The Dos and Don'ts of Meaningful Work

Graduating College - Thoughts on Next Steps

☀️ Welcome to the 24th Louis’ Learnings ☀️

This weekend I celebrated my college graduation 🥳. I’m planning on taking the summer to research what opportunities to pursue next!

In the spirit of life and career decisions, this email discusses my thoughts on meaningful work.

While my mind is far from made up, I’m exploring:

• Opportunities in DeFi/crypto.

• Freelance copywriting and digital/content marketing.

• Continuing existing projects (Aura, Senior Design, LK Pod, Writing/ YouTube).

• Joining a growing startup in either programming/marketing.

Thanks so much for reading! Enjoy 🚀

The Wrong Way To Work

To put it lightly, Karl Marx was a good critic. Since the dawn of industrialized society, many workers have suffered miserable conditions: long hours, horrible bosses (not the movie), and other alienating stressors.

For Marx, idealized work is “the active relatedness of man to nature, the creation of a new world, including the creation of man himself” (Fromm). In modern society, so many have drifted from this ideal. Instead of work amplifying the laborer, it destroys them. His days are routine, disruptive to biorhythms, soul-crushing, and cheerless.

Marx calls this alienation. Fortunately, in a free society, this is not an inevitable condition.

Opportunities and options are abundant. The internet offers free education on any topic. If you find yourself feeling alienated in your work, decide to no longer tolerate it and work to find new situations with a better harmony between work and the soul.

Money is not the answer. The relative value of additional income decreases once you exceed what is necessary to live a comfortable, low-stress life. Studies have shown that “once that threshold was reached, further increases in income were actually associated with reduced happiness” (Fottrell).

Naval Ravikant summarizes the finer points here: “What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy” (Jorgenson, 90). When you can not afford to buy food or pay rent, more money solves some very important problems.

After these basic needs are met, however, the endless quest for more inevitably leads to Hedonic Adaptation. We get used to what we have, and set that level of comfort as the new baseline. Driven by money, we want more. Then, when we acquire more, we get used to that new level of comfort, set it as the baseline, and therefore want more yet again in an endless cycle of dissatisfaction, fear of loss, and unmet desire.

Determine what is enough, and be content upon arrival. Any more money should be an incidental side-effect of value-creation. Money itself should not be the ambition.

Don’t do what you love.

Instead, love what you do. In her Jacobin article, Miya Tokumitsu critiques Steve Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address. In the speech, Jobs advises graduates to follow their passions. While I think Tokumitsu makes an appallingly bad straw-man of capitalism and completely ignores the context in which the advice was given, I agree with her on one point: setting out to “do what you love” is bad advice. This is for three main reasons. 

First, it is unlikely that you have an innate passion at the outset.

Cal Newport explains how cultural narratives “promise that you’re just a few personality tests away from finding your dream job” (Newport, 5). While obvious counter-examples exist, such as the doctor who has wished to be a doctor his entire life, that does not extrapolate to all circumstances. Instead, consider this heuristic. If you are forcing the question “what is my passion?” you probably don’t have a clear, innate answer. Otherwise, like the lifelong medicine-man, you wouldn’t need to ask.

Second, making a career of your passion often destroys the passion.

The prototypical example is the man who loves cooking and decides to become a chef. Now, to support himself, he has to cook 8-hours a day. By the time he gets home to his family, he no longer has any desire to cook. He has ruined his passion by making it his job. Even the most passionate chefs have a limit to how much cooking they want to do. By shifting from cooking for fun to cooking for money, the activity loses much of its luster. 

Third, pursuing your passion often ignores economic forces.

This is how we get a generation of disillusioned, highly educated baristas. Parodying the situation, MJ DeMarco shares the irrationality of many “educated” young adults: “I earned a degree in medieval literature! Aren’t I entitled to a $250,000 salary after graduation?” If your passion is baking, but your city has no need for another bakery, don’t force it. Don’t follow your passion in complete ignorance of supply and demand.

The antidote to the passion hypothesis? Get good at something! Citing Wrzesniewski’s research, Cal Newport shares how “the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do” (Newport, 17).

Instead of expecting to know what type of work will become meaningful, focus instead on picking a craft and then developing an unambiguously useful skillset over years of consistent and disciplined effort. Unsexy, but true.

With three “not todos” established, consider a few prescriptions for meaningful work. 

What To Aim For Instead

Self Determination

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport references self-determination theory’s three characteristics of highly satisfying work. Cal elaborates “SDT tells us that motivation... requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs

• Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important.

• Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do.

• Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people” 

Workers who are empowered to determine the what, when and why of their work demonstrate greater satisfaction than those with less control. This makes sense in contrast to the undesirability of alienation.

Competence, as hinted at in the previous section, refers to the self-evident joy of being good at an activity. Things are more fun when you are good at them.

Relatedness means liking your coworkers. Instead of viewing work as a sentence to a lonely cubicle, work is something you look forward to because you value the social company. This framework is a great starting point for enjoyable work.

A Higher Purpose

Beyond Cal’s ideas, it is also helpful to connect your work to a higher purpose. This can take many shapes and sizes. In American Work Values, Bernstein tells of Puritans merrily accepting demanding work because they connected effort to heavenly salvation. He explains “virtually all [Puritans] saw toil as a service to the community, and many looked to diligent labor as a possible sign of eternal reward. Luther... extolled Christ the carpenter, and… urged his own son to work hard and walk in the way of the godly. For Luther man's ideal role on earth was to labor in a fixed calling...” (Bernstein, 150). 

In a pre-Copernican society, this religious decree was effective. In an afterlife-doubting, secular society, a higher calling must be found elsewhere. An excellent role model here is Logotherapy founder, Victor Frankl. Motivated by the benefits his psychological work could bring to humanity, Frankl persisted through years of desolate life in concentration camps with the hopes of keeping his ideas alive. In his seminal Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl shares how the deep belief that his work would benefit the world kept him alive through the Holocaust. 

Help People

For those without a life’s work, another option is simply to help people. Solving a real problem for another person can be an addicting source of satisfaction. Consider the example of startup founders.

In his “Billionaires Build” essay, Silicon Valley legend Paul Graham shares the unexpected common thread among billionaires. Ironically, Graham argues that the pursuit of money or status makes one less likely to become a billionaire.

Why?

“The founders who are doing it for the money will take the first sufficiently large acquisition offer, and the ones who are doing it to seem cool will rapidly discover that there are much less painful ways of seeming cool” (Graham).

Instead, the billionaires take a different approach. “The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want” (Graham).

Billionaires are obsessed with adding value to their customers. At every opportunity, they prioritize delighting users over all other options. Had they cared about something else, founders would have sold out or been made obsolete by competition.

Closing Thoughts (TL;DR)

• Work hard to escape bad situations.

• Develop passion by developing skills.

• Find work that succeeds in proportion to how much it helps others. 

Hyperlinks To Various Things

Podcast Updates 🎧

• LK #65 with AJ Osborne: Thought processes for buying $150M in self-storage.

• LK #64 with Mona El Isa from Enzyme.Finance: Democratizing hedge funds.

• Danny Miranda #95 with Louis and Kyle: Danny interviews us!

LK Content Coming Soon 📅

• Cole Schafer from HoneyCopy.com

• Polina Marinova from The Profile

• Steph Smith from Trends (newsletter from The Hustle)

• Serial entrepreneur and former Miss Nevada USA Lisa Song Sutton

• Bodybuilder and performance coach Akaash Pardesi

Quick Clicks ✈️ Travel Themed

(1) 📚 Awesome Resource 📚 : Nomad List

Crowdsourced community data about the best cities for “digital nomads.” Extremely well-organized guide about safety, internet speed, fun, culture, and much more about the best cities for remote work.

(2) 🌍 Fascinating Business Model 🌍 : Selina CoLive Hostel Subscriptions

This blew my mind. Subscribe and stay at any Hostel in their network—starting at just $325/month for shared rooms. Includes coworking space and wellness classes. If you are “traveling full-time” this sounds incredible.

That’s all for this week

As always, I’d love to hear from you.

What you’ve been up to? What you’ve been learning?

You can reply directly to this email 😃

Have an awesome week,

Louis

Photo of the week - A Solid Run

We’ve come a long way

I’m grateful to have had great friends for these past four years.

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References

• Bernstein, Paul. American Work Values: Their Origin and Development. 1997.

• Frankl, Viktor E., et al. Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 2006.

• Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man. Erich Fromm 1961, Marxists.org, www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch05.htm#:~:text=Work%20is%20for%20him%20the,the%20creation%20of%20man%20himself.&text=He%20is%20concerned%20with%20the,into%20the%20slave%20of%20things.

• Graham, Paul. “Billionaires Build.” Paulgraham.com, Dec. 2020, www.paulgraham.com/ace.html

• Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: a Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing, 2020.

• Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You. PIATKUS Books, 2018.