How some people stay motivated at work when they don’t love their jobs
qz.com
qz.com
I'm confused as to who he's writing for as it seems very obvious that many people get "motivated" for work they don't enjoy because they have to support their family.
For example, every time the word "passion" is thrown around on HN, it will incite people to respond: "fuck passion... I just want to work my 40 hours and go home and spend time with my family."
[1] http://i.imgur.com/7MkgTGT.jpg
episode wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Maggie_Makes_Three
Actually, what I find interesting about this is the post goes on to note that:
It wasn’t only parents who experienced family motivation. It also applied to unmarried and childless workers who defined their family as brothers, sisters, parents, and other relatives.
I'd love to dig into this more, but the paper is, of course, behind a paywall. I'm very curious if the people indicated, above, had to financially support their extended family, or if it was simply the need to be dependable and responsible, that created the motivation.
Certainly I could be happier, on a daily basis, were I plying my trade as part of an organization more closely focused on the kind of work that I do. On the other hand, where I am now has the twin virtues of being quite stable and enthusiastically remunerative, which counts for a lot more when I've got folks back home to look after.
No one said that. Societal and cultural conditions being what they are in that part of the world lead to a situation in which living together and pooling resources makes a lot of sense. That's not true for most Americans. It has nothing to do with "caring" more or less. Most people, given the opportunity to do so, will chose to live on their own rather than bunk up with three generations of family members.
This is just not true at all. In most of the world, looking after one's parents is not seen as a chore or a hardship, but basic empathy for one's parents.
When you grow old, would you rather live in a multigenerational household - vs being alone or in some kind of facility?
This culture may have come about from a practical standpoint out of need, or maybe not. It's certainly worth noting that even if the culture wasn't such it's certainly practical for maquiladora workers to pool family resources due to low pay.
And yes, um, certainly parts of the US that have a large Mexican-American population would have a more Mexican-American culture.
http://www.livescience.com/38647-mexican-culture.html
>Mexicans put a high value on hierarchy and structure in business and family matters. Especially outside of cities, families are typically large and Mexicans are very conscious of their responsibilities to immediate family members and extended family such as cousins and even close friends.
Paste the DOI: 10.5465/amj.2014.0898
Into the box here: https://sci-hub.cc/
It makes sense to me that people ignore all that and just focus on providing for family, but I just don't know how to do that. If my job doesn't work for me, it colors my whole life.
The problem is the English language doesn't, today in 2017, have separate words for "Our workplace and workers are passionate" vs "I'm passionate about something"
I'm passionate right now about virtualization and I've got a micro-lab of vmware ESXi and vCenter and all that and I purchased the home lab license so its all legal and I love fooling around with it at home. There's just something weirdly entertaining about it, like setting up webservers at home in 1996. Its a pity because I just got over a bad case of passion about MQTT where I was doing unspeakable things to defenseless ESP8266 microcontroller chips and RabbitMQ with MQTT and node-red for graphing and here I am addicted to screwing around with something else with barely a break. There's not a darn thing wrong with this kind of passion. Its more fun than watching daytime TV or sportsball on TV.
The kind of passion (same word) that "we" hate in workplaces and workers is best expressed as "Yeah sorry the bad news is your boss is a screamer. The good news is we prefer to think your boss is very passionate about his work, not that he's an antisocial asshole raised by wolves or maybe werewolves". The first and last time I worked for a screamer was in the early 90s and its the kind of thing people only tolerate roughly once per lifetime if at all avoidable.
I always thought jobs advertising that they are looking for someone with "passion" as a ploy to trick the bright eyed and naïve young into overworking before they become disillusioned.
I've actually enjoyed most of the "menial" jobs I've worked. The only unenjoyable job I worked was only unenjoyable due to piss poor management. Now I enjoy working as a software engineer, I like what I do, but it's still just a job, just a way to earn a living.
I'm reminded of Office Space on career advice: "[The question from a guidance counselor of what you would do if you had a million dollars] is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her there would be no janitors because because nobody would clean up shit if they had a million dollars."
Maybe that's a good thing. If there's enough of them the entire concept will have to be reexamined (UBI for example or digital nomads, etc.). I think a lot more people are just starting to realise that owning a house and a car and having a few kids and a couple of ex-wives and a mountain of 'stuff' isn't necessary.
There are lots of jobs that will provide fulfilment. Most of them, of course, won't pay anywhere as near as well as your average office work - they pay enough though for someone who doesn't want the things I mentioned above.
Edit: Claiming having lots of money and 'stuff' isn't important apparently gets you lots of down votes now...strange.
Finding "passion" in your job is an entirely new concept. We've been around quite some time and, for 99.9% of that time and for 99.9% of the people, a job is a job. Nothing more than a means to an end. I don't see how UBI follows from people realizing what we've known for millennia.
I could easily see a tradesman before being "passionate" about his work, though they probably wouldn't have used that language.
If you consider six figure debt at 22 freedom :)
You're right though of course; there are a lot of variables and societal changes that have led to where we are now.
The pay was crap, and hours were 9pm to 5am, but I loved the people I worked with, and the physical/manual labour was more satisfying than cranking out some requirements for an app noone cares about.
Back in my single days, I actually applied to do some warehouse work outside of my 9-5 programming day job 'cos I found it so boring and unsatisfying. (Turns out you're not allowed to work so many hours for health and safety reasons)
I don't mind coding for a living - it's easy: I sit at a desk and browse the internet for most part, but it's hardly the peak of job satisfaction. I think if I was mad rich, I wouldn't mind doing something poorly paid but outdoorsy and invigorating.
Oh, good. I thought I was alone. Or undervalued.
I left one job last year and started a new one and find that I'm not stressed enough, perhaps. I could spend a full day doing nothing but screwing around on the internet and no one would notice.
If I did a graph of the number of posts I've made on HN per day since switching jobs the trend would be quite noticeable.
My kids are moving out "soon" and I won't need the expensive house in the best school district anymore, I wonder how many people would downgrade life a bit with a basic income. I won't need the best school district for 4, I'll just need somewhere safe for 2, probably much cheaper.
I get it that a BI means poor people get to eat, and thats very nice, but it also means something to me too, which would probably be a purely fun job.
Corollary: managing people is a shitty job where you are on your own. You have to be really awesome to not screw it up.
To make a long story short, when I was 20 I had to fully support my mother and my very young sister. This was the most important reason that led me to accept conditions at work (work for a foreign company who I didn't know anyone in person, for low salary, not enough vacation, work way more than 40 hours per week, be on call 24/7 for years, etc) that I know for a fact people that were not in the same situation would never take. At least the vast majority of my friends and colleagues from college.
I still loved my job, but it was a balance between accepting shitty conditions and being a very dedicated worker betting on a brighter future for my family.
It turned out very good for me, although it took a very long time to, in terms of salary, be on par with a national median.
I never thought about it that way, but family indeed was the real motivator for me.
If you are hemmed in by poverty, location, and financial obligations, you are going to convince yourself that your circumstances are acceptable to you, whether or not that is actually the case, or you won't survive in it, and be around to make a self-report.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do...
For me personally "they pay me" is enough to get me in the door and sitting at my desk for a certain amount of time each day.
I think it's actually this way for a lot of people.
My previous job doing DevOps-y stuff was completely different. In that job, if I didn't show up and do my work, other people wouldn't be able to work either. Doing that job felt like I was supporting my work family.
My current job (software QA) is very disconnected from eventual users and it just feels like a very repetitive slog every day.
Anyway this should maybe have been a throwaway, but whatever.
Sometimes it's the feeling that you can't make your family/race/school/tribe look bad by not working hard. e.g. "If I slack off on this job, they will think everybody who graduated from Stanford is a lazy unprofessional bum." or "My parents raised me to be a better worker than this."
"If I'm lazy, people will think all Mexicans are lazy." is not a fear motivator. It's motivated by pride and a sense of internal self worth.
Sort of a half-full/half-empty kind of thing, really. I suspect the perspective you cleave to is a product of your personal outlook.
It is literally being the one who has the power to make your family's life better, rather than being one of the powerless. Being able to provide your daughter with a better school, your mother with better health care, your family with a better place to live, feels to some the way "changing the world" feels to others.
"I can tell you, because I received many letters of this sort ... young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them with a sense of responsibility, and say look here, here's something worth living for, man.
You can find meaning in life with freedom, but freedom. Freedom is a chaotic sort of meaning, right, and freedom isn't sort of thing makes people happy. It is the sort of thing people troublesome -- troubled. Because freedom expands your series of choices, and that makes you nervous and uncertain... not to say that that's a bad thing. It's a good thing but it requires that you shoulder the responsibility of the freedom, but responsibility per se is what gives your life meaning, genuine meaning in the face of suffering." -Jordan Peterson
Viktor Frankl wrote a whole book about this innate need for meaning, aptly titled "Man's Search for Meaning." In the book, Frankl observes that those who best survived the horrors of concentration camps were precisely those who were able to give some sort of meaning to their suffering, which in many cases came in the form of a family or loved one that waited for them to emerge from captivity.
This article is not very useful, and its lack of insight leaves me feeling surprised that it was written by a psychologist (who ostensibly should know better).
Turns out it's not for him (I think) nor did the guys at QZ intend to suggest it was, but I just interpreted the picture in a whole different way.