In the 1980s, when Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley away from Pepsi to join Apple, he clinched the deal with a single question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Back then, the organization to which people belonged was the dominant driver of whether they found their work meaningful. A sense of purpose came from belonging to a company with a mission that mattered. Selling sugar water was worthless; reinventing computers was worthwhile. But now, where you work is no longer the major source of meaning. And in the next decade, employers will fade even further into the background.
Elementary and secondary education administrators: 93%
Chiropractors: 93%
These jobs have three big things in common, and they debunk three lies about what makes work meaningful.
Lie #1: Meaning comes from where we belong. You don’t need to work for a company like Apple to find meaning. All of the meaningful jobs above are completely untethered to specific organizations. Some of them work at multiple sites: surgeons often split their time between half a dozen different hospitals in a week, and clergy float between different religious institutions. The rest can do the same job anywhere: education directors and administrators can move from one school to another—and chiropractors from one office to another—while the nature of their work stays the same. They identify with occupations, not organizations. As Dan Pink wrote in Free Agent Nation: “Bye, bye, organization guy.”
Lie #2: Meaningful work is knowledge work. You don’t need to be a knowledge worker to find meaning. You might have heard that the industrialized world has shifted from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, but this isn’t actually true. We work in a service economy, and that’s where the meaning lies.