The Meanness of Meaning
I just finished reading an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about how miserable in their work 895 Class of ‘01 graduates of Harvard Business School are. Imagine that, the best and the brightest, earning over seven figures being unfulfilled in their work. It sounded in the telling like the root of the problem was money. Imagine money being the root of all evil. Oh, that’s right, they’ve been saying that since Biblical times. So that must mean that low-paying jobs without a money focus are more rewarding. But in the same magazine the $15/hour minimum wage is the topic of an article on the zombie-like nature of slave-labor. Hmm. Truth must lie somewhere in between.
What these articles do for me is force me to reflect on how much meaning I have found in my work over the last forty-three years. For comparison purposes, back in my day my pre-graduation work was well before the era of meaningful internships, so I was not unfamiliar with zombie-like slave-labor. We used to call those summer jobs or “make money” jobs. To be honest, these were less survival jobs and more life-enhancement jobs to take us beyond the monthly parental or scholarship minimalist stipend. But I too graduated with an MBA in the golden age of 1976. It wasn’t Harvard, but it was Ivy League, so I feel reasonably able to comment on the meat of both articles.
Here’s the thing, whether coding sociological research forms for $2/hr. (Minimum wage in New York in 1975) or running a large merchant banking division for $250,000/year in 1985, I have always managed to find meaning in my work. It’s actually more pronounced than that. I would wake up every morning feeling like I was working in the best area at the best time that could possibly be. I’ve never woken up feeling less than excited to go to work. I know this is not entirely normal. I’ve often said that it may be my biggest workplace advantage and may be inherent rather than learned behavior. I am no neuroscientist, but I do know that brain chemistry has a lot to do with success and happiness. Don’t ask me to get into melatonin, serotonin, or dopamine, but something inside my head has blessed me with this feel-good. I should probably explain.
Back in college I had a pal who was good-looking, popular and smart as a whip. He beat me by at least half a grade in whatever courses we took together. One spring vacation he got us both a job coding research forms for a week. It was a finite project with a big tall stack of questionnaires that each needed to be reduced to a coding form which would then be punched into IBM punch cards for tabulation. For the young readers, this is how computational work happened in 1975. Our team project was to sit in a room in a big drafty and empty school building. We had perhaps 500 questionnaires and a week to code them. The first time one reads through a questionnaire like this (it was all about teenage sex attitudes) the subject matter was interesting. But after that, its all about putting the answers into a simple number on a coding form. In other words, it becomes mindless and rote.
My pal and I discussed the study in the first hour and then got down to the business of coding. We set 100 questionnaires per day as our goal (we were very numerate sorts). By the end of the first day, I noticed I had done 70 of the 100 forms. After 5 forms he would need to take a walk to clear his head. Meanwhile, I was making up games like seeing how many forms I could code hopping on one foot. Suffice it to say, we had very different approaches to menial work.
This same pal was so smart he actually got a finance internship that summer. One day he bumped into the CFO in the hall and when asked how his summer was going, answered that he was disappointed by the menial work like adding the numbers on a sheet he was carrying. The CFO was very sympathetic and asked to see the sheet. He told my friend not to worry, that he would do that task and he would ask the Treasurer to give my friend another, more cerebral task. Poignant lesson.
In the early ‘80’s I was asked to create a futures and options business for my bank. This was in the era when the mainstream trading desk activity of trading and selling bonds was where the money was. The futures and options game was a niche bit of esoterica to most. But I, like a few others, saw it as a key to creating global market liquidity and risk flexibility. Despite the pervasive lack of enthusiasm by most bonus-focused peers, I found the complex nature and limitless potential of these asymmetrical instruments fascinating. What meaning came from this early-days’ work? Look to the pervasive and ubiquitous presence of derivative instruments all across the financial spectrum to answer that question. Computers now trade bonds with ease and the best and brightest of finance carry derivatives in their quivers.
In mid-career I was asked by my bank to help them solve their Sovereign Debt crisis (the year was 1985 and the deepening crisis, focused on Latin America, afflicted all big banks in the world to varying degrees). It was an incredibly challenging assignment and I gave up the prized merchant banking division in the bank to do it. One wag reminded me that if the bank disliked you they fired you, but if they hated you they sent you to Latin America. So, it is fair to say that such an assignment was not everyone’s cup of tea.
I went about working the problem, first in Chile, then all across the continent. Retrieving $4 billion for a bank with $1 billion in capital as the value of the Sovereign Debt was starting to sink below $0.90 on the dollar had a sense of urgency about it. I viewed it as a meaningful task. I also viewed it as a meaningful mission of great importance to the region. This was not like reposessing a car, it was about the sanctity of contracts and keeping the capital markets open to this burgeoning region.
When I explained my new job to my mother, who had worked for The Rockefeller Foundation and then the UN for fourteen years in Latin America, she had an interesting reaction to the meaning of my assignment. The way she put it, “So, I spent Forty years putting money into Latin America, and now my son will make his career taking money out of Latin America?” I’m not sure she ever fully understood my logic or the meaning I had found in the job.
In 2000, while the world of .com was crashing all around us, my partners and I started a venture capital company that was focused on the new digital economy. Through the fun years of seeding young entrepreneurs, the sober years of watching the lemons ripen first in the orchard, the difficult years of hard work and worry, we finally came through the patient years to a great realization with our foundational investment. While there was much meaningful value in the doing, the outcome proved extremely rewarding. Yes, our investors did well and yes, we, the partners, did even better, but one story carried all the meaning one could ask. One small investor explained that the 8X outcome would allow them to buy a home for their autistic build and six of his equally challenged friends. They said that our success had changed the lives of seven families, who would no longer need to fear the future.
Today I am building a company that is trying to change the world by bringing it a new, green way to synthesize ammonia. Where exactly is the meaning in that? Well, when you realize that modern life over the past 100 years has been made possible by the Haber-Bosch method of making ammonia, it becomes clearer. These dual Nobel Prize winners brought us the means to feed half the world, something that might have ground progress to a halt in its absence. But the cost of this has been massive contribution to Global Greenhouse Gases, which now threaten our very existence through climate change.
Our nascent start-up May have the answer via some very new technology. If this new technology can be made to work at scale, the opportunities are limitless. From ammonia synthesis, this gravitates to ammonia as a storage medium of energy and then logically to ammonia as the fuel cell and even propulsion source of the future. It sets free renewable energy and ushers in an entire new hydrocarbon-free world just in time for the twenty-first century.
Finding meaning in work is all-important. But you don’t need to work for a not-for-profit or pursue traditional, purely creative paths to find meaning. Meaning can be found in any work. My belief is that it’s all about attitude and FINDING pleasure and meaning in your work. Since I know not everyone has my brain chemistry, it may be mean of me to say it, but you need to wake up thinking your job is great. Find the joy in it. I guarantee you it’s in there somewhere. I’m 65 and I can’t stop working for fear I’ll have to search every day for the meaning I find in whatever job I have, whether sweeping the floor or building a business.