As I See It: The Sanctity of Work

by Victor Rozek

Buddhists have great stories. One of my favorites is about a devout monk who was asked what he did before enlightenment? "Chop wood, carry water," he replied. And what did he do after enlightenment? "Chop wood, carry water," he shrugged. I like the story because it speaks to the inevitability of work. From household tasks to career choices, work is the great leveler. Few of us escape work entirely, and although those who do are usually blessed with wealth, they are much poorer for being idle.

Although attitudes toward work shift with changing economic fortunes (there is nothing like a depression to engender gratitude for even the most menial job), the prevailing sentiment is rooted in mythology. Christian mythology suggests that work is a punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience. There they were, happy and apparently idle in the Garden of Eden, but a bite of the apple condemned them to a life of providing for their own needs. Cast out of paradise, the first thing Adam and Eve could have used was a job, not easy to find when you're the only couple on the planet. Although scripture isn't specific on the topic, we can assume Adam and Eve became the first entrepreneurs, both of necessity and by default.

It's ironic, therefore, that so many people find paradise in punishment. Work, particularly creative work, provides many of us with meaning and purpose. We humans have a need to express ourselves, and work is the ultimate self-portrait. How we do our jobs is an unerring reflection of who we are. Performance, therefore, reveals more than just our level of skill; it is a daily display of character. Brian Tracy, business and personal development consultant, advises: "The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think we work for anybody but ourselves."

Work maintains what is and creates what isn't. At its best, the work we choose is a manifestation of our values, our ingenuity, and our imagination. It is life force made visible. When creativity and passion partner with commitment, they forge the finer elements of culture and translate ideas into inventions. Much more so than love, it is work that makes the world go round.

We do, however, have a love/hate relationship to work, and for many millions of peoplework does indeed resemble punishment. It can be a merciless, soul-shriveling drudgery; empty, repetitious, physically depleting, and mentally exhausting. Work without joy is death by a thousand commutes. One hundred and fifty years ago, Dostoevsky described the effects of dispiriting labor: "To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character."

In Dostoevsky's view, being underutilized was worse than torture. Indeed, doing something for years that you don't want to do, something that does not feed the spirit, is, in at least one regard, worse than slavery. A slave has no choice, but a chronically unhappy worker is simultaneously the victim and the perpetrator.

That for so many work is not a conscious choice but something that "happens" to them, is perhaps more than just an indication that they haven't read Dostoevsky. The Industrial Revolution, for all of its remarkable benefits, also produced standardized and interchangeable workers performing an endless assortment of meaningless tasks. The result was the rise of a huge middle class able to amass considerable affluence without an underlying foundation of meaning. The unending requirements of supporting a lifestyle created its own gilded cage, and the disconnect between pay and fulfillment spawned a rash of issues born of discontent. They manifested as a pervasive is-that-all-there-is malaise, which unleashed an increasingly frantic search for happiness. We see the results in addictive behaviors to television and alcohol, and sex, and exercise, and drugs, and maybe even now the Internet. At its worst, work became confused with drudgery, but as Henry Ward Beecher said, "work is not the curse, drudgery is."

So what made chopping wood and carrying water something other than drudgery for a supposedly enlightened monk? One would think an enlightened person would choose more interesting work. Certainly not all work is creative or fulfilling, so how do menial tasks acquire importance? In the monk's case, they became important by virtue of the fact that he did them. And not because he was in any way special, rather because he held a profound reverence for his own life and would not dishonor a moment of it by doing something poorly.

All work is important because it requires an investment of something precious and irreplaceable: time and life energy. We may not always have a practical choice about how we spend our time (there will always be some variant of wood to chop and water to carry), but we can choose our attitude in each moment, and attitude prescribes effort.

Work transcends toil and becomes sacred when we apply what Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, calls "discretionary effort," that which we withhold when we judge a task to be without merit. Discretionary effort is the difference between going through the motions of doing a job and doing it mindfully. Any work can thus become sacred by virtue of the fact that we give our sacred life force to it. In effect, we become the work, much like the ingredients become the pie.

Many years ago, I remember hearing Danny Thomas reminisce about what it was like living through the Great Depression. When two people met each other on the street, he said, the first thing they asked was, "Are you working?" The kind of work made no difference. You were fortunate to have a job, any job, and you performed it to the best of your ability. Certainly fear was a motivation, but there was also a fierce pride, Thomas said, as people brought all of themselves to every task as if their life depended on it, because sometimes it did.

One of the advantages of working for a large company is that you can have an off day and hide in a vast employee pool without calling attention to yourself. Of course, some people hide for years, and others only give minimal effort, never exerting themselves beyond what it necessary to keep their job. Some are angry at the choices they've made and withhold effort as a way to punish their employers, as if their employers were solely responsible for their plight. But in the end, as Brian Tracy said, we all work for ourselves and the question worth pondering is: Knowing what you know about yourself, would you hire you?

The irony, as Ogden Nash put it, is that even if you don't want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work.

In that case, we may as well do it right.