive strategy at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada.

She has lectured and conducted seminars on business ethics to undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA students, and to various corporate audiences for over 20 years both in Canada and abroad. Before earning her Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, she helped turn around a small business in Finland and worked for a consulting firm in Canada.

Jaana’s research on technological change and innovation, value creation by business, executive decision-making, and business ethics has been published in various academic and professional journals and books. “How to Be Profitable and Moral” is her first solo-authored book.