PURSUE PLEASURE
If I am enamored with the articles in old magazines, Cary Hatch is equally enamored with the other half of the editorial-advertisement divide. Hatch owns MDB Communications, an advertising agency based in Washington, DC. Anyone stopping by to visit will immediately have classic jingles ringing in her head, because “I have like 120, 130 advertising icons in my office,” Hatch says. “I’m surrounded by Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Trix Rabbit, all these different things.” She looks around and rattles them off. “I’ve got the Noid from Avoid the Noid. That guy’s 9 feet tall, catty corner to me. There’s the Fruit Loops guy, different kinds of beer icons, Mr. Peanut, the monster from Monster.com, the AFLAC duck, Mr. Clean, Ronald McDonald.” She explains that “the power of branding is making that emotional connection with your audience. There are so many ways to personify a brand. There’s the gecko from Geico. When you can do a personification of a brand, people become emotionally attached to the brand.” She finds that concept fascinating to the point where she has a gigantic Big Boy in the lobby. “Visually, it’s fun,” she says. “It gives everybody a lift.”
But what really gives her a lift is that she loves her work for the work itself. She relishes thinking about an advertising campaign or brand personification and seeing her team pull together to make it take shape. As she’s working at the drafting table, “I’m thinking to myself, I’m putting together ads and they’re going to pay me to do this!” She’s always enjoyed helping people advocate for different things, a passion she can trace back to being president of the Pep Club and a Pom Pom in high school and college. “To get compensation for something you love was like a big epiphany for me,” she says. It’s what makes her long hours possible. It’s what makes her not mind walking around with a new client’s files in her purse for two days because they kept missing each other by phone, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull up the notes on her phone in a convenient way when they managed to connect. As she puts it, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to live for the weekend.”
This is the key insight that successful people have about how they spend their working hours—an insight often missed in stories on great places to work that belabor the countervailing perks of free M&Ms and an onsite gym, and also missed in the curmudgeonly bloviation of those who claim that “You’re not supposed to like it! That’s why they call it work!” Successful people know there isn’t any virtue gained by spending your 40–60 working hours each week doing something that doesn’t buoy your spirits, but that spirits are buoyed by very specific things.
Productivity, we are discovering, is a function of joy. Joy comes not from free M&Ms, but from making progress toward goals that matter to you. For their 2012 book, The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist, analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries kept by teams at 7 organizations. They found that when “inner work life”—defined as the perceptions, emotions, and motivations people express as they go about their workdays—is good, “people are more likely to pay attention to the work itself, become deeply engaged in their team’s project, and hold fast to the goal of doing a great job. When inner work life is bad, people are more likely to get distracted from their work . . . , disengage from their team’s projects, and give up on trying to achieve the goals set before them.” So what creates a great inner work life? Analyzing the diaries, which included ratings of the subject’s mood and motivation, Amabile and Kramer found that the best days were characterized by progress, with 76 percent of the diary entries from the top scoring days featuring small wins, breakthroughs, forward movement on projects, and goal completion. Such progress was far more likely to be evident on the best days than what one might think of as important factors, such as encouragement from a boss. The worst days were highly likely to contain setbacks to that progress—more so than obvious toxins like an insult from a coworker. As Amabile and Kramer write, “making headway on meaningful work brightens inner work life and boosts long-term performance. Real progress triggers positive emotions like satisfaction, gladness, even joy.”
It is this idea of making progress—progress you can see toward a completed and delightful story—that makes illustrating children’s books so satisfying. You can see progress in creating ads that raise the profile of an organization you admire. “We’re doing this thing with the International Spy Museum,” Hatch says. “50 years of Bond villains. Who doesn’t love working on a campaign for the spy museum?” But these obviously fun sorts of work are not the only way one can tap into this mode that makes joy and productivity possible. Amabile and Kramer quote near ecstatic diary entries from a software team called in over a holiday weekend to come up with the data necessary for their organization to settle a lawsuit. Writes Marsha, “Today our entire office worked like a real team again. It was wonderful. We all forgot the current stressful situation and have all worked around the clock to get a big project done. I have been here about 15 hours, but it has been one of the best days I’ve had in months!!” The only thing that matters—evident in those double exclamation points—is that the progress is toward a goal that matters to you.
Ideally, your work naturally lends itself to this sort of progress. You make time for deep work rather than coasting in the easily interrupted shallows. You can see the accomplishment of one step after another. You feel the inherent bliss in the moment when you know that success on something difficult is possible. It is the moment when the proof makes sense, when a pupil grasps the beauty of the novel you’re teaching, or when an interview that pulls a thesis together makes you want to jump up and down.
If you haven’t felt this way in a while, then maybe it’s time to take a few of your work hours and think back to when you last took such pleasure in your work. Think about what you can do to recreate those conditions. There are likely ways to turn the job you have into the job you want, at least for a higher proportion of the day, particularly if you like your organization’s values and people. Small tweaks add up over time. Successful people constantly look at their days to evaluate what brings them pleasure and what does not, and they figure out how they can spend more hours pursuing pleasure and fewer hours doing what they don’t care about. Because while work hours sometimes seem lengthy, they aren’t endless—and life isn’t either. The daily discipline of seeking joy makes astonishing productivity possible, because then work no longer feels like work. It feels, as LeUyen Pham put it, “really, really lovely.”