How bad days can help us reframe our work

“Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service.”

Henry Ford

How do you handle your bad days at work?

As a younger man, I’d get frustrated or angry, but a workout and a couple of hours was more than enough to clear the fog.

The older I get, I have a lot less certainty about the world and my life. And if you knew me in my 20s, that’s not a bad thing.

Even a great job has its tough days. But sitting in mid-life, with both the benefit of perspective and a sense of the brevity of life. My anger turns a lot more quickly to existential questions. Questions like am I in the right spot? Do I have what it takes to be successful? And if I’m in the middle of an intractable problem, why do I keep trying to solve this?

These sorts of questions can be helpful, but not in the way that I thought originally. The point is not to answer them, time has a way of proving out the answers.

Instead, what I have found is that underlying those questions are often deep seated beliefs about what I expect my work to be like and what I expect my job to provide to me. What I’ve learned in sitting with and analyzing those beliefs is that most of the time, I’m approaching work with the wrong goal in mind.

What I really need then is not the answer to some deep existential question, it’s a reframe of the whole thing.

So why do we keep showing up to work?

The need to make money makes this question irrelevant for most. Why does it matter why I show up, if I have to be there?

This is a lazy answer. Necessity might make it true, but it doesn’t have to be the final answer.

I have found it to be helpful to invert the question - and consider, how do people who don’t have to work for money feel about work?

Spend time on the high net worth Reddit channels (/rich, /fatfire /fattravel) and you’d be surprised what and how much people are willing to share. Reading these posts is a favorite distraction of mine.

One of the most common types of post is someone describing how they achieved their wildest financial dreams, and how they still feel lost in the world. There is probably one of these a week.

It seems that outcomes do not really matter to work satisfaction. Those who have to work can feel lost in what they are doing. Those who don’t have to work, feel the same way.

The root cause of the problem is not the absence or presence of money. Instead, it’s a flawed understanding of the purpose of work. For most, our labor has been about us - about our life and financial goals. It is about the effort expended in exchanged for the output received.

But there is an alternate motivation, a different fuel source, that I have found to be a lot more impactful.

Most of us are not actively choosing our vocations by considering whom and how we wish to serve our fellow man. But maybe we should.

Here’s how it’s looked in my own career.

While I hated my first job, I really liked my second. For ~6 years, I wrote and published roughly 2 articles a week of investment research. It was fascinating work to follow companies and markets that closely.

While the work was interesting, I was one of many analysts writing research on these companies. Trying to convince an institutional investor that we were the best was tough simply because the average potential client received hundreds of emails a day of similar product on similar companies.

The intellectual part of the work was compelling, but it was really tough to get to the place where someone would utilize the work we had done.

Over time, I moved into the advisory side of finance. Similar content, but I remember my first week on the job, we met with a family, who expressed a real need, that we were able to ultimately solve. It was exceptionally gratifying and I enjoyed helping someone with a real problem.

The ability to meet a need and solve a problem, doesn’t require you to have made your fortune. We can reframe our work from the perspective of service today.

Why service?

To answer that, we need to ask an orthogonal question. How do you become a person? An actual adult. A person of substance and depth. Someone who is left childhood behind and firmly moved into life.

Martin Shaw in his Liturgies of the Wild answers that question by looking at the great myths and finds that lives well lived follow a similar pattern. This pattern, like that of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, involved a departure from the status quo, a wrestling / facing of struggles, and a return.

Shaw characterizes those who return well, returns with both a limp and a blessing. A limp because of the cost of the lessons they have learned and a blessing they have ready to give to others. Shaw shows that the arc of life is to move towards the service of others.

The Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was a great example of this. The partners of the firm were well compensated and certainly did not need to do anything else. But their had been a long history established of public service and many of those found places where they could take their smarts and relationships to Washington.

Or even consider retirees. The WSJ just had an interesting piece on retirement. “What these retirees were describing wasn’t just disappointment in a lack of opportunities. It was an erosion in something far more fundamental—their sense of mattering, the deep human need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. “

The author, Jennifer Breheny Wallace, went on to note that in her study of retirees, “the people who regained that sense of being needed tended to follow a simple, repeatable pattern: They identified a genuine need and met it with 3Ts—time, talent or treasure.” or said more simply, they were of service to others.

A clear interpretation here is that while their work was providing financial resources necessary to live (and prepare for their eventual retirement), it was at the same time providing tremendous psycho-social benefits. When the work went away, so did those benefits. As Wallace highlights, there are way to be useful to others, even if full-time, 40 hour a week work is not an option.

There seems to be something innate that points to wanting to help others as deeply orientating to our psyche.

How are we then of service to others?

To be a service, we have to address a real, actual need. Often we have ideas of needs people have. The question is - do those people actual want that problem solved right now, by you. There can easily be a mismatch between what we perceive and what people want.

Often, the needs we want to address are often things we really want to do. Using our imaginations, we easily envision that people might actually want us to help them in that way. And so because we can envision this, we assume the need is there.

For example, you go to the beach on vacation and one sunny afternoon on the board walk, you decide that a fresh squeezed, frozen lemonade would be the perfect refreshment. You look around at the local stores and no one is offering what you have in mind.

Should you start a frozen lemonade stand there?

You had a demand for the product. It doesn’t appear there is any competition. People love going to the beach and they love a frozen treat. Homerun - a can’t miss opportunity.

The problem? This entire analysis has occurred in your head, based off your personal experience, intuition and imagination. You may be 100% correct. But there is more data to gather to determine whether the idea is real and the need is actual.

There is a dialogue that must occur between us and the real world to understand where people are and what they are looking for. We cannot be of actual value to others if we are not in dialogue with them about their needs.

Service should solve the problem

When we work to address a need, our work should come as close as possible to actually addressing it. Like a motivational infomercial which promises “10 easy ways,” without ever revealing the answer, we must be careful to ensure that the service performed actually solves the problem.

It may take a few attempts to determine whether you have done so. For emerging types of problems, knowing you have arrived at the finish line may be an act of co-creation between you and the client.

There is tremendous satisfaction that comes from a job well done. Moreover there is a degree of madness that comes from having a project close, but not all the way complete.

Help your customer out and finish the job properly.

Service should feel like it did the job

Why do car dealerships wash your car? Sure it is is nice. But if you went in for maintenance or had a fan belt replaced, it all happens under the hood. Sure the problem is fixed, but does it feel like anything was actually done.

But a car wash returns your car with some degree of transformation - an outward sign of something that may have been hidden.

Don’t neglect the psychological feeling of the client when the act of service is complete. You may need to build in a moment or a ritual of some sort to help indicate the completion of / resolution of the task. To draw attention to the fact that the job was done and done well.

Service has boundaries

A common challenge with service is that if you have found a real need, people may need your service all the time. And because you are legitimately helping, saying no, putting boundaries on your service, can feel a lot like disappointing or abandoning someone.

But , service is always co-created between two people.

As a result, your limits are a key input to whether the service is successful. If you are too tired, run down, or no longer able to be fully present in the act, the service delivered will be greatly diminished.

You must know where the line is for where you are able to serve, and where you will stretch too far and be unable to continue.

Conclusion

Life knew better, and she was starting to guide me away from myself through service to others

Michael A Singer

Work does not have to be soley about the paycheck. If we will take a step back and connect to the service we are providing for another, we have a tremendous opportunity to see a higher purpose for our work.

This higher purpose can inspire us. It can provide fuel for creativity to find new ways to improve our work.

But moreover, this purpose can survive the bad days in our jobs that leave us scratching our heads or the good days in which we experience success.