The Work Itself: It’s Not All About the Money

Early in my career, I accepted a promotion that required relocating from my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia to Wichita, Kansas.

I didn’t know a soul in the entire state of Kansas, so there were many nights where I would come home from work late, make myself dinner, and watch whatever sporting event was on TV that night. (It wasn’t quite as depressing as it sounds.)

One night, a college basketball game was playing in the background while I cooked and one player kept drawing my attention to the television.

Incredibly tall and impossibly skinny, this player was singlehandedly dominating the game. The opposing team kept sending waves of defenders at him, but it didn’t matter. He was simply shooting over people with his astonishing wingspan or going around them with his explosive speed.

He looked like an alien sent to earth to take over the the game of basketball.

That player was an 18-year-old freshman named Kevin Durant. He would finish the game with 37 points and 23 rebounds, leading Texas to a win over rival Texas Tech.

Durant has since established himself as one of the greatest basketball players to ever live. He has scored the 14th most points ever in the NBA, won the 2014 MVP award, and won back-to-back championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018.

I have been a fan ever since I was fortunate enough to witness him jump off my television screen that January night more than 15 years ago.

My appreciation of Durant goes beyond his basketball ability. He is also that rare professional athlete who is unafraid to speak his mind and engage with fans, the media, and his critics.

And despite his incredible accomplishments, Durant has plenty of critics. When he joined the Warriors they were already the best team in basketball, so some viewed the move as a questionable way to add championships to his resume. He has since switched teams twice more, most recently to another already-great team, the Phoenix Suns.

But while other people debate the validity of Durant’s championships and argue over his “legacy”, he seems to be focused on . . . playing basketball.

Consider the response Durant gave the writer Logan Murdock recently when asked about “chasing” more championships (emphasis mine):

Us winning a title, that would be amazing. But that’s not the only reason why I play basketball. I want to develop every day and I truly like this activity, you know what I’m saying? I like getting up knowing that I’m going to go play, and that’s really it for me. . . I just simply like the activity.

I have no idea whether or not Durant is familiar with the work of Frederick Herzberg, an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management and a pioneer in motivation theory, but he certainly sounds like someone with a deep understanding of Herzberg’s central thesis.

In the 1950’s, Herzberg interviewed groups of employees to better understand what drove job satisfaction. He asked them two simple sets of questions:

1. Think of a time when you felt especially good about your job. Why did you feel that way?

2. Think of a time when you felt especially bad about your job. Why did you feel that way?

From these interviews Herzberg developed a theory that there are two dimensions to job satisfaction: motivation and hygiene.

Hygiene factors cannot motivate, they can only minimize dissatisfaction. They include things like status, relationships with coworkers, working conditions, and salary. (You read that right, salary is not a motivator for most people—it only demotivates when we feel we aren’t being paid enough.)

True motivators, on the other hand, create real job satisfaction by fulfilling our need for meaning and personal growth. Herzberg identified a handful of these motivators such as: recognition, achievement, responsibility, advancement, and—you guessed it—the work itself.

Most of us can’t choose to play basketball for a living, but we can choose to seek out work we value and actually like doing. This sounds obvious, but most of us don’t do it, gravitating instead to fancy titles, salaries, or shiny offices.

I accepted the job that sent me to Kansas solely for the increased salary and the status I thought the new title would convey.I never once stopped to consider if I would like doing the actual work.

It turns out I didn’t, and I was pretty miserable for the year I spent there.

Whatever work you choose to do, do it for the work itself.

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