Would You Do Work If It Couldn't Be Shared?

00:00:04.700 | Alright, we got another question here from TreeFallingInAForest

00:00:09.700 | who asks, "Would you do your CS researcher writing if you could not share it?"

00:00:16.700 | Probably not. I mean, I think impact is an important property of satisfying a meaningful career.

00:00:25.700 | Knowing that your writing is being read by people, I think, is really valuable and it's fine to prioritize that.

00:00:31.700 | Knowing that your computer science paper is cited and other people are building on it

00:00:36.700 | is a real source of satisfaction and is important.

00:00:39.700 | So I'm not a big believer in this fortune cookie wisdom around careers

00:00:46.700 | that it should just be the thing you would do if no one was watching.

00:00:50.700 | Well, I don't think that actually really holds, right? Because it's way too narrow of a view of what a satisfying career is.

00:00:58.700 | It narrows down to the actual activity that you're doing.

00:01:03.700 | You know, it's, okay, is the activity you're doing in the moment something that feels good or something like this?

00:01:10.700 | And career satisfaction is a much more complicated and rich tapestry.

00:01:14.700 | That's why I talk about it so good they can't ignore you.

00:01:16.700 | Things like connection to other people, impact on the world, mastery,

00:01:21.700 | so having an objective measure of you getting better at something,

00:01:24.700 | these are all part of the tapestry that all weaves together to build a satisfying career.

00:01:28.700 | So I don't think it's useful to try to separate work from all of that and become obsessively activity-focused.

00:01:34.700 | Is the actual activity you're doing, you just enjoy doing the activity and that's the only measure?

00:01:39.700 | I think that's going to be probably way too myopic.

00:01:41.700 | It's why, for example, sports stars obsess so much about their contract size.

00:01:46.700 | Now, let's use this as a quick case study.

00:01:48.700 | Again and again, the casual fan will say, "I don't understand. This player likes it here.

00:01:56.700 | The hometown crowd loves them.

00:01:58.700 | They're being offered more money than they'll ever know what to do with in their life.

00:02:03.700 | So why throw that all away to go somewhere completely new and to get all of the ire of their fans

00:02:09.700 | for a little bit more money on top of an amount of money that they would never know how to spend in all of their life?"

00:02:15.700 | I mean, in other words, what I'm saying is, why, Bryce Harper, why? Come on.

00:02:21.700 | But if you talk to the more serious sports fan, to the athletes themselves, mastery is important.

00:02:27.700 | I mean, what else was going to get someone to that top level in something as competitive as sports

00:02:33.700 | than a real desire to get better and better, to push themselves, to revel in the unambiguous mastery that they have developed?

00:02:43.700 | One of the ways you measure that mastery is the contract size.

00:02:47.700 | And so they care about these epsilons.

00:02:50.700 | Bryce Harper cared about the $330 million that the Phillies were offering versus the $300 million that the Nationals were offering.

00:03:01.700 | And this is exactly the type of conversation with similar numbers I have with my publisher, very similar numbers.

00:03:07.700 | He cared about that difference because $330 million would have been, it was at that point, I believe,

00:03:13.700 | the largest contract that had been given to an individual ballplayer.

00:03:18.700 | Like, that really matters, right? When you're really, the epsilons of mastery, when you're at that level of the game,

00:03:23.700 | at an MVP caliber, that really matters.

00:03:26.700 | If you just think about it the way we do, it's like, "$300 million seems good to me. It doesn't make sense."

00:03:32.700 | So this whole divergence, me excising my baseball demons, is really about getting back to this main point,

00:03:39.700 | which is there's a lot of different attributes that come into making work satisfying,

00:03:42.700 | and some of those attributes include other people, other people recognizing you,

00:03:46.700 | you getting unambiguous indicators of mastery, you make an impact on the world.

00:03:50.700 | That all matters. We can't just think about work in a myopic, activity-focused manner.

00:03:57.700 | We can't just say, "If you would do this when no one's watching, then that's what you're meant to do."

00:04:01.700 | Nonsense. Professional life is complicated, and it's social, and there's community aspects to it,

00:04:07.700 | and there's a lot of interesting, complicated stuff in it.

00:04:10.700 | So that is why Bryce Harper left, and it's why we should care about how many people actually read what we write.

00:04:18.700 | [Music]

Would You Do Work If It Couldn't Be Shared?

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