Seth Godin: What Is Work (& Work Worth Doing)?

How do you define work and how do you define work that's worth doing?

Oh, what a great question. Okay, so everybody has to put a roof over their head, take care of their family, feed themselves. We tend to do that by exchanging labor and effort to some entity that's going to pay us to do that. And Industrialism, which has been around for 110 years, really changed the equation because machines, when they're put to good purpose, can dramatically increase the productivity of workers, which means the workers can get paid more and people can buy stuff for way less money than it would've cost. And when we think about that offer, it got buried deep into our culture. The whole idea that you go to school. To be prepped for a test. We ask, will this be on the test? We got to graduate. If you're defective, they put you back a year and reprocess you. And so industrialism created a different kind of work, a brain-dead, depersonalized, impersonal, brutal sort of work. And lots of folks who were lucky, like people like you and me, didn't have to work, uh, at a sewing machine or a punch press We got to use our minds. We have to make decisions as well as making a living. But we're now at the end of the industrial era. Between AI and robots and outsourcing, lots of big companies and small ones are under pressure to extract as much as they can from their workers. And that's why they call it human resources, because they're treating people like machines. And so what I'm hoping for is that people can get their arms around the fact that it's possible to have a good day at work. Maybe you already have had one. It's possible to have the best job you've ever had. I have asked 10,000 people and every single one of them knew which of the jobs they'd had was the best one they ever had. So given that life is short and we're going to spend 90,000 hours at work, Feels to me like it's incumbent on us to help build that, that kind of job.