Top 5: Finding Joy in Any Job AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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Episode: Top 5: Finding Joy in Any Job

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:35:18

Episode Shownotes

To mark the podcast's fifth birthday, Dr Laurie is revisiting some of her favorite episodes. And this show - Working Your Way to Happiness - has a special place in her heart. Marty kills rats... but if you asked him what his job is he'd say it was "solving problems"

and "helping people". How we view our work can contribute greatly to our daily levels of happiness - far more than money or status. Dr Laurie examines how we all came to ignore the importance of job satisfaction and hears from Professor Amy Wrzesniewski about "job crafting" - the reframing skill that happy people like Marty use to see their careers as more than just a way to make money.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this special episode of 'The Happiness Lab,' Dr. Laurie Santos highlights how perceptions of work influence happiness, using the story of Marty, a pest control worker who finds joy through problem-solving and helping others. The podcast challenges the misconception that high salaries guarantee job satisfaction, emphasizing factors like meaning and engagement instead. Insights from Professor Amy Wrzesniewski reveal the concept of 'job crafting,' which allows individuals to reshape their roles for greater intrinsic satisfaction. Ultimately, the episode contends that meaningful work is key to overall happiness, not monetary rewards.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Top 5: Finding Joy in Any Job) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:02:05 Speaker_10
Our podcast has just turned five years old. And to celebrate, I sent my producer Ryan Dilley deep into the archive to grab out the five episodes that I found the most memorable from all the hundreds that we've made together.

00:02:16 Speaker_10
So Ryan, which episode is up next?

00:02:18 Speaker_06
So this show's from season two and it's called Working Our Way to Happiness. This is one where I have a slightly humiliating cameo appearance, but that's not why you chose it, right?

00:02:26 Speaker_09
No, it's totally why I chose it. I really enjoyed your scream in that episode.

00:02:31 Speaker_06
A lot of this show is built around, as listeners will find out, a lot of this show is built around me seeing a rat that had run into your house.

00:02:38 Speaker_10
Which is the part of the wonderful cameo because we get to hear at least a reenactment of the scream that you gave when you saw the rat. But the episode's not about Ryan or screaming.

00:02:47 Speaker_10
It's really about kind of the job of someone who has to deal with folks who see rats all the time.

00:02:52 Speaker_10
We interviewed Yale's pest management person, Marty, and he was the perfect guest for this episode because it was an entire episode about what we can do to be happier at work and the misconceptions we have about happiness at work, like the idea that being a pest control person might not be the best job when it turns out Marty really adores what he does for work.

00:03:11 Speaker_06
And this episode also includes a research-backed idea that gets more pushback than any other thing that we mentioned about. People get so angry. And that is the amount of money that you make doesn't predict how happy you will be.

00:03:22 Speaker_10
Yeah, this is something that the science has shown us for a while, with some nuance, right? If you're not making enough money to put food on the table or put a roof over your head, definitely more money will make you happier at work and beyond.

00:03:34 Speaker_10
But for folks making a reasonable wage, money doesn't seem to be the path to happiness that we think. At work, it seems to be other things. And that's really what Marty was so great at teaching us.

00:03:43 Speaker_10
So this is one of the reasons that I've loved this episode. It features good screams from my beloved producer, Ryan, and some really important science about what makes us happy at work. I hope you'll love this episode too.

00:03:54 Speaker_10
Working your way to happiness.

00:03:57 Speaker_09
No, no, no. It was much more like terrified than that.

00:04:08 Speaker_10
I'm going through my sound effects library with my friend and producer Ryan Dilley. I'm trying to find a very specific scream, one that's forever etched into my memory.

00:04:18 Speaker_09
No, that's like way more of a manly, brave scream. I think we need it more high-pitched and frantic and fearful.

00:04:25 Speaker_10
We're trying to reenact a rather horrifying moment that Ryan and I experienced a few months back. We were working on our podcast scripts, and Ryan needed a cup of coffee. So he headed into the kitchen. And that was when I heard it.

00:04:42 Speaker_09
I think that's pretty close. I think that was it."

00:04:45 Speaker_10
Ryan emitted the longest, loudest, and most terror-filled shriek I've ever heard. Apparently, a huge terrifying rat had run through the kitchen. A rodent that was, at least according to Ryan's retelling, about the size of a large Great Dane.

00:05:00 Speaker_10
Or a small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's construction outside.

00:05:11 Speaker_10
A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely hightailed it out of the house, never to be heard from again. But just as I was explaining that we had absolutely nothing to worry about,

00:05:27 Speaker_10
The creature, that I could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse, was back. It raced from the kitchen, into the study, around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct on the wall. But I wasn't worried.

00:05:40 Speaker_10
Not because the rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for long.

00:05:47 Speaker_10
Because at Yale, when these things happen, and you need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call... Marty Gilloran, pest control operator. Marty is like the Terminator for vermin.

00:05:58 Speaker_10
Within minutes, he was at my house, armed with baits and traps galore.

00:06:02 Speaker_08
I like to get there as soon as I can to help people. I don't like to leave calls waiting too long. And that was kind of an emergency call because it was a rat in a living space.

00:06:12 Speaker_10
While Ryan continued to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on the floor. He checked for the rat where we last saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty then set his traps like a general deploying his armies.

00:06:24 Speaker_10
He strategized about all aspects of the rat's moves. Like what if the rat retreated here, or made a break for it over there? Within minutes, all the traps were down. And almost as soon as Marty left, we heard.

00:06:39 Speaker_08
Oh, I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a lot longer.

00:06:43 Speaker_10
Marty is a vermin aficionado, one of the most skilled professionals I've ever met. But few people want a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America.

00:06:56 Speaker_10
Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and spend their working hours in the company of scary critters that can bite, scratch, and sting.

00:07:05 Speaker_08
I usually get stung about once a year. Kind of just comes with the territory.

00:07:09 Speaker_10
But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of person we should emulate if we want to find the perfect job. Or even just to be happier at work generally.

00:07:18 Speaker_10
Because as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong. We think that pay and perks and plush offices are what makes us happy in our careers.

00:07:30 Speaker_10
But as we'll see, happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying minds realize. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?

00:07:44 Speaker_10
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction.

00:07:54 Speaker_10
You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. What did you want to be when you grew up? I'm going to venture a guess that rat exterminator was pretty far down the list. It was for Marty, too.

00:08:11 Speaker_10
He grew up with the standard career aspirations.

00:08:14 Speaker_08
I mean, like every kid, I guess, a fireman or a cop or, you know, when you're a kid.

00:08:19 Speaker_10
But Marty never joined the police department or signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted into a number of different jobs.

00:08:27 Speaker_08
Just like restaurant work and, you know, security guard and filling vending machines, things like that.

00:08:33 Speaker_10
They all paid okay, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with joy when he clocked in every Monday morning. And he wasn't alone.

00:08:40 Speaker_10
According to a recent Gallup poll from 2018, only about a third of American workers report feeling really engaged with their jobs. Over 50% admit feeling actively not engaged. They merely put up with boring work.

00:08:54 Speaker_10
And nearly 20% report hating what they do for a living.

00:08:57 Speaker_08
I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. Like, I have to go to work, this is not good, it's Monday morning.

00:09:03 Speaker_10
It's probably not all that surprising, but hating your job isn't that great for your happiness. Which raises an important question, what actually makes for a happier job?

00:09:12 Speaker_10
What could make work life better for the nearly 100 million Americans who feel disengaged on the job? Many of us have a pretty strong intuition here. We'd be happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one LinkedIn survey from 2014.

00:09:26 Speaker_10
It found that financial compensation was the top value that most college students look for when considering a new job opportunity. compensation was chosen more often than work-life balance, having good colleagues, or even career development.

00:09:42 Speaker_10
And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices. It's also affecting how we choose to live our lives generally.

00:09:51 Speaker_10
Consider the results of one study, which has surveyed the values of incoming freshmen for the last half century. In 2018, more than 80% of freshmen said that being well-off financially was really important in life.

00:10:04 Speaker_10
It was more important than raising a family or developing a meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared to the answers their parents or grandparents gave.

00:10:14 Speaker_10
The number of students who think big salaries are key has gone up dramatically since the 1960s. But is our growing intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right?

00:10:24 Speaker_10
Can employers really improve the well-being of the nearly two-thirds of people who hate their jobs simply by paying them more?

00:10:31 Speaker_07
When you ask people what would make their lives better or what would make their jobs better, the first thing they point to is, my life's so good, and if I only made 10% more, it would be perfect.

00:10:42 Speaker_10
This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of the book, Why We Work.

00:10:49 Speaker_07
People are wrong. This is not the case. Money does buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy a lot of happiness.

00:10:58 Speaker_10
We covered this in an earlier episode called The Unhappy Millionaire, but it's worth repeating here. If you're not making a living wage, more money will definitely improve your overall well-being.

00:11:09 Speaker_10
But if you currently earn $100,000 or more a year, doubling or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super rich can lead sad and lonely lives.

00:11:22 Speaker_07
For the most part, doing what you do in order to earn a little bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction.

00:11:29 Speaker_07
And it can have perverse effects in that if the amount of money you make starts to be the metric you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not, and whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the wrong metric.

00:11:44 Speaker_10
I've seen so many of my Yale students head in exactly this wrong direction after graduation. They pick a job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers they kind of know they're going to hate just because it comes with a great paycheck.

00:11:58 Speaker_10
But they soon end up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs, that feeling of being stuck in a high paying job that you absolutely hate.

00:12:08 Speaker_10
And that's one of the reasons that professions we often think of as good jobs, the most prestigious ones with the highest salaries — think doctor, lawyer, Wall Street investor — the people who have these prestigious jobs have suicide rates that are one and a half times those of the average population.

00:12:24 Speaker_10
Higher paychecks are simply not having the positive effect on our mental health that we think. But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction so messed up? How did we come to think of more money as the answer to all our work woes?

00:12:38 Speaker_10
And if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better, then what does? To get to the bottom of all these questions, we need to turn back to the very critter we started the show with. That's right, the rat. the Happiness Lab. We'll be back in a moment.

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My second.

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00:17:46 Speaker_10
Back in the 1700s, a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation, a pin factory. Now, you might not think pin making would require that much innovation.

00:17:57 Speaker_10
I mean, at first glance, it doesn't seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really, really simple straight kind. But back in the 18th century, creating each pin was tough.

00:18:11 Speaker_10
It took 18 individual steps. First, you needed to measure and clip a length of wire. Then straighten it. After that, you carefully sharpened one end.

00:18:21 Speaker_10
Once that point was set, you prepared the other end to attach the head, which involved several steps, like grinding the top to make sure it was the right texture. Finally, the pinheads needed to be affixed.

00:18:33 Speaker_10
And after that, they had to be placed in a perfect row onto a little sheet of cardboard that holds them. The pin manufacturer was a time-consuming business.

00:18:42 Speaker_10
A worker on his own who did all of those steps, one after another, would only be able to make about 20 pins per day. But the management of the factory figured out how to speed things up.

00:18:52 Speaker_10
They broke the work up so that each employee only did one or two steps over and over again. It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher, a scholar who later became known as the father of economics, Adam Smith.

00:19:08 Speaker_10
Smith began his famous book, The Wealth of Nations, with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized that the factory's assembly line didn't just allow production to go a little faster.

00:19:19 Speaker_10
On the day he visited, 10 workers were able to make 12 pounds of pins, so 48,000 in total. That's a rate that's 50 times faster than the traditional method.

00:19:30 Speaker_10
By splitting up the complex task, Smith argued, management could create way, way, way more pins at a much, much, much lower cost.

00:19:39 Speaker_10
And that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply, and they might even think of new ways to use pins since they were now so cheap, which might increase the overall market for pins, making the factory even more money.

00:19:52 Speaker_10
In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle of the assembly line, or what he called division of labor. It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing.

00:20:09 Speaker_10
But as psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book, Why We Work, there was a big downside to division of labor, at least for the pinworkers.

00:20:17 Speaker_07
So you're just taking a pliers and straightening wire and handing it off to the next guy. Why would you show up at this job? There's only one possible reason to do this work, and that's for the paycheck.

00:20:29 Speaker_10
The idea that people need to get paid in return for their labor was central to some of Smith's deeper ideas about human nature.

00:20:46 Speaker_07
Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do you get people off their asses? You have to make it worth their while for them to do things. And they will work as hard as you make them work to get the payoff.

00:21:00 Speaker_07
What they do doesn't matter, since they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as you have the incentives right, you can get them to do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line.

00:21:13 Speaker_07
But Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work. So break the work up into as efficient and meaningless chunks as you can so that people can do the same thing over and over and over again as fast as possible.

00:21:26 Speaker_07
And as long as you pay them, they'll do it.

00:21:28 Speaker_10
Smith's view of humans as lazy paycheck seekers pervaded the entire industrial revolution. But it would take more than 100 years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically. And that's where we turn back to... the humble rat.

00:21:46 Speaker_10
17 decades after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, a bunch of rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the scientific veneer they needed.

00:21:55 Speaker_07
My training as a psychologist began in the framework developed by a guy named B.F. Skinner, who at the time was probably the most famous and most influential living psychologist.

00:22:10 Speaker_07
invented the famous Skinner box where you would take a rat and put them in a box and they'd be hungry or thirsty and they'd run down an alley or they'd push on a bar and they'd get food or they'd get water.

00:22:22 Speaker_07
And he thought that by understanding how payoffs influenced the behavior of rats, you would understand what governed all the voluntary behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats. He cared about people.

00:22:40 Speaker_07
But he thought that in this little simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work hard in the workplace because they want a paycheck or a bonus or a promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation is we do things to get things.

00:22:56 Speaker_07
This is very much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of the Industrial Revolution.

00:23:03 Speaker_10
Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the scientific validation they needed.

00:23:08 Speaker_10
His rats provided proof that organisms are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find work to be inherently worth doing. Or fun.

00:23:21 Speaker_10
Which means, if you want to get people to work, you gotta give them a reward. But Berry argues that there's a problem with this people-are-so-lazy-you-gotta-pay-them view. The problem is, it's flat out wrong.

00:23:33 Speaker_07
People won't work if they don't get paid and they need to make enough money to support themselves and their family but once that's done that's not really what motivates people what motivates people is they want to be working on something that matters

00:23:48 Speaker_07
which for most of the time means has an impact on the lives of other people, not curing cancer impact. It could be a small impact. They want work that engages them, that forces them to think, to be active.

00:24:03 Speaker_07
They want work that's varied, not the same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging. And all those things make jobs good, given a constant pay.

00:24:14 Speaker_10
These sorts of intrinsic rewards—feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative—they make work worth doing.

00:24:21 Speaker_10
And allowing workers to experience these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck.

00:24:29 Speaker_10
Because a growing body of research shows that if you want good work done, you might want to try making your employees' jobs a little happier.

00:24:37 Speaker_07
You want people who show up in the office every day because they want to be in the office every day and who leave every day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because of what they did.

00:24:47 Speaker_10
But if that's the case, why do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement? Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason, according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:25:00 Speaker_10
They're working with the same wrong theory of human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago. That people are lazy, and that money is the only way to motivate them.

00:25:10 Speaker_07
So you create a world in which Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning, engagement, autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated.

00:25:22 Speaker_07
And then you look at, you point to people working in this world and you say, see, I told you, people just do it for the pay.

00:25:28 Speaker_10
And as Skinner showed, rewards do work.

00:25:31 Speaker_10
People will do mind-numbing jobs like sticking heads on pins over and over and over, but they won't do it because of the normal human motivations, for meaning or passion or any of the important things that make us want to get up in the morning.

00:25:45 Speaker_10
And that worries Barry. The pin factory division of labor still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs. From boring data entry work, to tedious telephone sales, to the workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers over and over and over.

00:25:59 Speaker_07
Essentially, you've created a Skinner box. You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.

00:26:10 Speaker_10
Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled.

00:26:16 Speaker_10
They're now also filled with the sorts of carrots and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to clock their every second with clients.

00:26:26 Speaker_10
HMOs that regulate doctors' interactions with patients. Lots and lots of jobs are starting to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically designed to treat us like Skinner's rodents.

00:26:37 Speaker_10
The biggest irony of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work, you inadvertently make people more miserable. And that means you get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers.

00:26:49 Speaker_10
Removing meaning can jeopardize a business's profits.

00:26:53 Speaker_07
And it makes you wonder why it is that people who want to make money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is put into creating workplaces where people want to be.

00:27:11 Speaker_10
The good news, though, is that there is another path to follow.

00:27:14 Speaker_07
You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make people feel trusted and important in the work that they do.

00:27:23 Speaker_10
And that's why I want to turn back to Marty. I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of reasonably unattractive work.

00:27:29 Speaker_08
We get calls a lot for just to pick up a dead animal or something. And some of that can be pretty, uh, not very pleasant.

00:27:36 Speaker_10
In fact, when Marty first got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external rewards that many of us use to pick a new career.

00:27:43 Speaker_08
I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper and I saw an ad, pest control, company vehicle take, that was really cool to me. I was like 20 years old and they're going to give me a company vehicle to take home. Wow.

00:27:54 Speaker_10
But if you ask Marty what he loves about this career 40 years later, that company car has little to do with it.

00:28:01 Speaker_08
I just love the variety. I love that you never know where you're going to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday, I was taking a possum off of a roof. I don't know how it got up on a roof. It's, I don't know. It's just, it's fun.

00:28:11 Speaker_10
When Marty gets talking about what he loves about his job, you're in for a really long conversation, because pest control gives him lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows us makes his job worth doing, like variety and mental challenge.

00:28:26 Speaker_08
It's about solving problems, more or less. I remember chasing a bat out of one of the libraries, actually, here at Yale.

00:28:32 Speaker_09
Oh, really?

00:28:33 Speaker_08
And it was rather difficult. We had to bring an extension ladder in and go all the way up to the top of the ladder with a net, and it flew away. And it just went into a vent and never was heard from again.

00:28:44 Speaker_08
You just never know what you're going to get one day to the next.

00:28:47 Speaker_10
Marty's job also gives him a sense of meaning. Beyond just working through creative solutions to problems, he also gets to help some very scared people.

00:28:56 Speaker_08
I had a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of bed until it was solved.

00:29:07 Speaker_08
So going there and solving something like that really, yeah, you know, it makes you feel good. I get a lot of thank yous from the kids.

00:29:14 Speaker_10
Marty also gets to help his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about requiring his services in the first place.

00:29:21 Speaker_08
I try to explain to them that it can happen to anybody. People get bugs, people get cockroaches, the cleanest environments. It calms them down a bit, calms their fears, and they're less embarrassed.

00:29:33 Speaker_09
Do you think you'd do it if they didn't pay you?

00:29:34 Speaker_08
I mean, helping people, yeah, because, you know, a neighbor or something that comes over, hey, I have a bee's nest or something like that. And you've had the, you know, the experience and taking care of it.

00:29:43 Speaker_08
Or how do I get rid of the squirrels in my attic? Or, yeah, I think I'd still do it. There's really no other job like it. It's such a unique position, meeting different people, different problems. Every day is different.

00:29:53 Speaker_08
I do feel grateful and lucky that I'm doing this.

00:29:57 Speaker_10
Human beings aren't lab rats in a Skinner box. We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety, challenge, and having a positive impact on other people's lives.

00:30:08 Speaker_10
These are the things that get workers like Marty out of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that a lot of us don't experience the same joy that Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys.

00:30:22 Speaker_10
There are evidence-based strategies you can use to enrich your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll learn about all those strategies when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

00:30:38 Speaker_04
This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. So we are, we're sitting in what?

00:30:45 Speaker_03
We're sitting in a 1988 BMW 325is. And describe the way in which it's been modified. It has no interior. That's where it begins. Not even a steering wheel, as far as I can tell.

00:30:58 Speaker_03
Yeah, right now there's no steering wheel, although I can fix that in a second. And what's the appeal of a late 80s BMW 325?

00:31:07 Speaker_03
Well, it's almost like the perfection of a recipe that BMW began in the 60s, which is to take, you know, a really beautifully made inline six engine, rear wheel drive, and just like an incredibly balanced and fun to drive car. Yeah. Yeah.

00:31:23 Speaker_03
Let me give a little sneak peek. Oh, I need to connect the battery. The battery's disconnected. Wait, the battery's in the back of it. The battery's actually under the rear seat. Oh, I see.

00:31:37 Speaker_03
So it has an absolutely perfect balance between front and rear way. Exactly, yeah. So, yes, turn it on. Let's hear it.

00:31:48 Speaker_12
Oh, yes.

00:31:56 Speaker_02
And this is your first BMW? My second.

00:31:59 Speaker_13
Oh no, Lucas, you can't say that. Wait, what was your second? What was your first?

00:32:04 Speaker_03
It was a 1989 535i. Oh, that's right. But you owned that with a bunch of other people. Yeah, yeah. So this is my first. My first, you know, sole BMW. Solely owned. Solely owned BMW.

00:32:18 Speaker_04
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00:32:38 Speaker_04
With innovative technology, intelligent driver assistance systems, and bold design inside and out, the 3 Series makes every journey unforgettable. Learn more at bmwusa.com.

00:32:58 Speaker_10
Many people have questions about how to improve levels of happiness. And there are a lot of different ways. Happiness is unique to each individual. But living a healthy lifestyle is one sure way of increasing happiness.

00:33:10 Speaker_10
And a good place to start is with your oral health. Just a few small changes to your oral care routine, such as changing your toothpaste to Colgate Total, can lead to beneficial changes in your oral health.

00:33:21 Speaker_10
Colgate Total helps stop oral health problems like gingivitis and cavities before they start. Before they start is an important part because preventing oral health problems is a lot easier than treating them.

00:33:33 Speaker_10
So for a happier, healthier you, use Colgate Total and actively help prevent oral health problems like gingivitis and cavities. You'll be happy you did. Be dentist ready and get Colgate Total at shop.colgate.com slash total.

00:33:47 Speaker_10
Spending time with your pets is one of the quickest ways to feel better on a tough day. Research shows that just being around our pets has a whole host of happiness benefits. Our furry friends can help reduce stress and anxiety.

00:33:59 Speaker_10
They give us a sense of purpose and some much needed social connection. Pets and their unconditional love can help us feel better even in the toughest of times. And that's why I'm proud to support Purina and the amazing Purple Leash Project.

00:34:12 Speaker_10
Purina started the Purple Leash Project to eliminate one of the many barriers domestic abuse survivors face, a lack of pet-friendly domestic violence shelters.

00:34:21 Speaker_10
One in three women and one in four men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, and nearly half of survivors delay leaving because they can't bring their pets with them.

00:34:30 Speaker_10
Through the Purple Leash Project, Purina is helping to create more pet-friendly domestic violence shelters across the country, so abuse survivors and their pets can escape and heal together. Visit purina.com slash purple to get involved.

00:34:50 Speaker_10
Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands or sports or political causes. Amy Ryzneski found herself drawn to something very different, a topic she turned over and over in her young mind.

00:35:02 Speaker_00
It has taken me a really long time to figure out why it's sort of weird for a teenager to become interested in something like this. What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled?

00:35:11 Speaker_10
Well, she looked around at the people in her life, people in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and she saw a vivid and troubling divide.

00:35:20 Speaker_00
Seeing people who were working incredibly hard, but feeling at the end of the day kind of maybe empty, maybe not too strong a word about what it all meant, versus people who felt like they bounded out of work every day to come home, feeling as though they had done something that really mattered and they had done it well and it had changed people's lives.

00:35:41 Speaker_00
And the thing that's been, for me, the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing. And I think that's a very cool puzzle to try to unpack and think about.

00:35:53 Speaker_10
Figuring that puzzle out brought Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at the School of Management.

00:35:58 Speaker_00
There's a whole research literature that analyzes kind of what's a good job and what's a bad job. And it just looks at the job, like what is it that the person's doing?

00:36:06 Speaker_00
And as psychologists, we knew there might be actually more going on here in terms of how people really experience this work and think about this work.

00:36:15 Speaker_10
Research back in the 1980s had shown that people tend to take one of three orientations towards their work. They either think of it as a job, a career, or a calling.

00:36:24 Speaker_00
So people who view their work primarily as a job see the work as a means to a financial end. People who view their work with a career orientation see the work as primarily a means to advance within the field or the work or the occupation they're in.

00:36:39 Speaker_00
It's a stepping stone to the next thing that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on the work itself.

00:36:53 Speaker_00
They see the work as an end in itself.

00:36:56 Speaker_00
These are people who, again, if they hit the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel like it's a contribution that they would be more likely to want to stay involved in it.

00:37:06 Speaker_00
And interestingly, they see the work, regardless of what the job is, as contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make it a better place.

00:37:14 Speaker_10
But the question that fascinated Amy was how a person comes to consider their work a calling. You might think the way to test this question would be to study professionals that we typically think of as well-respected.

00:37:26 Speaker_10
Surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing. But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work orientations develop in seemingly not so great jobs.

00:37:38 Speaker_00
We were really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean in hospitals, so hospital custodial staff.

00:37:46 Speaker_10
The duties of a hospital janitor are easy to sum up. Mop the floors, sweep up, wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage bins filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff.

00:37:57 Speaker_10
These sorts of positions don't require much previous experience or formal education. Becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the typical person thought of this work.

00:38:11 Speaker_10
She was interested in how the cleaning staff themselves described their roles. So she just asked a group of hospital workers, How skilled do you think your job is?

00:38:19 Speaker_00
It's a simple question, except it yielded two really different answers. We had one set of participants who said it's not very skilled at all. And we had another set of participants who reported the work was really quite skilled.

00:38:31 Speaker_10
Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested two kinds of staff members, ones with different duties. Maybe one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles, but that turned out not to be the case.

00:38:43 Speaker_10
Nothing about the structure of their job explained this difference. So Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled were generally dissatisfied with their jobs.

00:38:53 Speaker_10
They were part of that two-thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work. But the staff members who saw their job as requiring skill absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly.

00:39:07 Speaker_00
They were meant to be kind of wafting in and out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean. They were instructed to not interact with patients. And what we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts of patient care and

00:39:21 Speaker_00
attentiveness to what was happening with patients and their families, what it was people might need. They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and saw and described what it was that they were doing there as helping patients to heal.

00:39:36 Speaker_10
Amy calls this technique job crafting, the art of redesigning the specific work you do to match your personal strengths and values and thus amplify the sense of meaning you get from your job.

00:39:48 Speaker_10
One of Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor who worked on a unit caring for coma patients, people who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of a miracle.

00:40:00 Speaker_10
That staff member did the usual duties, mopping and tidying, but she also did one additional task that wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no one had told her to do.

00:40:10 Speaker_00
She would take the artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this unit and switch it around to just sort of mix things up. Even though these patients were not conscious, she hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment,

00:40:23 Speaker_00
that even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something as it was a change that could help promote their healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.

00:40:33 Speaker_10
Another janitor Amy encountered was assigned to a particularly depressing set of duties. She had to clean up after patients on the cancer ward.

00:40:42 Speaker_00
Given that chemotherapy makes people very sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member who, again, remember by the structure of the job, not really supposed to be interacting with patients.

00:40:53 Speaker_00
You're just supposed to go and clean things up. Instead, turn this into an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients. Because imagine you're an adult, you've just been sick, you know, all over yourself and all over the floor.

00:41:07 Speaker_00
It's embarrassing. Now somebody has to come clean this up. You feel awful, right? This is not a good moment. And so this cleaning staff member would show up and say, I want to thank you for getting sick. I have a car. I have car payments to make.

00:41:22 Speaker_00
The more you get sick, the more job security I have.

00:41:26 Speaker_00
And so you have someone who's now laughing in the context of this awful situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone who has gotten not any training in patient care or patient interaction, but who has taken it upon herself to think about how can I still do the cleanup, still do the work that's required of me, but do it in a way that's transformative of the relationships that she has with her patients.

00:41:49 Speaker_10
Getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that job crafting can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work.

00:41:57 Speaker_10
She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged with their jobs probably feel that way in part because they too job craft.

00:42:05 Speaker_00
I think this happens all the time. It happens in all kinds of jobs. But I think it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where people don't have permission to do it or they're not encouraged to do it.

00:42:15 Speaker_00
They might actually be forbidden from doing it.

00:42:18 Speaker_00
We'd all be better off if we just granted people more autonomy to bring their strengths into the work that they're doing while trusting them that they will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to do for the organization.

00:42:30 Speaker_10
Now that Amy has answered the question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted to address a more practical question.

00:42:36 Speaker_00
How can we get more people to job craft? Are there interventions that can be done that can help people connect more deeply with what it is that makes their work meaningful?

00:42:46 Speaker_00
Not just by thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the job, still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the organization for accomplishing in the work.

00:42:54 Speaker_00
but do it in such a way that it's tapping the things that they care most about and the ways in which they most want to contribute.

00:43:00 Speaker_10
It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore the tasks you were hired to do.

00:43:06 Speaker_00
Job crafting isn't deciding, you know, I'd really love to be the company guitarist, so I'm just going to bring my guitar in and play. And I think everybody will appreciate that because I'm being my best, you know, my best self.

00:43:18 Speaker_10
The other barrier to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like Adam Smith watching those pin makers, your manager might still fall for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the only way to get the job done.

00:43:29 Speaker_00
I sometimes hear from managers who feel very nervous about this because it means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees to do this. It would be a mess.

00:43:38 Speaker_00
People would be freestyling and off-roading and doing things that would be really problematic in the organization.

00:43:45 Speaker_00
And my response to that is, well, actually, if this is how you see it, what I can tell you is they're already job crafting because this is happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you. And so you have a choice.

00:43:57 Speaker_00
Is this something that you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you?

00:44:01 Speaker_00
Or you want to continue to sort of drive this underground with employees who will still take the degrees of freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more of the kind of identity they want to enact in the work in any way they can and how they're doing the work.

00:44:17 Speaker_10
While I'm certainly not praying that my house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites, or roaches, I do enjoy Marty's infrequent visits.

00:44:27 Speaker_10
His job is to set up traps and put down poison, but I now realize that he does all the things that Amy studies in her job crafting work. He genuinely enjoys the puzzles that pests bring.

00:44:38 Speaker_10
He concentrates on the people who need his help, and he works quickly and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors, but if Exterminator's had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it.

00:44:50 Speaker_10
Sure, he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who need his help. I asked Marty if during the 40 years in this job, he's ever daydreamed about doing something else.

00:45:03 Speaker_10
Becoming a cop or a firefighter, maybe.

00:45:05 Speaker_08
I've thought about it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back to this and I do, yeah, I do feel grateful.

00:45:12 Speaker_10
If you really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if you're not even making a living wage, then you should quit as soon as you can and search for something better.

00:45:24 Speaker_10
But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your daily work, then give job crafting a try. Because that dream job that you fantasize about, it doesn't really exist.

00:45:34 Speaker_10
the research shows that any job can turn into a calling if you bring the right attitude. And maybe a few science-backed tips from the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

00:45:52 Speaker_04
This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History, looking for a ride that turns every drive into an exciting adventure. Picture this, it's a Tuesday morning. You could take the usual route, or you could take the ultimate route.

00:46:05 Speaker_04
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00:46:17 Speaker_04
Because why just get from A to B when you can do it with unparalleled style and flair? Unleash the passion for driving. Get behind the wheel of a BMW today. BMW, the ultimate driving machine. Learn more at BMWUSA.com.

00:46:34 Speaker_01
For many of us, the holiday season means more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more of your personal information in more places you can't control.

00:46:44 Speaker_01
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00:46:51 Speaker_01
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00:47:03 Speaker_01
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00:47:19 Speaker_01
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00:47:38 Speaker_01
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00:47:41 Speaker_10
Here's to the season. From hanging ornaments and matching pajamas, to building gingerbread houses with extra icing, and staying up late to wrap gifts and watch movies. These traditions make the holidays truly special.

00:47:54 Speaker_10
And through it all, the Chinette brand is there to share in the joy. With the Chinette Crystal Collection, holiday tables are perfectly coordinated, allowing for elegance with less cleanup, so everyone can focus on what really matters.

00:48:07 Speaker_10
Here's to the traditions that bring us together year after year. Here's to us, all of us. Find a local retailer at mychinette.com.