The Future of Work Lies at the Intersection of Flow, Income, Meaning and the Popularization of Entrepreneurship

Some thoughts on labor on this its day.

One of my heroes, Deming, used to argue that the worker deserved to take pride in her work. To feel proud of what you do you have to feel like it matters, it is valued, and that it represents your best.

One chief difference between work and a hobby is pay. One reason I like markets is that it is a way for the community to signal what it values. You may want to write another folk song but what the folks in your neighborhood will actually pay for is someone who can solve the problem of getting them food at lunchtime or to devise a better solution for running rainwater off of - or collecting solar energy onto - their roof. Pay is the community conspiring to vote on what would be valuable to them and not just to you. That makes us all a little more relevant, forcing us outside of ourselves.

One of my other heroes, Csikszentmihalyi, studied the psychology of engagement, what he called flow. It turns out that we're happiest when we're doing something that requires our full attention. When we're in flow we face clear goals, there is a balance between our skills and the challenge we face, we are free from distractions, we are animated by clear - rather than conflicted - priorities, there is a perfect overlap between what we're thinking about, wishing for, and doing, we are not worried about failure (one's mind has no room to simulate that outcome, so fully engaged is it in the task at hand), we lose track of time, the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake, and the self becomes more developed as the result of this state of flow, this absorption in the task.

Flow is a fabulous thing but for many it is easier to find in a video game than in work. A video game provides little meaning, though.

A task is meaningful if it serves a purpose bigger than that task. One guy might be cutting stone and the guy beside him - engaged in the exact same task - may be building a cathedral, be glorifying God. Sometimes meaning is simply a matter of framing your work as something bigger than the task at hand. More often it is being animated by what a difference your work makes in the lives of others, even in the lives of future generations.

As we become more affluent, we may rather paradoxically define ourselves even more by our work. Identity is often bound up in our job and in answer to the question, "What do you do?" we rarely say, "Stay current on politics," or "Read all of Michael Connelly's new novels." We tell folks what we do for a living. But as work becomes less essential to covering the necessary costs of life, we may expect that we not just get paid in money but in flow and meaning as well.

Faulkner wrote, “You can’t drink eight hours a day. Or make love. Work’s about the only thing a fellow has to do to keep from being bored” We have a number of examples of folks in the modern world who have made more money than they can spend and yet a great number of them continue to work. I suspect that we peons will follow their example and increasingly demand of our work these elements of pay, flow and meaning even as incomes rise.

Video game designers, TV producers, and designers of social media know how to capture and hold attention. What I suspect will define much of the modern corporation is that it will distinguish itself not by the products it designs - its employees will do that - but by its design of work so that employee efforts create income, flow and meaning. The founder of companies in the early 1900s became wildly successful by designing products like safety razors and automobiles. I suspect that we'll look back at the founder of successful companies in the early 2000s as successfully designing work to attract the best and brightest.

Keep in mind that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren't producers of any content in the same way that Newsweek, CBS or the New York Times are. They are platforms. I think that corporations in general will take on a similar relationship with employees in the future, focusing on creating great work rather than great products or services, positioning themselves as a platform rather than maker of products. This is part of what I mean by the term, "the popularization of entrepreneurship." Employees will create the new products, services and businesses that generate new jobs and wealth. The corporation will create the systems and roles that facilitate those outcomes.

Work matters. Profoundly. It has the potential to define us as much as anything else in life. Think of the people who stand out in history, people as different as Picasso, da Vinci, Marie Curie, Maria Montessori, Beethoven, Bjork, and Kurt Vonnegut. We know them through their work. Work is key to how we become who we are. And just like us, our labor continues to evolve. I suspect it will matter even more in the future than it does now.

Happy Labor Day!

Huston Smith, Religion, and What's Just Made Up

Huston Smith died Friday at 97. He authored what became the standard comparative religions textbook (it sold about three million copies), The Religions of Man. He was born to Methodist missionaries and died a Methodist even while studying, and then incorporating, practices from Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.

I think it was Bill Moyers who asked him how he could be so accepting of other faiths and yet still be a Methodist. I don't remember his precise answer but essentially he said, "If I studied languages I would - at the end of the day - still come home and speak English with my wife. We can acknowledge the fact that people communicate in other languages but we still have to choose one language to speak." Another way to put this is that it makes sense that people make sense of their lives in other ways but we have to make sense of things in a way that still makes sense to us. If that makes sense.

In the UK, their wonderful health care system has made huge progress in the battle against a variety of diseases and health conditions. It's led to a curious situation. Now, the leading cause of death among men under 49 is suicide. Having protected their population from outside attacks, they find themselves vulnerable to attacks from within.

There are a number of reasons one might commit suicide but surely a chief one is a crisis of meaning.

Here is the funny thing about the meaning of words. Look up the definition of a word and what do you find? Other words. The meaning of one word is expressed through other words. It would be a really bad dictionary if you looked up the meaning of, say, car and it said, "A car is a car. That's just what it is."

We find meaning outside ourselves, in other lives, in broader goals and tasks, in some arc of history. Religion was perhaps the first way that people made sense of the human experience.

Religion also made the world bigger. Robert Wright in his Evolution of God argues that as kin began to trade outside of their group their god(s) had to become bigger than the tribe. How do you make an enemy a trading partner or even a fellow citizen? You expand your beliefs to make those former strangers friends.  You love your enemy. Money, contracts, employment and trade are all well and good but outside of the context of trust they're ineffectual. The prelude to a global economy is a God of all humanity or at least people who see all of humanity as deserving of trust.

Speaking of trade, money is just made up. The fact that a 20 dollar bill is worth 20 dollars is not a fact inherent in a piece of paper that size and shape. It's only worth 20 dollars because we all agree that is worth 20 dollars. Money is completely made up and it is completely real.

Social invention - agreeing to the rules of a school or bank, agreeing that we will shake hands when we greet or kiss one another on the cheek or bow - is both made up and completely real. Religion falls into that same category. It is just made up that we should love our neighbor or forgive a brother. Such things are made up but their consequences are very real. Living with shame is so very different than living with forgiveness. Living life selfishly is so very different than living life selflessly. (And in truth it is hard to imagine a life that doesn't always have some element of shame and forgiveness, selfish perspective and empathy, but a life can be made very different simply by moving more in one direction than another.)

I agree with my agnostic friends that religion is just made up. I also agree with my religious friends that religion is quite real. Caught up in determinism and what that suggested about us simply being the products of past causes and present conditions, William James struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts. What if nothing he did or believed really made a difference, he wondered. One day he declared, "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." From that point on his life was largely different; he was mostly productive and happy. (James wrote the first psychology textbook and was one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism, among other things.) Did William James actually have free will or did he just make that up? Yes and yes, it seems to me.

Going back to Huston Smith, at the end of the day we have to speak in some one language in order to make meaning and to understand others, to understand and to be understood. Religions are deeply flawed and they are just made up but they certainly can provide meaning. Life is more than the logistics of work and sleep, food and recreation, or a winning score in a bank account. Realizing that if you had grown up in Indonesia you would likely be Muslim or that if you grew up in Nepal you'd likely be Buddhist or that if you grew up in Iowa you'd likely be Christian and realizing that this is arbitrary doesn't mean that it is meaningless anymore than it is meaningless to realize that if you grew up in China you'd grow up speaking Chinese. Meaning is fragile when we try to make sense of our own lives via a reductionist method that looks at us in isolation. Meaning can be robust when it sweeps out to include others, family, friends, and strangers, and the story of a life as part of some larger arc of history, part of a bigger set of forces that include our own words and actions. Meaning is never self-referential; it comes from the relationship of one word to other words or of one life to other lives. Religion surely isn't the only way to create meaning but it is a way that works for billions. And while you can just make up a language rather than rely on the ones around you, a language that isn't shared isn't much of a language. Religion has its flaws but one big advantage is that it is "spoken" by quite a few people around you. You can say something novel in a very old language. And maybe that's the challenge of a any religion: go beyond rote memorization of what others said to a statement that comes out of a common tradition into your own unique life and time, something that Huston Smith seemed to have done quite beautifully.

Love, Meaning & Flow

Bernard didn’t even pause to sip his coffee. “You thought it was a crisis of meaning," he told me as I was sitting down, not even wasting his breath on a simple Hello. "You think you can approach things philosophically. It isn’t a crisis of meaning and you can’t just approaching things philosophically.”

I was in a foul mood and had not wanted to meet Bernard. I responded with a serious tone, “It isn’t? What are you babbling about, Bernard?”

“You think this is a crisis of meaning. It isn’t. It’s a failure of love, not philosophy. You can’t approach everything philosophically.”

“Sometimes love seems so overrated.”

“That is such a condescending way to put things. Do you really think so lightly of love?”

“No,” I said, feeling like maybe I did but not wanting to admit it. “I mean, human beings need something more than just affection. Life has to have some kind of meaning for people. Even puppies can love.”

“Ha! You think that meaning is just about meaning? Meaning doesn’t stand alone. In fact, meaning itself is not a thing - it is just a web, a way to connect things.”

“Bernard, could you be more convoluted today?” I asked, seriously ready to just walk away and noticing for the first time that Bernard could be classified as an old fart.

“You want a happy life? You want to feel better than you do right now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then first thing, accept some coaching. You either change feedback or it changes you. I’m trying to give you feedback.”

“I’m all ears.”

"Your ears are kind of big. And you know what? Ears keep growing – right up to the time you’re my age."

“Great,” I tried not to smile. His stupid humor was kind of cheering me up, which I found annoying in my present mood.

“Use your ears. Shush.
“First of all, you want happy, you learn from Csikszentmihalyi. You find flow, or engagement in events. You lose yourself in tasks. Good. But if the happiness from flow is going to last, these tasks have to have some meaning."

“That’s what I said,” I retorted, a little miffed that he was trying to advise me with my own advice.

“Lesson one: this is not about you, so just listen.”

“Got it,” I said churlishly.

“Sometimes you think you do. Got it. And just remember, anytime you start feeling confident, it just shows how little attention you are paying. But what is meaning?”

“I can talk now?”

“Yes. I asked you a question. What is meaning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Now you are talking sense.
"You look up the meaning of a word and what do you find? Other words. The meaning of words is just more words, which at some level makes no sense – at some level, meaning seems meaningless. It's just a web of connections. But when you read the other words, you learn what the word means. Meaning comes out of the interaction of one word with other words. Meaning comes out of relationships. This is just like life.”

“Life is meaningless?”

“No, you twit. Life has meaning when one life connects to other lives. So, if you want happy, you need two things: flow or engagement in the moment or in tasks; and a sense of meaning, a sense that your activities, your own life, connects to other people, to something bigger.”

Why are you telling me this? I told Life Hiker this a few weeks ago.”

“Sure, but if all you have is these pieces, they eventually collapse. You missed the most important and final piece of the happy puzzle."

“I did?”

“You did. And I don’t know why these things surprise you. You’ve missed more than this, but this is important. If you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t feel for anyone, it sucks all the meaning out of your life. Flow is unsustainble without meaning; meaning is unsustainable without love. You can't stay engaged in meaningless tasks and you can't sustain meaning without love.”

“So, all this to say that we need love? What is this, Bernard, you’re writing for Hallmark now?”

“You have no idea how stupid you look in the very moment you are feeling so smart,” Bernard told me, looking disgustedly at me.

“But you don’t just wander around passing out love like advertising brochures. Love has to be earned and sometimes people you are supposed to love are so far from lovable. What about when you just don’t feel like loving them?”

“’Don’t really feel like love,’” Bernard mocked me. “You think that people need to be worthy of love?”

“Well sometimes they’re so petty or jealous or full of contempt…” I trailed off.

“Because of that, they don’t deserve to be loved?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling like sticking it to him.

“Well, you are right,” Bernard said, surprising me. “They don’t.”

“So you agree with me?”

“No one deserves to be loved, really. I mean, not if you get technical about it.”

“My point!” I exalted. “So, when love fails we become philosophical.”

Bernard snorted. “Could you be more dense?” he stared at me. “Have you not heard a thing? Philosophy depends on meaning and meaning is all meaningless if the connections you make are to people you don’t love. You don't love because deserve to be loved. You love because it gives your life meaning. No philosophy can save you from a failure to love.”

“So we love to find meaning?”

“Well, yeah. That and it simply feels so much better to love than not love."

I paused a long time, letting my ugly feeling slowly drain from me. “So, love is better than philosophy?” I asked.

“Love is a philosophy, you twit.” And at last, his coffee now cold, Bernard took a sip.

The Power of Love & Trascendance - an excerpt from Csikszentmihalyi's Evolving Self

One of the men who most influenced my perspective on the modern world is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I'm still amazed that Csikszentmihalyi's book The Evolving Self isn't continually cited. It gets my vote as the most overlooked and underappreciated books of our time.

Central to his thesis is the notion that a fully developed self comes from two often competing needs: the movements towards greater complexity and integration of that complexity into harmony, bringing those disparate elements into a whole self. Complexity results from pursuit of what makes us individuals, and he calls a person joyfully invested in complex goals a transcender. What follows is an excerpt of Evolving Self, using the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy as an example.

WHAT TRANSCENDERS ARE LIKE
There are many individuals whose actions demonstrate what a life dedicated to complexity could be like. But they cannot be reduced to a type, for there cannot be a single path to reaching personal harmony. Because differentiation is one-half of a complex consciousness, each person must follow his or her own bent, find ways to realize his or her unique individuality. And because we are born with a different combination of temperamental strengths and weaknesses, and with different gifts, and grow up in different family contexts, communities, and historical periods, each of us displays a characteristic pattern of potentials. Therefore, there is no such thing as a typical transcender, nor a best way to achieve complexity.

[Csikszentmihalyi gives an account of the early life of Faludy, a Jew who ended up imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp. He lived through this, migrated to the US, but returned to socialist Hungary. Again, he was imprisoned by an authoritarian government, somehow surviving this ordeal in a Stalinist-era prison from which few survived.]

Yet it was precisely in this dreadful environment, where inmates were whipped to labor from dawn to dusk, with slops to eat and rags to wear, that Faludy's muse really started to sing. His prison verses are among the most lyrical ever written in that genre. They deal with the most realistic and painful aspects of life in a concentration camp: hunger, frostbite, and brutality of ignorant and frightened men. Yet these clinical accounts of entropy are narrated so concisely and elegantly that their tragic content is transformed into a thing of beauty.

In fact, this was precisely Faludy's intent. In order to maintain his own sanity, and that of his fellow prisoners, he tried to give meaning to an otherwise intolerable existence. In one of his last poems before being released Faludy wrote:

What was the best thing I learned?
That after need
left my ravaged body
love did not leave.
Susy [his wife] became a light, silvery mist; shimmering always
before my eyes
even when shut
in pain, in gnawing hunger, as senses left,
love stayed,
love, the eternal fire, burning without harming,
not born of scalding desire,
no dreg of glands,
no juice of sex organs,
Dante, not Boccaccio,
Apollo, not the world of the dead.

Let Ziggy Freud go soak his head.

In the extremity of a life-threatening situation, the former rebel sought sustenance from the most hopeful aspects of the past, from the most meaningful memes of his civilization - and from the love for his wife. Perhaps one of the most touching aspects of Faludy's oeuvre is that originally it was not written down, for the simple reason that pencil and paper were not available in the camp. At first Faludy memorized each of his poems. Then, to avoid losing them through death or forgetfulness, he had fellow prisoners learn them by heart as well. In one case, toward the end of his captivity, he composed a long elegy for his wife, and each part of it was memorized by different inmates. Some of these prisoners were freed before Faludy, and went to visit his wife, to bring news of her husband and to recite the part of the poem they had memorized. At the end of the recitation they would typically announce: "That's all I learned. But in a few days Jim Egri should be released, and he will come and tell you the next twenty verses."

When Faludy was finally allowed to return to civilization, and then escaped once more to the West during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he published his prison verses, relying on his memory aided by various mnemonic devices. (For instance, he had made certain that the first poem he composed began with the letter "A," the second with "B," and so on.) Soon after, he started to receive letters from all over the world, from Brazil to New Zealand, containing corrections to his poems. They were written by former inmates, now scattered across the globe, who had committed to memory the harmoniously transformed accounts of their deadly experiences. Most of these corrections were incorporated into later editions of Faludy's work.

Faludy's life serves as such a valuable example for two complementary reasons: In the first place, it is so idiosyncratic in its specifics as to be obviously inapplicable to the lives of most people. How many of us have such a gift for language, have suffered so much persecution, and triumphed over so many obstacles? Yet despite - or rather, because of - its uniqueness, Faludy's story is typical of those individuals who have been able to fulfill the potential complexity of their selves. He is certainly not a saint, but he may not qualify as a Confucian sage or a Bodhisattva, either. But he learned to find flow in complexity; he learned to transform entropy into memes that create order in the consciousness of those who attend to them, and so because of him the world is a little more harmonious than it would have been otherwise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, 1993, pp. 208 - 213.

The Paradox of Meaning

“We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
- W. H. Auden

If you look up the definition of a word, you'll find it references other words. Meaning is an oddly circular notion.

So what is it that gives a life meaning? I suppose that it, too, is an oddly circular notion. Our lives have meaning when they connect with other lives. We're unlikley to discover the meaning of our lives with a deep dive into our navels.