Work vs. work

Huge, huge props to Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, whose life-changing book Your Money or Your Life articulates a distinction that most of us may have missed for much of our working lives. In pointing out the two different roles we in the "developed" world have assigned work - (one) to get us money and (two) to provide fulfillment of our desires for duty, creating things, socializing, service for the greater good, prestige, success in doing something well and so on - the authors note that expecting our job to satisfy both these roles creates a problem with the idea of work.

As they write, "The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It's that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining 'work' as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity."

AMEN!!

The book doesn't suggest that we should float around living off of someone else's labor and spouting platitudes about excessive materialism while we take advantage of other people's hard-earned materials. Instead, it redefines much of the stuff we all do outside those eight hours of paid work. Planting a garden? Sewing new curtains? Repairing the broken recliner mechanism for the fourth time? Driving your kids to a live theater production? Creating a great necklace? Organizing your photo albums? Taking a class on food and wine pairing?

These are real work, baby! You're not unemployed just because you're out of a paying job. If being unemployed means not getting paid for the work you do, then most of us are unemployed about 14 hours every day and on the weekends! Do you really stop doing meaningful work once you walk out that door at your job?

My friend Angie, a business coaching consultant at The Coaching Continuum, and I have mulled over this subject together many times. Both of us feel underemployed in the sense that we do a lot of work in a variety of arenas and get paid for a small fraction of it. Get paid with money, that is. We decided to list our skill sets that would aid us in a particular venture; independently, we tackled these lists by writing down the obvious skills first - what we are trained to do through formal education and years of job experience. But those lists seemed artificially short to us. Remember, we were creating our lists independently to share with each other at our next meeting. At that meet-up, we pulled out our notes and saw what we had both done: After the first list, we had each given ourselves free rein to make a lengthy inventory of some of our strengths that serve us well every single day in any situation: nurturing, repairing, encouraging, writing scripts, gardening, thinking critically, playing piano, helping others clarify goals, cooking, fundraising, economizing, networking, self-marketing, beadweaving, puppet-making, organizing disparate items, volunteering, reading music, identifying needs and resources, etc., etc., etc.

These are skills used in everyday life, but because there's not a paycheck attached to most of them for each of us, we don't tend to view the results they reap as work. Yet they help us care for people around us, make the world a nicer place, run our homes, avoid buying unhealthful or unnecessary items, create beauty, support friends and organizations, and so on. Is there a better purpose for work?

Yes, we need money. Money is a symbol of value that helps us assign worth to material objects and to our own work. But if money is all we're after from our jobs, then let's stop apologizing for what we do outside our paying jobs if what we do is creative, helpful and pleasurable. Let's stop calling our hobbies "guilty pleasures" if they make ANYBODY'S lives that much more pleasant. Let's view the food basket we put together for an ailing neighbor as representative of some of our best life work.

Too, let's turn the tide on our expectations for our jobs. There's a wealth of satisfaction to be gained from what you do at home for your nearest and dearest - and the folks at home won't escort you to the front door with a cardboard box containing all your desk tchotchkes when the budget simply has to be cut or your productivity just didn't hit the mark last year. It's great to get kudos at work for the tasks everyone else sees you do. But how about all those little unfinished (or unstarted. . .) jobs at home that no one but your family sees? Are they really less important than what the boss wants you to do?

Are you trying as hard at the other work in your life just because it isn't paid?