Finding durable happiness at work

Over the last year or so working at my corporate job, I’d often get up in the morning and look at my work calendar with a sense of dread. I spent hours and hours every week doing “important” and “necessary” activities that, to me, created no value at all for the world. I’d end the day feeling mentally and emotionally drained.

It’s clear to me from my work with engineering leaders that a feeling of contentment or joy in a senior management role is far from guaranteed. In fact, it’s typical for a rise in seniority to be accompanied by an apparent decrease in contentment.

There is no single reason for why this happens that applies to everyone, but there is one key factor that predicts how happy you’ll be in your job overall, regardless of seniority.

If you understand this one incredibly simple thing, you can guarantee job satisfaction forever.

The reason why engineering leaders experience this decreasing joy phenomenon is commonly that our early-career joy was tied to our work rather than to our job. We started as individual contributors, and we were excited to just write code. The work itself was fun, challenging, gratifying.

As we take on more management responsibilities, typically our time spent doing those intrinsically joyful tasks decreases, and our fundamental role changes in character. For a while, the new challenge of solving “people problems” and learning new skills creates equal gratification.

Finally, leaders split into two groups: the folks who discover that they also intrinsically love the tasks of management, and the folks who move beyond its novelty and end up missing the programming work and who find no other source of gratification in carrying it out.

But there’s a shortcut around all of this, a way to maintain happiness and gratification no matter how mundane your daily tasks.

I’ll tell you a secret: you don’t need to love your work to love your job. Furthermore, there are tons of people out there who often love their work and yet are still perpetually dissatisfied with their jobs.

Why is that?

Mainly it is because many people end up with their personal happiness tied up in their achievements. Certainly achieving things is great, but it isn’t a good idea to base your happiness on achievement, and I’ll tell you why.

News flash: you don’t control your outcomes.

No matter how hard you work at something, some part of its success is entirely out of your control. It might be colleagues’ performance, market dynamics, or dumb luck, but you don’t hold all the cards.

Even when you do bank a win, the “glow” of that success doesn’t last very long.

You used to get that rush from coding, then for a while it came from the novelty of figuring out how humans interact and how teams create leverage, and then it came from the recognition of promotions into higher levels of leadership.

But if you want happiness to last, it has to come from somewhere else entirely.

Safi Bahcall, famed physicist, technologist, executive, and author discovered this, and the way he said it is lovely:

“Happiness and achievement are independent variables.”

—Safi Bahcall

What a perfectly scientific way to put it. You can achieve, and you can be happy, but if you think the two are connected you’ve got it wrong.

Alright, so where does happiness come from, then? If you’ve read anything by Daniel Pink or Simon Sinek, this won’t be surprising to you: it comes from purpose.

Consider this brief excerpt from Start With Why:

Consider the story of two stonemasons. You walk up to the first stonemason and ask, “Do you like your job?” He looks up at you and replies, “I’ve been building this wall for as long as I can remember. The work is monotonous. I work in the scorching hot sun all day. The stones are heavy and lifting them day after day can be backbreaking. I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime. But it’s a job. It pays the bills.” You thank him for his time and walk on.

About thirty feet away, you walk up to a second stonemason. You ask him the same question, “Do you like your job?” He looks up and replies, “I love my job. I’m building a cathedral. Sure, I’ve been working on this wall for as long as I can remember, and yes, the work is sometimes monotonous. I work in the scorching hot sun all day. The stones are heavy and lifting them day after day can be backbreaking. I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime. But I’m building a cathedral.”

The work is less important to happiness than whether you think the job is worthwhile. If the job is worthwhile, if it’s noble, if it aligns to what you feel is important (no matter what that is), the work can be anything.

Ask yourself these two questions

“What are my gifts to the world?”

Note: this does not mean “what do you do very well,” but rather what are the things that you intrinsically, automatically create? What is added when you show up in the room?

For me, it’s curiosity, optimism, and thoughtfulness. With no effort, I bring those qualities into every interaction.

“What is your purpose?”

Imagine that you are on stage, moments from presenting to a sold-out audience. They have all come to learn from you and your experience. What is the one thing that you want to teach this audience?

That one thing is, or is somehow connected to, your purpose.

For me, it’s the concept that curiosity enriches life, and I want to help everyone to discover this. If I can help someone to get more curious for even five seconds, and have one of those “huh…” moments, it makes my day.

Find a job that puts your gifts on offer and serves your purpose and I promise that you will find truly durable happiness there.

As goes without saying around here… A coach can help! (My coach helped me figure out both of the above answers.)

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