A Leader’s Search For Meaning

Meaning. Nothing like starting a nice light, friendly blog post with a 50 pound bag of cement. Meaning? Can I pass please. I’ll eat the salad for lunch, I promise just as long as I don’t have to talk about meaning. I know how you feel. Aren’t pay bills, raising a family, staying out of trouble enough? Does it all have to mean something? Well… no actually. No, it doesn’t. But the trouble is that ignoring meaning doesn’t solve the problem either.

What exactly is the problem?

I’m glad you asked. The problem with meaning is motivation. As humans, especially Westernized humans, we are very skilled at working hard. Despite our own head trash and negative self-talk, the facts are we do hard things. The simple fact you are reading this puts you in the category of people who:

1. Read heady things (my blog posts are not eye candy, cartoons aside. )
2. Care about your career and connecting with other people (you are on social media aren’t you? Whether it is LinkedIn, Facebook, or a newsletter.)
3. Have some interest in making a difference.

And it is that third item that is the kicker. We want our work to matter. If you are anything like me, one of the worst things you can find out is that you wasted your time. “You mean I did that for nothing?” The empty feeling that follows that statement often sends me in search of a cold beer. I mean, if I’m going to waste my time, can I at least do it with something I enjoy instead of work?

What makes something meaningful

This past month, my entrepreneurs book club read Viktor E. Frankl famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl zeroed in on the idea that while we love the idea of passion, it is meaning that can carry us through the difficult times. The reason is rather simple. Passion is an emotion, and we all know emotions are fleeting, often uncontrollable things. Dictionary.com gives this first definition for passion:

strong and barely controllable emotion.

Of course, most writers that speak of passion, such as Angela Duckworth in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, prefer the third definition:

an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.

Regardless of what definition you pick, the reality is that passion is still an emotion, and like all emotions, it is subject to ebbs and flows of our amazing emotional engine. Frankl’s point is that meaning can carry your forward when the going is extremely difficult. The reality is that for most of us, the going can be difficult more often than it is pleasurable. As a friend of mine quipped, “you want to find out the difference between passion and meaning, have kids.”

In that joke, comes the clue to what makes something meaningful. Jordan B. Peterson posits in his textbook Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, that responsibility is the gateway to meaning.

Why is that?

Because, when we feel we have the capacity and the responsibility to take action that makes the future better, we perceived that as meaning. Value is another way of saying, “will that situation be better, or worse for me and the people I care about.” Values are an expression of meaning. Acting to move from a negative space to a more positive space is taking responsibility.

Understanding the value of the desirable future and being willing to be responsible for seeing it happen, can give you the energy you need to do the unpleasant and often boring work necessary to make your situation better.

The athlete that knows that only through mind-numbing practice can they achieve the perfection they need to be competitive. This grindy work means they will get better and knowing that gives them the motivation to be responsible for getting it done.

Another formula

Chip Conley in his book Emotional Equations put forward the formula that:

Despair = Suffering — Meaning

This is a very clever mathematical expression of the quote Viktor E. Frankl attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy.

Meaning, not passion, is the lever that balances suffering. In a much more practical way, Mark Manson basically described in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, that pain in fact, can be an essential ingredient in helping us achieve our potential. Quoting the Polish Psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski, who studied survivors of World Word II, Manson observed a strange correlation between suffering and meaning.

Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life… …We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.

The key here is that happiness, or passion, is a trailing indicator, not a leading one. Mark Cuban has been outspoken against encouraging young people to chase their passion. When we find ourselves suffering through tasks like endless workouts, or research, or trying to prevent a trailer from overheating in 115-degree weather in the middle of Arizona’s hot summer, it is the meaning that pulls us through these situations. In my situation, those challenges made me more resilient and yes happier.

That’s great for my personal life, but what about work?

Of course, no one in their right mind would make employees suffer, and we all hope never to see another World War. But we do want to know what the practical application of this idea. How can we help cultivate meaning for our people? Of course, I think it starts with you, then it expands to each member of the team. Greg McKeown had one of the best formulas I have come across for generating meaning in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. The formula uses three questions.

1. What interests you?
2. What do you have some aptitude for?
3. Does it make a difference for people you care about?

The alignment of interest, capability, and impact give us clues how to create meaning in work. In essence, we can back chain from the impact, through aptitude to interest to create an understanding of how we can enhance meaning for our team members.

When I ran the game studio, one of the ways we developed people is we would let them take on a new job with a new game. They wanted to grow, and we wanted to develop from within. However, we basically let them become overwhelmed and watched.

Where they spent the bulk of their time and effort was there, they most wanted to be. This is nearly the exact advice Mark Cuban gave in his blog post titles, “Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort”. We watched what they could not let go of. We would then step in and support them with other team members who were chomping at the bit to pick up the parts they had let fall to the floor. This had the advantage of cultivating an appreciative mindset in the new manager. They came face to face with the reality that they could not do everything, and the letting go happened faster.

The key here was that their interests and aptitudes shaped what was important for them. Being a little older (and more compassionate), I would not do it that way again. However, I would make the effort to align our people with their interests and abilities. The impact came from the team and the game itself. They could see the difference they made.

Summary / Takeaways

If we want to have a positive impact on our teams, not simply our direct reports, we need to find ways to enhance the meaning of people’s work. Meaning is different from passion because it can give us the motivation we need to power through the difficult times. What’s more, the challenges might be exactly what we need to grow and achieve our potential. One way to help people to see the meaning in their work is to empower them with responsibility (we’ll talk more about this in a future article) and make sure they can see how their efforts impact others. As Greg McKeown put it, when our interests, abilities, and impact align, this can fill our need for motivation.

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References

1. Frankl, V. E., Kushner, H. S., & Winslade, W. J. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning (1st edition). Beacon Press.
2. Duckworth, A. (2018). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Reprint edition). Scribner.
3. Peterson, J. B. (2002). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1st edition). Routledge.
4. Conley, C., & Hsieh, T. (2012). Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success (Reprint edition). Atria Books.
5. Manson, M. (2016). The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F\ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life*. Harper.
6. McKeown, G. (2014). Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Virgin Books.
7. Dont Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort | blog maverick. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2021