Wellsprings of Work: Surprising Sources of Meaning and Motivation in Work

By Samuel Halpern

"I want more from work than just a paycheck.

...What am I looking for?"

Whether you're just starting out, in mid-career, or retired, Wellsprings of Work reveals often-unappreciated sources of meaning and motivation in work. Unlike the many books bemoaning how work br

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samuel Halpern
• Release date: Jan 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737286516

Samuel Halpern

Samuel Halpern has written over 25 articles on Titanic and is a member of the Titanic Historical Society and Titanic International Society. He lives in Chicago.

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Copyrighted Material

Wellsprings of Work:

Surprising Sources of Meaning and Motivation in Work

Copyright © 2022 by Samuel Halpern.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

For information about this title or to order other books and/or electronic media, contact the publisher:

Steinem/Landau Press

www.wellspringsofwork.com

[e-mail]

ISBNs:

978-1-7372865-0-9 (print)

978-1-7372865-1-6 (eBook)

Cover and Interior design: 1106 Design

"I want more from work than just a paycheck.

. . . What am I looking for?"

Wellsprings of Work identifies psychological and spiritual drives that can make your work fulfilling, whether you’re beginning your work life, in mid-career, or entering retirement.

You may view my own career as soulless and materialistic, but tapping into these drives, I found it spiritually rewarding. Episodes across a nearly 50-year career in investing and lawyering—from Warren Buffett to Major League Baseball to Beijing and beyond—are springboards for explaining how many other people, across many types of work, can tap into these sources of meaning and motivation as well.

To Barbara

My Greatest Wellspring

I think a man only needs one thing in life. He just needs someone to love. If you can’t give him that, then give him something to hope for. And if you can’t give him that, just give him something to do.

— Actor Scott Michael Campbell, as character James Liddle in the 2004 remake of the movie Flight of the Phoenix

We shall not be remembered personally, but we shall be remembered by taking part in events that will be remembered for their significance in the life of the collective.

— Israeli Philosopher Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass (2004)

The millennial generation—born between 1982 and 2003—numbers more than 75 million, comprising nearly a quarter of the U.S. population and nearly two-fifths of the working-age population. As a group, these young people want their work to have meaning and purpose . . . want their job to fit their life.

— Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017, p. 5

Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.

— Proverbs 22:29

Contents

Preface: Who This Book Is For and How You Can Use It

Introduction: What Wellsprings, Why Me, Why Now?

PART ONE: PERSONAL IDENTITY

1. Working for Purpose and Meaning

Snow for the Eskimos

2. Achieving Personal Values

Good Ole Boy’d in Texas

PART TWO: TRANSCENDENCE

3. Arts & Crafts

An Elegant Trade

4. Assertive, Yet Part of Something Larger

Mandarin for Fiduciary

5. Productivity for Self and God

Respectability at Two and Twenty

6. For Spiritual Release

Kanyakumari

PART THREE: EGO AND BEYOND

7. Play and Competition

Bernie Madoff: High Conviction

8. To Navigate the World

A Goat Rodeo

9. For Mutual Respect

Warren and Me

10. Legacy

A Funeral . . . and a Shotgun Wedding

PART FOUR: FUTURE GENERATIONS

11. Building a Brighter Future

Long Tails, Underwater, and After Oil

PART FIVE: A WORKING HYPOTHESIS

12. The Larger Context

Livelihood, Life, and Death

Afterword: Wellsprings of Integrity

Endnotes

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Index

Preface

Who This Book Is For and How You Can Use It

This book is about uncovering sources of fulfillment through your work—sources you may have never recognized—or even if you’ve recognized them, sources you haven’t fully appreciated. And it’s about work in the widest sense. While paying jobs are the most obvious form of work, the ideas here apply equally to other pursuits from avocations to volunteering.

This book is aimed at anyone who’s wondered what they can expect to get out of their work beyond a paycheck, anyone who’s wondered what others find gratifying about their work, and anyone who feels something’s missing. It’s for anyone considering the value of their own work as well as its limits and trapdoors.

In the real world, lots of practical realities influence how you feel about your work—your (fill in the adjective) boss, your colleagues, your physical (or remote) workplace. But what about the work itself? How do you feel about the point (or pointlessness) of it—and why? If you’re a journalist, how do you feel about journalism? If you’re a firefighter, how do you feel about firefighting? Is the work worth doing?

These questions are particularly timely because of a whole host of societal forces that today make the search for meaningful work especially urgent and challenging. Some of these are long in the making, some more recent, some still unfolding; some are concepts implicit in modern thinking; some are political, economic, or technological.

Two forces in particular deserve special note. One is the Covid pandemic, which has led many people to reassess their work lives and reconsider what (besides a paycheck) to expect from it. Another is the ongoing digital revolution—from the internet to smart technologies to social media, including their impact on work in general and, more to the point, on finding satisfying work.

This book initially surveys these and other societal forces and then, across a dozen chapters, explores different types of satisfaction from work—aesthetic, social, psychological, spiritual—across a wide range of fields. One reader told me this book provided her insight into what made her father tick. Another told me he recognized himself in the chapter about reflected glory. Several educators confirmed that business-school students and graduates in mid-career increasingly insist on meaningful work lives. Maybe the stories and concepts about legacy, or pride, or concern for future generations will strike a chord in you.

If you’re just starting a career, you may wonder whether you can find meaning and motivation in your chosen path. If you’re in mid-career, you may want to figure out how to strengthen whatever you find satisfying or get past the obstacles that leave you dissatisfied. If you’re nearing or in retirement, you may wonder what your life’s work really amounted to and what to do for an encore. This book aims to identify the questions, possible pathways toward answers, and roadblocks along the way.

Particularly for people involved with business, investing, consulting, or law—occupations that strike many as value-neutral or worse—the following chapters may help you tap into deeper drives to motivate and fulfill you. Because my own career revolved around those fields, they are the source of the stories here and the springboard for exploring broader ideas about work that apply to many other fields as well. For the more general reader, the book aims to provide insight into what clicks for a variety of workers, from craftsmen to teachers to professional athletes. And maybe what clicks for you.

Having said all that, this book does not fit neatly in the conventional self-help section of any brick-and-mortar or online bookstore. There’s no 1–2–3 formula, no one-size-fits-all approach here. I don’t prioritize the different wellsprings of work. (Try this one first, because it’s most effective, and, if that doesn’t grab you, move on to number 2.) The stories and concepts in the following pages are designed to make you think. Does this apply to me? How? With my personality and interests, given my situation at work, which of these sources of meaning and motivation strike closest to home?

This book provides you conceptual tools for grappling with these and related questions. Think of it as a framework: a frame for thinking about work. The rest is up to you.

Introduction

What Wellsprings, Why Me, Why Now?

Workers fall into two big groups. Which one are you in?

Do you find work a drag? Does it leave you feeling empty, sucking you dry? Or, at the end of the workday, do you feel motivated and engrossed? Are you among the 40% who feel they perform a Bullshit Job¹ or the 40% who feel they’ve got good jobs that include a sense of purpose and dignity?²

For his classic 1972 book, Working, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel interviewed a wide array of workers about their jobs, asking them, as the book’s subtitle puts it, What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do.³ Terkel himself had grown up in Chicago, the third son of a tailor father and Polish immigrant mother, who—among other things—ran hotels popular with a wide range of blue-collar workers. Through exposure to that clientele, plus an affinity for what he dubbed guerrilla journalism, Terkel became an effective interviewer, armed with the capacity (as he said) to break down walls.⁴ During his research for Working, Terkel spoke with dozens of workers—waitresses, parking-lot attendants, farmhands, prostitutes, athletes, executives, stockbrokers, and film critics, to name just a few of the occupations he covered. And yet, despite the diversity of employment, Terkel noted one desire uniting them all: they all sought more than just a paycheck. Work, said Terkel, was a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.⁵

This is colorfully captured in his interview with a Brooklyn fireman who—despite his feelings of dysfunction and frustration with the larger world—finds great satisfaction from his work:

The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying . . . That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be . . . I can look back and say, ‘I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.’ It shows something I did on this earth."⁶

Not everyone can save lives for a living, but we all crave satisfaction from whatever work we do. And that leads to the questions this book explores: What are the wellsprings of work? How can we tap into them as sources of meaning and motivation? Can identifying and understanding them make our work more satisfying? Even work that otherwise appears dispiriting or dry?

That’s how many people might view my own career. That revolved around OPM—other people’s money—investing and helping manage large pools of capital for workers and governments. Though that field might strike you as entirely materialistic and soulless, my work tapped into deep drives and aspirations that motivated and gratified me. The emotional rewards were no less than the financial ones. And while much of that work revolved around telephone calls, airports, and conference rooms, it led to unexpected—sometimes literally far-out—experiences. These ranged from negotiating one-on-one with Warren Buffett to sidestepping Bernie Madoff; talking tennis on the Thames with Rafael Nadal’s mother and about climate change over dinner with Al Gore; advising investment funds that covered groups as diverse as Major League Baseball players and Broadway stagehands, Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, and government workers from Beijing to Bangkok to Brunei. In this book, these and other experiences are springboards for exploring a set of often-unarticulated dynamics that drove my own career and likewise motivate other people across many lines of work.

WHAT DRIVES US?

Wellsprings of Work explores those dynamics from a combined psychological, philosophical, societal, and spiritual perspective. These are deep, often hidden urges that can make work fulfilling. Wellsprings identifies and explores a dozen of them, falling into four main categories:

The drive for personal identity. This revolves around forging a sense of personhood or individual character—a code for living your life. A central aspect of this is developing meaning and purpose, but that’s so broad it doesn’t explain much. More telling is the urge to identify your personal values and put them into action.

The desire for transcendence. This takes form in several ways: a sense of aesthetics and craftsmanship, or feeling part of something larger, feeling you’re in the zone, or feeling a sense of mastery.

The power of ego and getting beyond it. Sometimes this feels like a competitive urge, where you’re pushed to achieve your personal best. Sometimes this is the satisfaction gained from building your character and self-respect. Other times, it takes form in honoring the standards and ethics of a guild or establishing a legacy.

Concern for future generations. Distinct from legacy, this is altruistic—an impulse to build for the future, for your children, grandchildren, and the larger world.

My hope is that identifying and examining these wellsprings of work will help others tap into them and contribute to developing satisfying careers.

Getting in touch with these wellsprings entails developing intrinsic motivation for your work. By intrinsic, I mean a deep, pure interest in pursuing a task because—for any number of underlying reasons—it’s satisfying in and of itself. By contrast, extrinsic motivation means pursuing a task because it leads to some other perceived goal. Feeling engrossed in a book you can’t put down—that’s intrinsic motivation; feeling duty-bound to read it in order to pass a test—that’s extrinsic motivation. Recognizing the wellsprings of work may help you develop intrinsic motivation for whatever you choose to pursue.

Getting in touch with these wellsprings means relentlessly asking the next question, like a four-year-old (with an endless series of Why?) or, for that matter, a philosopher or lawyer. People who enjoy their work often say that’s because It’s interesting, or I learn new things every day, or I like the people I work with. But those are surface answers. The next question is what underlies those surface responses—what’s going on at a deeper level.

INSTEAD OF LOOKING DOWNWARD, LET’S LOOK UP

Concentrating on aspects of work that bring us down overlooks others that can lift us up. Work can deliver much more than a paycheck—a sense of purpose, motivation, and meaning. I’ve felt that from my work. And so do lots of other people.

But not everyone. Certainly not all work is gratifying and lots of deliberations over work focus on the downsides. To a point, that’s legitimate; expecting meaning and motivation from your job is a luxury unavailable to millions of workers. You’re probably not going to extract any great sense of meaning from working three low-wage jobs just to cover the rent. Slaving at an Amazon warehouse may provide you $15 an hour, and though it’s called a fulfillment center, that’s not because it provides you fulfillment.

Mountains of material—from full-length books to op-ed pieces to surveys—bemoan how deadening work can feel. For instance, that’s the entire thrust of the popular 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, by anthropologist and best-selling author David Graeber. Graeber estimated that roughly 40 percent of workers today are unfulfilled by bullshit jobs, defined as paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.⁷ And he was not talking merely about