A fun, good, nice job

One way to think about our work is its 3 spheres of motivation.

I call it "fun, good, and nice."

• Fun: Intrinsic motivation, how we feel about doing the work itself
• Good: Impact, how our work positively affects others and the world
• Nice: Returns, how our work indirectly benefits us

I love thinking about these things, and in particular, figuring out how to measure them.

Clear measurements can also illustrate how challenging it can be to find really motivating work for many of us.

Fun work: you don't have to work another day in your life

There's a saying that goes, "Find work you love, and you won't have to work another day in your life."

Of course, finding work you love is easier said than done for many of us.

The other part is clarifying "loving what part of work, exactly?"

The challenge is that we tend to think about the impact of motivation as intrinsic motivation. When doing impactful work, it's hard to self-assess whether you really like the work.

If your job is saving babies from the hands of sadistic torturers, it can feel pretty motivating even if the work itself is quite mind-numbing or, worse, annoying.

One way to understand the dimension of intrinsic motivation of work is to ask yourself: If you made exactly this much money without having to work at this at all, and your work had absolutely no impact on anybody, including yourself or your loved ones, would you still do this every day the same exact way?

Intrinsic motivation is easy to find because humans are naturally curious and entertained by challenges. The hard part is finding work that fully encompasses intrinsic motivation while also having impact and rewards.

Common examples of intrinsic motivating jobs are music, writing, programming, handcrafts, coaching, traveling, etc. You'll often find people pursuing intrinsic motivating work as a hobby.

My wife loves assembling jigsaw puzzles, and she'll frequently do a 1,000 jigsaw puzzle over the course of the day, while listening to some podcasts, when she has some free time.

The problem is that we don't have enough real-state to frame all jigsaw puzzles around the house, so they are often assembled, and then immediately torn apart – sometimes on the very same day.

She does jigsaw puzzles because they're fun.

That's the type of intrinsic motivation one should have – as absent of external results as possible. Dan Ariely talks about the difference in motivation at assembling toy robots when you put them on a box vs when you immediately disassemble them, for example, even if they were both told they'd be disassembled.

The participants in the second condition were promised the same amount of money per Bionicle, so they had the same financial incentive. But this time, as soon as they finished building a Bionicle and started working on the next one, we began disassembling their completed Bionicle. Right before their eyes. Once we finished undoing their work, we placed the parts back in the box.

The first group built their Bionicles in what we called the “meaningful” condition, so called because they were allowed to feel that they had completed their work satisfactorily. We called the second condition the “Sisyphic” condition [..] Those in the Sisyphic condition managed to build an average of seven Bionicles — four fewer than those in the “meaningful” condition.

Ariely, Dan. Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (TED Books) (p. 19). Simon & Schuster/ TED. Kindle Edition.

My suggested way to think about intrinsic motivation for your work is to outline what percentage of your time you'd spend doing the exact same thing if your work didn't have any impact or returns:

If your work didn't have any impact or rewards, you'd still do it:

A: 100%+ of the time.

B: 75%-99% of the time.

C: 0%-75% of the time

For example, if you are a writer and your current book contract got canceled and you knew you couldn't self publish, how much time would you still spend writing it?

As we can see, it's hard to separate impact from our motivation for work, so let's talk about impact now.

Good work: You're making a real difference

Most times when you or somebody else says "my work is meaningful" this is what they mean: they're looking for work that makes a difference out there in the world.

Ideally, one that positively affects others.

This is what I call Personal Impact: the way our day-to-day work affects other people in the world. How the conversations, words, bricks, and bytes we move around change people's lives for the better.

Most work done as a job in a company impacts other people. The whole point of doing the work is that it matters, after all.

The hard question is, "How much does your work matter, exactly?"

The way I like to think about impact at work is this:

1) Find the average value of your company's work to people

2) Multiply it by how many people you impact in a year

3) Divide by how many people work with you at your company

This is easier said than done, and easier for B2C than B2B companies, but here's an example:

If you work at a pen company that sells people pens, you'd figure out your impact this way:

1) How much do people who use it value my pens? Say $2.

2) How many people use my pens in a year? Say, 5,000.

3) How many people work with me building pens? Say, 10 people.

Your Personal Impact: $2 * 5,000 / 10 = $1,000 / year.

Of course this is a very monetary way to think about impact, and you can think about impact other ways if you'd like, but financial impact works particularly well when thinking about our jobs.

If you work on helping the poor or others who can't afford your company's services, you can always come up with a figure that isn't your price, but rather your value. The idea is measuring impact, not revenue, after all.

Our personal income varies a lot, but one way to think about personal impact is related to our personal income. If you made $100,000 / year, for example, you'd grade your impact as follows.

The personal impact you have on people in a year is:

A: $1,000,000+ of personal impact value.

B: $100,000-$1,000,000 of personal impact value.

C: <$100,000 of personal impact value.

Your figures don't have to be exactly these (though I think these are good benchmarks), and maybe it's too hard to calculate your personal impact at your current job.

But, as I said, I like the challenge of trying to make things our value and people affected quantifiable, and I think this is a nice way to do it.

In Michael Greger's book "How Not to Die," he talks about impact as a motivation for his work, and in particular about the importance of reach leverage: how many people are affected by his work, and why he chose to write books and create content for the internet instead of practice medicine in a clinic.

In the clinic, I could reach hundreds; on the road, thousands. But this life-or-death information needed to reach millions. [..] I can now reach more people while working from home in my pajamas than I ever could when I was traveling the world.

Now a self-sustaining nonprofit organization itself, NutritionFacts has more than a thousand bite-sized videos on nearly every conceivable nutrition topic, and I post new videos and articles every day. Everything on the website is free for all, for all time. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships. It’s just a labor of love.

Greger MD, Michael; Stone, Gene. How Not to Die . Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.

Similarly, Sam Harris discusses his decision to focus on podcasts instead of writing books in his last book "Making Sense," which is a transcript of his podcasts:

And yet, creating the Making Sense podcast has consumed most of my professional energy in recent years. The reasons for this are disconcertingly simple: I will reach more people in forty-eight hours with my next podcast than I will reach in a decade with all of my books. And the results are instantaneous: instead of waiting a year for a book to be published, I can release a podcast the moment it’s finished.

Harris, Sam. Making Sense . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

While calculating impact can be tricky, calculating your rewards can sometimes be quite straightforward:

Just answer the question: what's in it for you?

Nice work: You're really raking it in

I've coached many people, mentees and employees alike, in finding their next job or career opportunity.

They always, always, care about their new compensation.

Don't get me wrong: for many people, comp is not the most important part of a job, and above I think I made a good case that a fun and good job is also really valuable – you must also like the work itself, and the impact you'll have while doing it.

But 99.9% of people aren't financially independent, and their compensation has a tangible quality of life impact on them and their loved ones. Not only that, but comp is also a quantifiable measure people will use to understand how valuable they are to the company.

The great Bill Campbell in Trillion Dollar Coach, quoted by Eric Schmidt and others, clarifies that money is not just about being financially secure but also about feeling valued.

MONEY’S NOT ABOUT MONEY

Bill helped advise us on compensation issues at Google for many years, and he always advocated generosity. He understood something about compensation that many people do not: the money isn’t always about the money. For sure, everyone needs to be paid a fair salary that affords them a good lifestyle. For a great many people, the money is about the money.

But it’s also about something else. Compensation isn’t just about the economic value of the money; it’s about the emotional value. It’s a signaling device for recognition, respect, and status, and it ties people strongly to the goals of the company. Bill knew that everyone is human and needs to be appreciated, including people who are already financially secure. This is why the superstar athlete who is worth tens or hundreds of millions pushes for that next huge contract. It’s not for the money; it’s for the love.

Schmidt, Eric; Rosenberg, Jonathan; Eagle, Alan. Trillion Dollar Coach (p. 66). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

From an indirect extrinsinc motivation perspective, there are also other rewards besides monetary ones you can count from your job: opportunities, skills, etc. In many ways, these will apply not only to increasing future income, but also work that is more intrinsically motivating and impactful.

But in any case, a precise way to measure deserts is just to measure your precise rewards. And that is, usually, your income from the work:

The rewards I get from my work in a year are:

A: $400,000+ of income and value.

B: $100,000-$400,000 of income and value.

C: <$100,000 of income and value.

It's hard to make it into the top 1% of income in the US, $400k+ a year, through salary income alone. This is an employee income bracket for a select few tech startup employees (usually in sales), big tech company employees, surgeons and anesthesiologists, corporate lawyers, and investment bankers.

Which brings up an important point: the importance of choosing well.

Not every job will allow you to maximize your motivations

Some jobs have low intrinsic motivation. Some are low-impact. Some are low-income.

Nothing you can do about it other than not pick them if that's important for you.

No matter what brackets you define for your A, B, and Cs to rate how fun, good, and nice the jobs are, not every job, in every career, will have the potential to be an AAA.

Instead, you have to choose and make trade-offs.

I've worked at startups for a significant amount of time now, and I've interviewed many people leaving big companies. A common refrain was "I want to make an impact" alongside "I know a tech startup won't pay as much as I was making at Big Tech Company."

Trade-offs.

For me, these are the most fun optimization problems: ones where you're trying to find which parameter weighs the most, where an increase here can mean a decrease there, etc.

And it also can create a guiding light: What would be a AAA job for you?

What would be a AAA job for you?

The bar for a AAA job, one that's maximally fun, good, and nice, would be extremely high. But it's interesting to think about.

Let's go over the scorecards again so you can rate your current job and then what is a potential AAA job:

• Fun – A: 100%+, B: 75%-99%, C: <75% of time doing with no reward or impact.
• Good – A: $1M+, B: $100k+, C: <$100k of personal impact.
• Nice – A: $400k+, B: $100k+, C: <$100k of income.

Under these criteria, an AAA job would:

• Fun: Be something you'd do even if it didn't have any impact or rewards for 100%+ of the time you currently spend on it
• Good: Have $1M of impact once you find the average value per person of your work, multiply it by the number of people affected, and divide by the coworkers who helped you
• Nice: Pay $400k+ a year, the top 1% of income in the US

It sounds pretty unlikely, but it's fun to think about: if you had an AAA job, what would it be? (if you have one, then I'd love to hear about it!)

But most likely, even with lower standards for A, B and C, you'll be choosing a job or career track that trades off an ABC for a BBB or a CBA.

So the guidelines for these are simple: When thinking about your job, or your next job and career move, and evaluating motivation, I encourage you to think:

How fun, good, and nice is this job? Which one of fun, good, and nice are you currently optimizing for?