It’s not important to find a job you love, and that’s okay

Many people are now re-evaluating the importance of work and finding that they are not very willing to spend their most productive years striving to reach the top of the pyramid.

loading

Sometimes work is just work and nothing more. Of course, work should provide at least some meaning to our lives, but you’d be surprised how little that meaning is.

One of the most interesting insights into this comes from a 2009 paper Archives of Internal Medicine Investigating burnout rates among physicians at a large medical center in the U.S. Physicians typically have a great deal of autonomy in how they choose to spend their time, such as caring for patients, conducting research, teaching, or administering.

In the study, they asked doctors to record how much time they spent on what they personally considered meaningful work at work and compared that to their burnout rates. They found that doctors who spent only 20% of their time on meaningful work were much less likely to burn out than doctors who spent less time.

Interestingly, the researchers also found a “ceiling effect,” meaning that even if doctors spent more than 20% of their time on meaningful tasks, the impact on their burnout levels was still the same.

In other words, no matter what type of work you do, you only need to spend about one-fifth of your work time doing something you find meaningful to reap the most benefits.

This dispels the idea that we all need to strive to find a career that will make us feel fulfilled every day when we come to work. Instead, you just need to be aware of the areas in which you derive meaning and make a conscious decision to invest more in them.

If you do that, we’ll all benefit just as much whether you have a job, a career, or a calling. In fact, it’s time to rewrite the original quote. “Find a job you don’t hate,” it should be, “and you’ll still be working a lot of the days of your life.”

Sure, it might not be as sexy, but at least it’s real.

Tim Dugan’s new book, Working in reversenow available. He writes a monthly newsletter called “OUTLET” that offers one useful thing each time, available at timduggan.substack.com

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers breaking news, exclusive reports and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.