Yet in this video we see that the accordion can sound beautiful when handled by a master.

This brings me to something I hear a lot of people say – “I don’t like my job, I want a new one.”  What does this have anything to do with an accordion?  Well, just like the accordion a lot of us have hate our jobs.  We think that if we just had the “right” job we’d be happy.  If only we had the right job, then we’d have that elusive joy.

But would we?

I believe that if you want to have meaning in your work, that meaning has to come from you, not your job.  In short you must bring your own meaning to work.  If you look for work to provide you with meaning you’re going to be disappointed for a long long time.

In other words, we’re asking the wrong questions.  We shouldn’t be saying, “how can I find my perfect job?”  We should be saying, “how can I make this job right for me?”

This brings us back to the accordion video.  Instead of looking at getting the “right” instrument, we should focus on becoming masters.  By focusing on becoming experts in what we do, we change the situation.  The more we excel at whatever our task, the more we take something wonderful and awe inspiring.

It’s easy to play the accordion poorly.  It takes real talent to make it sound amazing.  Are our jobs really any different?

image provided by flickr user rochelle et al

Why do I do all that?

Recognition.

When you find rare armor, beat a difficult boss, or get the top score on solitaire you get recognized.  It’s no different than trying to get the best marathon time, beat a personal record for cycling, or maintain that 240 bowling average.  We push for these things because we get recognition for those achievements.

Recognition has always been important.  But it’s becoming more important in our highly specialized, service oriented, possibly failing – recovering – failing economy.  Most of us are create on demand professionals (people who make stuff out of nothing for a living, by a deadline) it can be difficult to have a sense of accomplishment.  You don’t always get to pick up a tool or piece of food that you’ve helped create and say, “I did that”.

But recognition can fill that void.  When we recognize our employees, we validate their efforts.  And we find that they actually want to work harder, because they know someone cares.

We are all like that.

We all want someone to care about what we do.

If you are a boss, or even part of a team, you can help people grow just by recognizing what they do in a meaningful way.  And when people feel recognized they will engage in ways you never thought possible.  And isn’t that what we really want our employees to do?

photo provided by flickr user oskay

Surprisingly yes.

Negative comments give you two benefits.

1.  Negative comments let you address legitimate problems.  Let’s face it we aren’t perfect.  We make mistakes.  Release defective products.  And don’t always have the best customer service.  If you bring your meaning to your work, then you care about quality and service.  Wouldn’t you rather address the problem and have a chance at turning an unhappy customer into a satisfied customer?  Negative comments give us this chance.

2.  Negative comments help set customer expectations.  What?!  How is talking about the bad things good?!  Well let me go back to our old friend the “realistic job preview.”  People are more satisfied if their experience matches their expectations.  If there are some legitimate, but negative comments, then you know what you’re getting into.  Overly positive comments smell like fake reviews.  No comments at all suggest no one uses your product.  Ironically having a few negative comments makes people feel more comfortable with what they are buying.  That is, of course, assuming that negative comment isn’t a deal breaker.

Allowing feedback is a great way to grow your brand.  And as you can see, there are benefits even to negative feedback.  When I bought my car I did a lot of research on the internet.  I read just about every customer review I could find.  Especially the negative comments.  I wanted to know what might be wrong with my car in the future.  The two biggest issues were the road noise from the tires and not being able to see the “corners” of the car.  I decided that those weren’t enough to stop me from buying my car.  So when I bought my car I found out that my two biggest complaints were the road noise and not being able to see the corners.

My expectations had been set, and I knew what I was getting into.  I had already decided I could live with that.  So instead of buying a car for $20,000 and being upset that it wasn’t quiet, I was prepared, and the road noise didn’t even faze me.  8 years later I love my car, and couldn’t be happier.

I owe that to the realistic expectations I developed and negative comments.  What do you owe to negative comments?

image provided by wikimedia

For most of my life I’ve loved technology.  I remember walking to elementary school during the summer with my Dad to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIgs.  I remember fondly hacking my old x386 Windows 3.1 computer.  I’ve tweaked programs, downloaded software, and written code from my XP machine (which I even built myself.)

But these days something has changed.  I’m just not interested in doing all of those things.  I still love the idea, but these days I just want things to “work.”  I’ve become one of THOSE people!  I don’t have the patience, and more importantly, time to trouble shoot all of my problems.

Frankly, I find this a little depressing.

I’ve been a PC advocate for my entire life.  I love the open nature of the platform.  The freedom to do what I want to do.  And the flexibility to have choices.  But these days I find myself actually wanting a Mac.  I like my Android phone, but I’m not thrilled at how I need to micromanage certain applications.  The design of the iPhone is so much better even if the iPhone 3GS isn’t nearly as powerful as my Nexus One.

At some point efficiency has become the rallying cry of my life.

While this conversation is about phones and computers, it can easily be applied to work.  Employee goals are changing, but companies aren’t recognizing this.  How we are motivated, how we want to work, and even how we choose to work is changing.  No longer do we want to work 9-5 in a cubicle (did we ever really?).  We want flexibility and freedom.

Apple has been successful because it’s recognized the change in the customer base.  Apple sees that people are overwhelmed by the information that comes there way, and they create designs that simplify our lives.  That’s why they are successful.  Maybe it’s time your company took that same approach.  Because if you don’t, you’re likely to lose out on the best employees.

photo provided by everystockphoto

Most of us spend our lives searching for how to make our lives more meaningful.  We hop from job to job hoping that the next one will make our lives more meaningful.  But the truth is, no job brings meaning to our work.

A friend of mine went to work for a non-profit.  He had worked as a marketer at a big marketing firm and over time grew disillusioned with trying to “trick” (his word) people into buying a product.  He saw this new opportunity as a way to break free from that feeling.  So he joined the non-profit.  After a few weeks I asked him what he thought.  He paused for a moment and shrugged, “it feels like a job” he said.

While he loves his work at the non-profit, it’s still a job.  It still requires us to get up out of bed when we’d rather be sleeping in and to work on weekends we’d rather be sitting outside.  Jobs don’t provide meaning, they provide us with a way to make money.

No job will ever give you meaning.

However….

…If you take your meaning to work with you, then you’ve got an entirely new conversation.  While it’s still a job, your meaning provides context to those long hours at the office.  The meaning you bring to work makes the headaches that come with working with others, more bearable because you know why you’re there.  You see where you’re supposed to go.  What you’re supposed to be doing.

As a society we have it all wrong.  We don’t get meaning from work.  We have to take our meaning to work.

And that, my friends, is what this site is all about.

There I said it.  Now I can enroll in Learner’s Anonymous.

Why is this a problem?  Because learning isn’t the same as doing.  And it’s in the doing that greatness happens.   Go ahead and pick anything you want.  A thought, a belief, an opinion.  But I can tell you it didn’t matter until someone did something about it.  You might have a great idea for a new TV product, but it won’t matter until you do it.  Do you have the next Great American Novel?  That’s awesome, but it doesn’t count until you write it.

All of that takes action, and that’s where I can get bogged down.  Even as a kid I loved thinking.  I even loved school.  In fact I would give just about anything to be paid to go to school forever.  Which, I suppose, is why I once applied for a job as a Text Book study guide writer.  (I can feel most of you falling asleep even as I type the job title!)

Learning is important.  But so is doing.  Because in the end, without doing, it’s as if you didn’t learn anything.

image provided by flickr user ckhamken

Practice is part of that.

Many of us don’t practice because we figure “why bother?”  That type of mentality says, it’s not the practice that matters it’s luck, or natural skill or some other random variable.  While those things are important, they don’t replace practice.

Just look at the NFL or the NBA.

Usually the top athletes are the ones known for spending hours in the gym.  Especially when everyone else has gone home.  That’s dedication.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from reading an e-book by Chris Guillebeau, author of the blog, The Art of Nonconformity.  In that book he said that as a writer his minimum goal is to write 1000 words per day.   If he doesn’t hit that number he doesn’t feel like it was a good day.

That got me thinking – I fancy myself a writer, what should my writing patterns look like?

Frankly they weren’t up to snuff. I might write 500 words every other day.  But a thousand a day? Nowhere close. Since then I decided to make changes.  If I wanted to improve as a writer I needed to practice.  And practice meant writing more.  Now I make sure to write close to that thousand word mark. I don’t always get there.   And I’m okay with that.  It’s not the number I care about, it’s the attitude.  But between Meaning to Work and a blog I write around living a life of faith, along with several other writing projects, I come very close to that number every day.  That’s a huge improvement.   That’s something measurable.

And you know what? It has helped.   My writing has improved.  My productivity has improved.  And unexpectedly, my confidence in my writing ability has improved.

Practice may never make perfect. But it makes things a lot better.

photo provided by flickr user laffy4k

The argument against working from home tends to revolve around “building relationships” and “being seen” at the office.  Both of these are good things, and work-from-home proponents tend to gloss over how important they are.  But a lot of times the underlying current of work-from-home-is-evil is an issue of control.

The organization wants to know what their employees are doing at all times.  It doesn’t surprise me that as we install more and more cameras in buildings and on roads we find we are less trusting of our employees.

While issues of trust run deep and can’t be solved in a 300 word post, let me propose a question: is it better to mistrust your employees so that they don’t get any work done while in your building?  Or should you give them the benefit of the doubt and let them work?

In a world driven by intrinsic motivation, external sources of motivation become less and less effective.    When your job is to create something out of nothing, how does having your boss stand over your shoulder improve your productivity?  Does punching into a time clock make you more effective?

Of course it doesn’t!  In fact, it actually undermines our productivity.

Times have changed, yet how we are “motivated” in the workplace remains the same.  Almost all of us work on a “project” basis.  But we are still judged for hours worked and not quality worked.

As we move into the next decade of work (one where the news repeatedly says we won’t recover all the jobs lost in this current recession), companies are going to need to look at getting more productivity out of less people.  While this will be a challenge for organizations and workers alike, I can guarantee you one way to destroy productivity is to prevent people from working at home.

At some point we need to learn to trust our employees.  Because if you can’t trust your employees to work from home, you probably can’t trust them to work at the office.  And if you have so little trust in your employees, that tells me one of two things:  You either have the wrong people working for you.  Or your management style is destroying their productivity in the first place.

photo provided by flickr user wetsun

So companies are making a lot of money offering services to “manage your online reputation”.

Usually the advice they give is something like this.

1. Be careful what you say online
2. Control the content your friends put online about you
3. Actively promote yourself online in places like LinkedIn or Facebook

Those are all good things to do.  Certainly there’s nothing wrong with asking your estranged Uncle Philip to stop talking about alien abductions on your Facebook Wall or asking an old college buddy to take down those pictures of you after your 21^st birthday.

But is this really the right approach?

To me it seems like a lot of work.  It takes a lot of effort to cover up all your imperfections.  So why not live your life open?  Why not work at making yourself a better person instead of hiding the skeletons in your closet?  If you’ve got to work somewhere, why not work where you can make a long term impact?

Let’s face it; people like Tiger Woods and Ben Roethlisberger have been rocked by scandal.  If they, and their millions, couldn’t protect their reputations, how likely is it that you can protect yours?

Of course it’s not just about avoiding trouble.  It’s about making a difference.  When we live a life of consistency other’s notice.  We aren’t one person on Facebook and another person in the office.  We’re the same person no matter who we are talking, and no matter where we are “existing.”  How much trust do you think people have in you when they know you act one way at work, and another way at home?

Will this attitude lose us out on some clients or maybe even a job?  Possibly.  But isn’t it worth it to not worry about what someone’s going to say about you in some far reaching corner of the internet?

Life is too short to worry all the time.

photo provided by flickr user vagawi

Naturally this means I’ve been looking at everything through an inefficiency standpoint.  What is wasteful?  What adds time and uselessness to my life?  What detracts value?

Trendnet does.  You see I bought a wireless internet card from them (which I love).  But it came with a rebate.  Now I understand the whole purpose of the rebate is to get you to not spend it.  That’s why it’s difficult to mail in the rebate, why it takes so long to get a rebate back.

I’ve sent in many rebates over the years but this is the first time I’ve ever received a debit card back.  That’s right they sent me a credit card instead of a check.  Why?  Because it will reduce the chance I’m going to use it.  It also means I need to spend that money instead of saving it.  In short it’s a con.

It’s also wasteful.  I am, by no means, an environmentalist.  But I can’t stand wasting things.  Now I’m forced to use a little piece of plastic that will sit in a landfill for the next 300,000 years.  All so I can spend my $8.68.

When you work with clients or students, don’t waste their time.  Don’t create a model of waste juts because it benefits you.  If the only way you can make money is by creating waste, maybe it’s time you rethink your business model.  Because at some point, people will become fed up with your wasteful ways, and stop going to you.

photo provided by flickr user net_efekt