What are you hiring your work to do?
Heading back to work after the summer can feel unwelcome. Or it can feel gleeful, like going back to school with fresh supplies and an eagerness to see friends again. For some reason, I doubt the majority of us are jumping into September with such joy.
I’ve been sitting with why that is. And it relates to a question I keep returning to: what role does work play in our lives? And how do we choose to engage with it? When I wrote Sustainable Ambition, I was focused on how we make choices across life and work as individuals. I acknowledged that the external world and structures play a role, but I wasn’t addressing or trying to solve that side of the equation. Since the book’s release and given the state of the world and work, I’ve been digging into the systems and organizations we operate within—reading and researching the history of economics and capitalism, sociology, the history of work itself.
What I’ve learned, to put it simply, is that work is complex. Or to put it in the words of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, it’s a “hard problem.” At the intersection of the individual and the structural, he asks how a society figures out “how to produce the goods and services we need, while providing people with income, sociability, and significance.”
If that’s a hard problem for an entire society to solve, it’s not surprising that it’s a hard one for us, too.
So from my perspective, the tensions we can often feel around our work aren’t evidence that we’re doing anything wrong. The difficulty is in the work itself, and it always has been.
Part of that is because work has never been just one thing. As anthropologist Adam Russell put it in our recent podcast conversation, “work is a suitcase kind of word.” We all say it, but we pack something different inside.
The reality is that we look to work for many things. For hunter-gatherers, work was almost anything that was part of living—gathering water, teaching the children, participating as part of the community. It was never only about survival. Studs Terkel, who spent years talking with ordinary people about their jobs, wrote that work is “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”
Across all the research I’ve done—historical, sociological, and what we know about motivation—I’ve come to five things that we look to work for. Sure, we look to work to sustain our lives. But we also look to it for identity, for meaning and contribution, for belonging, and for resonance or a fair exchange. These aren’t new, modern elements of work; rather they’ve been discussed and debated for thousands of years.
This is why models can fail us. Follow your passion. Do what you love. Find your ikigai at the intersection. They’re useful as guides, but the answer isn’t always simple, nor is the intersection always achievable. What helps is consciously choosing your trade-offs, and knowing the why behind your choice.
I go deeper into Why Choosing Your Work Feels So Hard in Episode 184, my latest solo show. You can listen here.
Of course, we’re not making these choices in a vacuum. We navigate work inside the structures of society and organizations—the economy, our workplaces, and now AI. Those structures are real, and they are not ours to fix on our own.
But they aren’t fixed, either. This is one reason I was so glad to talk with Adam. Through an anthropological lens, he describes the tension between structure—the forces that shape our behavior—and agency, the degrees of freedom we have to act within it. The world of work is always emerging. No one is in charge of it. Which means we can influence it, in our own small ways—not just navigating the structures, but occasionally pushing against them.
Adam and I also go deep on AI, and his counsel on how to engage with it (like: are you at a construction site or at the gym?). It’s a genuinely optimistic conversation and one that offers guidance on how to engage productively through collective intelligence, being an explorer rather than an expert, and being a good human. As Adam frames the opportunity: our vision shouldn’t be focused on humans versus AI, but H > AI—humans made greater with AI at our side.
Episode 183: Adam Russell on Building Better Humans in the Age of AI. You can listen here.
So as you head back to work this fall, the task isn’t to resolve all the tensions around how we might feel about work. Instead, it’s to navigate them consciously—refusing both naïveté and nihilism.
In Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of Work, Richard Donkin writes that if organizations won’t lead the way toward a better work ethic, “then it is up to individuals.” I think he’s right—we need to take up the agency we do have. And I’d add what he adds: that’s because we get one life to live.
Which brings me to the question I’d like to leave you with, because we don’t need our work to do everything for us. My hope is that there’s some ease in knowing what matters most to us and acknowledging the role work serves for us now.
So: what are you hiring your work to do for you this season?
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Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.