In a recent newsletter I was reading, the premise was that success (= being good at something) does not necessarily bring you satisfaction (=doing something that’s personally meaningful to you). Since I’ve not yet experienced lasting satisfaction in my 10 year long career – it got me thinking about what meaningful work means to me.
It time warped me back to my first years as an financial auditor at one of the big 4. I’m sometimes still flabbergasted that I chose this career path intentionally back then. Anyways. You might or might not know what a financial auditor does – so I’ll quickly explain it: you check the financial statements of companies that have a legal obligation to do so. Before I started the job, I kind of thought you’d be an investigator of sorts – someone that gets to know the company from the ground up. The reality however, was far from that. While we traveled to the client site 5 days a week (years pre-Covid), were put into some basement without windows because nobody wanted to see the accountant coming, and we would work 10-12 hours a day. The work was mostly desk work, and since we would serve the same clients for many years in a row – there was mostly copying and pasting excel sheets from last year and updating the numbers. No investigating, just being a copy/paste monkey. After 2 years I thought my brain had slowly died because of boredom.
I personally became so demotivated by the fact that we did all this work, the copying and the pasting, manually. Wasn’t that stupid? Already long before the rise of AI, I was fully convinced that jobs like these could be and should be automated away completely. The work was absolutely not meaningful to me, despite the fact that I was fine at it (showing by my promotions).
The interesting thing is that I have some great friends from this time in my career, that actually had and have a completely different experience. We worked on the same projects, sat in the same basements and copied the same worksheets. But still. They didn’t appear to find this work boring at all, no in fact – they thought this work was very meaningful to them. Even 10 years later, they’re still there – happily checking financial statements.
It made me think about this time I was talking with a friend over drinks, a consultant at one of the big management consulting firms. I think it’s needless to say that there are many doubts on how much value consultants add. But this guy all of a sudden started crying because he felt ‘so much pressure because the work he did as a consultant was SO important’. His clients? Banks.
I find it so fascinating that people have such different views on what meaningful work is. I guess ‘meaningful’ isn’t something that is universally defined, but rather dependent on the stories we tell ourselves and on what we value in our lives. Someone working in accounting may derive meaning from the fact that they (in theory) ‘protect the financial system’. A consultant might feel that they’re helping their clients ‘solve critical business problems that they couldn’t have solved themselves’.
Many other people that I know find meaning in their nice colleagues, the stability of their jobs and the fact that their salaries rise yearly with a nice inflation correction and that they have paid leave.
I’ve been around long enough for now that these aren’t the things that bring me satisfaction. And that’s something that used to bring me a lot of shame. I would always question myself – why can’t I just find my work meaningful? Why can’t I just be satisfied like everybody else?
But I’m starting to accept that meaning isn’t universal; it’s personal. And what’s meaningful to me might not be what I once hoped for.
Now, it’s time to figure out what is.