You'll Never Be Paid So Much That You Will Love Your Meaningless Job The necessity and challenge of paying the bills is great but work that we know is meaningless is another sort of poverty entirely.
By Jon Nastor Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Imagine for a minute you are a highly-skilled graphic designer. You are hired by a company known for treating its employees well and you are in no way over-worked. Your job is to redesign their existing website, one page at a time.
You pour your heart and soul into your work. In fact, this is exactly the job you had hoped for in college. You get to redesign pages for a website that receives millions of visitors each month. But there's a catch: Your work doesn't matter.
Each week, you are expected to submit one redesigned page. Actually, this gives you the required time to do your job as near to perfect as possible, without having to put in extra hours. Friday afternoon arrives and you submit your work to your boss via email. Fifteen minutes later, exactly like last week, she responds that she loves it and is again amazed at your attention to the details. Then she deletes it. Just like last week.
She loves your work, treats you exceptionally well, and pays you a salary of $100,000 per year. Then she compliments you and deletes it. She will never stop deleting it.
Your work doesn't matter.
Related: Money Is Nice, But It's Not Enough to Motivate Employees
In this experiment, we initially and quickly say that we wouldn't care and that we would take the easy money. But upon deeper reflection, we get the feeling that this might not be the case. Which puts us in an odd situation, because the money sounds good, yet we all want to feel that our work matters.
When our work doesn't matter, we get that gnawing feeling in our stomachs. The feeling that keeps us up at night and never allows us to feel true satisfaction.
Choose to make your work matter.
Now think about blogging. Why are there millions and millions of blogs on the Internet? Most are only read by a couple people. When you write and publish an article to the Internet, there is the possibility that one person (or maybe one million people) could find and read it. This, not the money, makes your work matter. Of course, most blogs never get found or read by more than the writer's friends or family. But the potential is there and the potential makes your work matter.
Your work must matter to you, but you must also find people to whom it matters. They are your bosses who love your work, and they don't delete it. They take it and build off it or use it to do their own work that matters.
We all need to pursue and find that work that matters. If not, you will have your heart and soul deleted every week.
