Defining my best work

Oftentimes, we don't take a step back and think about the implications of our work on society. I think actually as a leader of a company, that's an important role that you just have as well. It’s that classic story, whether it was correct or not, but it was a question of someone at NASA saying to a cleaner, "What's your job?" And the cleaner replying, "I'm helping get a man to the moon." I don't know whether that's true, but I think there's this idea that people seeing their work within the context of a greater goal, greater ambition that contributes next to society.

I think you actually can find good work through any type of work. I think there is a general kind of misconception that good work needs to be in a professional work, being a software engineer or working as a founder or being a revolutionary visionary of a company.

But actually, I think good work can be found through any type of work and to an extent the posture you take towards that work that can make that work good work as well. My father-in-law and mother-in-law, they work at a factory and they don't necessarily feel like this must be fulfilling work, but for them they see their work as a provision towards the family. For them, that's good work. Good work for them is providing things like that. I think actually at times, we can think about good work has to be fulfilling for myself personally, but actually fulfilling to family needs, fulfilling to societal needs. In my mind, those are good work as well. I think my view is that you can think about good work through many lenses, not just self-satisfaction.

The first thing that candidates associate hard work with is long hours. I just don't think that is always the case. If you apply that to burnout, everyone goes, "Oh, well, it's working super hard and getting very burnt out." I think it's actually pretty weakly correlated in my experience with burnout. I think burnout is much more attributable to what the Dostoevsky quote of just, "I'm on an infinite hamster wheel and none of the stuff I'm doing is going anywhere."

There's a difference between happiness and meaning. Happiness is a feeling and it's fleeting. It'll come and it'll go. People that seek happiness in their work will often at some points find themselves disappointed. People that seek meaning in their work, it's a very different kind of a thing. You can suffer through things in order to get to something that's meaningful. And that suffering also has meaning.

An old quote that comes to mind, probably one of the most popular in the world, is, "Be the change you want to see in the world." That's the way to both engage with the world by being the change, but also change the world by being part of it in a certain way. So from this perspective, I'm trying to avoid two extremes. I think one extreme would be to say, "No, the world is as it is. And yes, capitalism, climate change, social inequality, injustices, all of these exist and it’s horrible, but this is how things are and we can't really do anything about it."

So that would be one extreme, but another extreme could be to ignore how the world works today and try to fully demolish it to build a better world tomorrow. This kind of thinking gave us, I think, quite horrible social experiments in the 20th Century. But what I'm trying to do on a personal level with my life and my work is to stay in the middle, to be part of the system, but have as much awareness and clarity on how exactly I'm contributing to it, benefiting from it and how my way of being also changes the entire system for the better.

There was this belief instilled in me that it's very important to have a job. It doesn't necessarily matter what that job is, you wouldn't expect to enjoy your work or your job. It's not something that you would mess around with after hours. Our upbringing, our cultural programming, the beliefs that we have, those are some big mental barriers to doing work that we're going to enjoy, that we're going to find fulfilling because we just don't have maybe an example, or somebody that we've met or talked to that we can model ourselves after.