Seven components of good work
“Just follow your passion!”
This is perhaps the most frequently given career advice of our time. Find something you love to do, and go do it.
But for most of us, this is pretty unhelpful career advice:
Some of us have too many interests at the start of our careers and don’t know which one to prioritise. Equally, some of us need to try many different options before finding a passion for anything. Telling people to follow a single passion that they may not yet have can be disheartening, and lead to feelings of inadequacy.
It is true that many successful people are passionate about what they do. But often this passion derives from the mastery and success they attain in a given field, rather than coming earlier.
Finally, the “follow your passion” mantra can often steer us towards ‘outputs’ - the things we most enjoy consuming. (“I love listening to Radio 4, so I think I would enjoy being a broadcast interviewer.”) But this logic is flawed. The things we enjoy consuming aren’t necessarily the things we enjoy doing as a job. And by focusing on the outputs we enjoy, we write off whole areas of the economy as sources of good work simply because they don’t relate directly to these outputs.
So instead of focusing on outputs, it is much better to focus on inputs - what, for you, are the components of good work?
When you start asking this question, you begin to see that good work exists in a far broader range of jobs than you might have first realised.
Seven important components of good work are set out below:
1. A job you can become good at
Being good at your job helps you enjoy it more. It also builds career capital, which gives you influence and opens up interesting options later in life.
Besides, the most successful people in a field account for a disproportionately large fraction of the impact, and having an impact is an important component of enjoyable work.
2. Flow
Work is enjoyable and engaging if it enables you to enter a state of flow - the mental state of feeling completely immersed in a feeling of energised focus and enjoyment.
Work that induces this desirable state has four defining characteristics:
Clear tasks;
Freedom to decide how to perform each task;
Quick feedback; and
High variety of work.
3. Helping others
Helping others gives your work a sense of purpose.
To maximise your impact, focus on the most urgent social problems, rather than those you stumble into – those that are big in scale, neglected and solvable.
Create a mission around one of these problems, where your skills intersect with the needs of the world.
4. Psychological safety
If you work as part of a team, this team’s culture will be vitally important to your levels of job satisfaction.
Above all else, any team you work in should foster a psychologically safe environment - one in which you can express your ideas and feelings without becoming insecure or embarrassed.
5. Fit with personal life
No matter how enjoyable your work is, you will eventually resent it if it does not fit the lifestyle you want to create for yourself.
Find work that will provide you with significant autonomy over your time and location, once you have built up sufficient career capital.
6. Future proof
It’s important to find work that will, as far as possible, equip you with the skills that are likely to remain valuable in the years and decades to come.
Research tells us that the jobs that are least likely to become automated in the coming years are those requiring high levels of problem solving, creativity and social intelligence.
7. No major downsides
Good work also means avoiding major downsides. Major downsides will differ for everyone, but common ones are unfair pay, discrimination, job insecurity, long hours, a long commute or a bad boss.
Further reading
To Find Work You Love, Don’t Follow Your Passion, 80,000 Hours
What Makes for a Dream Job, 80,000 Hours
The Input / Output Confusion, The Book of Life
The Puzzle of Motivation, Dan Pink
Introduction to Effective Altruism, EffectiveAltruism.org
The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team, Google re:Work
A Guide to Using your Career to Help Solve the World’s Most Pressing Problems, 80,000 Hours