Work that Matters: an introduction

The first email! Thank you for being one of the earliest subscribers.

Edit: emails now come out when I have something significant to share (they were weekly). If you’d like to read one of my most popular ones, try this:

Great Work / Swanning through the tough week

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Each week, I’ll be sending you an email containing an approach, idea or tool you can use to improve your work and your life. But, in this first email, I want say something about why those of us doing work that matters need these tools, and how I came to be writing this.

Work that matters: I’m using this pretentious expression to mean two things. First, it’s work that matters to you: not just the pay or the career, but the work itself. Psychologists call this occupational calling.

But work that matters is also work that matters, at least a bit, to others. That’s probably one of the reasons it’s important to you.

Work that matters makes the world safer, kinder, better nourished, better educated, better housed, more cared for, less poor, cleaner, better informed, wiser, healthier, more connected, more thoughtful, more equal, more democratic, more creative, better designed, better run, better understood, more peaceful, more respectful of the environment, fairer, less lonely, more beautiful, more interesting, tastier, better built, more affordable, truer, more imaginative, more efficient, more questioning, less selfish, more humble, weirder, funnier, or more fun.

It takes a lot of unromantic toil to keep all the little cogs of our world meshing smoothly. Were reward and prestige determined by the importance of our work, our richest and most famous fellow-citizens would be carers and those who process sewage. Whatever it is you do, it probably does matter to the world. Most people’s work does.

It follows that, of these two definitions of work that matters, the more important one’s the subjective one: your work matters if it matters to you.

And let’s not forget students and others aspiring to a career that matters. How different my working life would have been had I understood, thirty years ago, what I’ll be writing about in these emails.

There’s something beautiful in investing our finite energy and short time on this troubled planet in things that matter. But so many of those who do are wrung out. Others aren’t doing badly, but their job has become a slog, a less fulfilling part of their life than they’d once anticipated. And then there are those who are fine, but who work in a group of people, a team, an organization that’s perpetually stretched, forever battling some trial or drama, never reaching that satisfying, steady hum of doing its thing well, week after week.

Stress; frustration with poor systems and weak management; overwork; lack of confidence; difficult relationships with colleagues; feeling we’re achieving less than we’re capable of; carrying a fist of worry in our chests about a mistake we made or a complaint we received; simply stopping enjoying our work; feeling lonely in a work culture that’s not ours; finding ourselves having taken on more leadership than we want, at the expense of what first drew us to our line of work: all these are common. Too many good people, having expected fulfillment from work that matters, find it becomes a grind.

Sounds familiar?

Much writing about work assumes we all do what we do in offices, for commercial organizations. And much work that matters is done in business offices. But a lot’s done elsewhere. In high-income countries those working in public (government) or charitable (non-profit) organisations make up around a quarter of the workforce, and our overlooked terrain’s different from commercial settings.

And, while doing work that matters adds meaning to your life, it may come at a cost: compassion fatigue, financial disadvantages, fear of getting something wrong and harming those for whom we do what we do, anguish when things do go wrong.

For much of my career, I found work gruelling. On occasion I’ve danced on the precipice of burnout, needing time off to recover. I began my search for solutions not long after I started working, and have focused on this, for myself and then for others, ever since.

I’ve spent much of my own working life as a GP in the UK’s National Health Service, and as a medical teacher. For some years I was also a human rights barrister (trial lawyer), doing legal aid work for people who were marginalized or vulnerable. Along the way, my work’s taken me to refugee camps, high-security prisons, wood-paneled rooms in ancient universities, remote rural emergency rooms, urban slums, supreme courts, and more meetings than I’ll ever care to remember. I’ve trained and mentored doctors and nurses and lawyers and managers, helped develop health services on four continents, and, in a country where it’s lawful, ended the lives of people who were suffering terribly and had decided their time had come. I’ve advised governments and other organizations, been an elected local politician, carried out research in medicine and the social sciences, and been part of many a team. Mostly, though, I’ve done what I’ve finally learnt I find most meaningful: sitting with people who are struggling with something, be they patients or clients or colleagues or students, listening, and, together, trying to figure things out.

And for years, now, I’ve been collecting, studying, testing, and sharing strategies for serenity and success in work that matters. I’ve triangulated, across many settings, what works and what doesn’t—the differences between those who manage well and those who struggle, and between teams that thrive and those that flounder—against research in psychology and management and with the writings of people who have thought deeply about life and work. I’ve collected solutions—tools, approaches, ideas that have transformed my life, and many others’, too.

To my astonishment, I’m now one of those people who used to perplex me by swanning through tough jobs mostly unfazed. As I write this, I’m a GP and emergency medicine doctor, and help lead a hospital’s medical team. I work 24-hour shifts in our emergency room, with problems coming at me from all directions, while managing the crises that arise daily in a small hospital on an Indigenous reserve in a remote part of Canada. I support others in changing their working lives for the better. I have spare time to relax ­and finish writing a book. I’ve never found my work as fulfilling as I now do nor, critically, been as alive, at work or away from work.

So I’m writing a how-to book about serenity and success for people who do work that matters. These weekly emails will share ideas from the book. They’re ideas that need to be shared. And I’m hoping reader feedback will help improve the book.

Next week we’ll look at the effort/results bell-curve, and why so many of us could get more done, and do better work, by working less hard. Thanks for reading.