The same is true for you. Thereâs a little bit of you that your organization can never touch, never know, never see, and certainly never feel. And yet itâs this part of youâthe loving, feeling part of youâthat makes you feel alive at work, able to do things that surprise and delight you, things that are ridiculously good, unexpectedly made, astonishing to your team, and that light you up from the inside.
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When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isnât a company, itâs a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, youâll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you wonât be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work. As Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher put it as far back as 1790, âTo love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.â
When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they donât care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team theyâre on.
In the real world, there is workâstuff that you have to get done. In theory world, there are goals.
Work is ahead of you; goals are behind youâtheyâre your rear-view mirror.
Work is specific and detailed; goals are abstract.
Work changes fast; goals change slowly, or not at all.
Work makes you feel like you have agency; goals make you feel like a cog in a machine. Work makes you feel trusted; goals make you feel distrusted.
Work is work; goals arenât.
But it doesnât have to be this way. Goals can be a force for good.
Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We canât always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.
The subtlety here is that, as we saw above, the feeling of enthusiasm about a companyâs mission, and confidence in its future, still vary team to team. In other words, our experience of our company is significantly mediated by our experience of our team.
But are we missing something here? Is the separation we perceive between work and life helping or hindering us in our quest for the good life? What if the value of workâeven work we dislikeâlies not just in getting paid, but also in the moment-to-moment sensations of being alive in the workplace, and the feeling of vitality we get from being connected to others? What if even the most ordinary workday presents real opportunities for improving our lives and our sense of being connected to the broader world?