The Meaning of Work

We have traveled so far that we have forgotten why we set out.

• Kahlil Gibran

Set aside the seemingly perverse 996 (the Big Four laugh: we’re on 007) and simply consider the working hours of an ordinary person—40 hours a week (though most people probably work more than that). Start a career in your early twenties and retire at sixty, and your career will total roughly 80,000 hours. That is an enormous stretch of time, far longer than any other activity in your life, such as the time you spend with family. And yet it passes so quickly: when you drag your tired body home each day, one ten-thousandth of your career has flowed away like water, gone forever. I wonder whether you, too, might sigh, “It passes on like this, never ceasing day or night.”

So we need to look carefully for the meaning of work.

Looking back over the first ten years of my own career, work has meant, for me, everything from a piece of “hukou” to the “five sons passing the imperial exam,” from “starting a business” to “creating a better environment for the next generation.” In the end, it comes down to a few layers of meaning:

(1) Social status: “hukou.”

(2) Family happiness: “five sons passing the imperial exam,” “for the next generation.”

(3) Self-realization: “entrepreneurship.”

Beyond these, for many people (myself included), the meaning of work also includes:

(5) Personal growth: opportunities to learn, and continuous self-discovery and self-awakening.

(6) Power/influence: possessing and being able to project power and influence outward.

(7) Social contribution: being able to help those who need help.

(8) A sense of “togetherness”: feeling the warmth of an organization and one’s own sense of participation.

And so on. I won’t enumerate them all.

Some people hope that their company will provide them with the meaning of work, and there is nothing wrong with that. Those great companies in their respective periods of rapid growth—Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, NetScreen, and others—also gave their employees a sense of meaning through the values they accumulated and the tremendous opportunities for growth they offered. Doing the same thing, “make it easy to do business anywhere” feels more meaningful and more motivating than “we want to become the most profitable company.”

But the meaning a company provides is, after all, universal. It is aimed at every employee, not “customized” for each individual. And the opportunities a company offers grow fewer as its own growth slows or even stagnates, as headcount swells, and as politics becomes more pervasive. So we need to find a meaning of work that we recognize deep in our own hearts. Only then can we awaken our passion—only then can we, as Gates put it, “Wake up every day with a feeling of passion for the difference technology will make in people’s life!” That works for him; it gives him a shot in the arm, because it was his lifelong pursuit and vision, and it gave his daily work momentum. But if you simply copy those words, they will likely do nothing for you, because deep down this is not what you expect from work or what you envision for the future.

I once met a young woman at a foot massage parlor whose hands were covered in calluses. I was very curious how long one had to work—from one pair of feet to the next, cycle after cycle—before calluses could reach that scale, so I struck up a conversation. She was twenty-six or twenty-seven and had been in the trade for nearly seven years. Her hometown was near the Huangshan scenic area, and her dream was to take over a small shop there, greet visitors day after day, and support her family. She said she had saved almost enough money, had already picked out a storefront, and would end her life in Beijing and return home in about half a year. I asked how much she had saved, how much she earned a month, and how much she got per foot massage. She said she had saved nearly 400,000 yuan, earned six to eight thousand a month, and made 40 to 70 per session. The shop did good business, she said: six or seven customers a day on average, and on weekends she was often busy until midnight. So she worked day after day, essentially without a day off all month, rubbing perhaps nearly ten thousand pairs of feet, until she finally reached the day when she could realize herself.

So the motivation for work comes from within—from actively assigning work a meaning of one’s own—and it lasts far longer. It will not surge and plunge with the ups and downs of a company or the comings and goings of colleagues.