A Meaningful Life!

So what should our focus be: Work or Life? Do we live to work or do we work to live?

Maybe we need both. Work and Life are integral parts of our existence and hence probably the focus on ‘Work- Life balance’.

But then why do we separate work and life? Are we saying that work has no life and life has no work?

I disagree! Some year’s back I realized that work and life are intertwined and inseperable. Why do I say so? Well, I’ll probably talk about that in a different post.

Let me devote this post to a journey I have been living through over last year. A journey best described as ‘There is more to life than work and life’.

Life is not all about working hard and partying hard/enjoying to the fullest.

But that requires us to first relook at the definition of work and what we expect from it.

We have our own preferences, interests, and aspirations. We look at work as a platform which would provide us/allow us to completely express ourselves or be ourselves. Is that a reasonable expectation? We play a certain role at work and that role may not have the scope for us to do work which we find ‘complete meaning’ in.

Charles Handy talks of an inverse doughnut. We have an inner circle which is our work, but we also have a series of outer circles which represent the other things that we want to do. I like the way he verbalizes it ‘What work would you be willing to do at ‘zero’ cost/salary?”. These ‘zero costed’ set of work would constitute the outer circles of the doughnut and provides significant opportunities for us to do meaningful work and grow.

So there are two questions which we need to ask ourselves:

• At work, what work do I want to do a) beyond my KPI’s?, b)that doesn’t necessarily furthers my career growth?
• Beyond work, what work do I want to do even though I may get zero money for it or maybe to have pay some money out of my pocket to do that work?

We can be nostalgic our past, build for our future, but we can create only in the present. Are we creating enough in the present to feel that we are leading meaningful lives?

As a manager, what we can do is probably sensitize our team members to the question “What all would you want to do for zero salary or non-monetary benefit?”. We may not get an answer straight off but atleast we have got our team members to start thinking about what gives meaning to them.

-

Sourav