“One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.” Leo Tolstoy.
How many of us can truly say we are living magnificently today? And how many of us can raise a hand to say that we love what we do for a living? I’d hazard a guess the percentage would be relatively low. Recent research finds that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling. If you’ve found your calling you may well be living magnificently. Very few of us are lucky enough to have found that true calling in life.
It’s more likely you set out with some ambition in your early career days and carried on up the work escalator. If that’s you, it’s likely you fall in to the career category – the large, middle part of the sandwich between a calling and having a job. Whether you find yourself in a job or a career there are ways to find more motivation and satisfaction at work. The key is to simply make progress and small wins.
Work is Fundamental to your Esteem
Marketers are no doubt familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Esteem needs are the fourth level in the hierarchy and classified into two categories: (i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g. status, prestige). Esteem is earned mostly through one’s work. Indeed, Tolstoy in War and Peace extols the idea that the quality and meaning of one’s life is mainly derived from day-to-day activities. And we spend a lot of our time undertaking work whether it’s a career or just a job. If you’ve found your ‘calling’ you’re likely to have high esteem and be in your element. So how do you find esteem when your work is perhaps a little more mundane?
The Effectance Motive and Progress Principle
The effectance motive is a basic human need to make things happen i.e. a need for competence, industry, or mastery. This is the need to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. It is a constant presence in our lives whereby we get more pleasure from making progress towards our goals than we do in accomplishing them. For example on a personal level you may have fitness goal such as accomplishing running a marathon. Simply being on the journey to achieve that goal is where the human need is actually met. Not just the completion of the marathon goal in itself. In other words it’s about making progress.
In addition to the effectance motive, the Progress Principle describes the secret behind truly productive people: simply by making progress. If you can make progress of any meaningful work you’re doing, you will perceive your day as positive, which in turn provides a feedback loop for finding meaning and satisfaction at work. Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during your workday, making progress in meaningful work is the single most important thing. And the more frequently you experience that sense of progress, the more likely you are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether you are trying to solve a major client brief or simply produce a high-quality marketing document, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how you feel and perform.
When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. Big wins like a ‘pitch’ success are great—but they are relatively infrequent to the average work day. Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. Just taking small steps forward can evoke outsized positive reactions.
Live Magnificently at Work
What are you waiting for? Just get started on that project or document you’ve been putting off. Prioritise what the big things are that will make a difference to your work. Then just get started. Don’t get caught up in the detail and over thinking it. Instead of aimlessly scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, set aside some time to get going. Just by making a little bit of ordinary, incremental progress, will increase your happiness and esteem during your workday.
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