What if a good life isn't just about happiness or purpose, but also about the richness of the experience? This is Andrew Soren and today on Meaningful Work Matters, I'm joined by Shige Oishi, professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, whose research has helped redefine what it means to live and to work well. In this episode, we dive into Shige's groundbreaking concept of psychological richness alongside meaning and happiness.
He thinks it's the missing ingredient to our well being portfolio. Shige shows how unexpected experiences, curiosity and even some discomfort can add depth to our journeys. We explore how jobs that offer creativity, autonomy and freedom can fill our cup, and how organizations can design roles and environments that encourage exploration and play. Chihei also shares how the arts, storytelling,
and even a good metaphor can enrich our perspectives. So join us for a thought provoking conversation that might make you excited to bring a little more dark chocolate into work. Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host Andrew Soren, founder of eudaimonic By Design. On this podcast we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities, and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of.
Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of meaningful work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful, and supports everyone's well being. Subscribe or follow us now and let's make Meaningful Work matter. Shigeoishi, it is wonderful to have you on Meaningful Work Matters.
I am such a huge fan of your work and it is such an honor to be able to have this conversation with you exploring one of my favorite constructs to have emerged over the last few years, the idea of psychological richness. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Maybe we can just start this conversation off by by you sharing with folks a little bit about who you are, what you'd like for them to know about you, as well as what makes your work meaningful or perhaps in this
context, psychologically rich. I'm a professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. I studied my PhD back in 1995 with Edina. So I've been studying happiness for over now 30 years and when I had my faculty position in 2000 at the University of Minnesota, one of my first student, Mike Stiga really wanted to do meaning in life and I discouraged him from doing it because happiness was already very difficult construct to measure and meaning
seems to be even more complicated and Abstract. But he was very persistent and he was. Yeah, you seem that you failed. You failed to persuade. Yeah, I failed to persuade. Yeah. I'm not very persuasive. But he was great. I mean, he was persistent. He did his groundwork and then he published his essentially dissertation as the 2006 paper. And now it's cited probably like over 6,000 times. So I started, you know, studying meaning in life around 2000 and
now around 2015. So that was the summer when I realized, oh my gosh, I've been studying happiness for 20 years and what have we learned? And, you know, we thought the biggest questions and biggest debate in the area was this hedonic versus eudaimonic well being. Which one is more important? There are lots of evidence suggesting eudaimonic well being seems to be more predictive of outcome
measures. At the same time, some people say these two things are quite highly correlated, so maybe not really distinguishable. And some people say, well, stop arguing. Which is more important because, like, anyway, both are important. So it felt like repeating nature versus nurture debate, which was really, really contentious in the 1980s and 1990s in psychology. And I asked myself also the questions like, am I happy? And my answer was, yes, I'm happy with my life. I have,
you know, I was full professor already at that time. My wife seems to love me and, you know, things like that, and, you know, do I find my life to be meaningful? And my answer was yes too, that, you know, I. I've been teaching this huge class, Intro to Social Psychology. Initially it was 150 students. It became 350 student class and then eventually became 500 students. So students
seem to love that class. And, you know, at the time, my kids were still small and I played catches with them and, you know, try to help them in terms of their baseball skills and things like that. So I felt my life was meaningful. But at the same time, when I asked the question of do I feel like my life is full? Is this life complete? And my answer was no, I could not feel that way. And I thought it might be just me.
So when the semester started, I asked my graduate students, postdoc undergraduate students, what do you think if somebody says, this person is happy and this person finds their life to be meaningful, does this person, this person's life is complete, full? And half of them say, of course, what else do you want? Don't be so greedy, right? I mean, if you have happiness, if you have meaning, that seems like a full, complete life. At the same time,
the other half Said, well, maybe not, maybe something is missing. So we systematically started looking at what kind of, you know, good life, what we think are ideal might be missing from the current conceptualization of, you know, hedonic and eudaimonic well being. And in the end the features that came up again and again was things like adventureless life because the literature really shows that relationship stability is really critical for happiness.
Of course, my advisor Edina talked about have a famous chapter entitled Happiness is a frequency, not intensity of positive emotions. So you want to hang out with your best friend, your partner, your family, loved one, essentially just frequently. And that's a way to, you know, maintain your happiness and enhance your happiness. And then the meaning was very similar. Like many people find their meanings in their relationships and raising children, taking care of other people, helping out others.
So these are of course like very, very important factors. But at the same time, when you focus on this stable factor or commitment to one or two things, then it becomes very difficult to deviate from this focus and go bey beyond the comfort zone. So we wanted to capture some good life that is not necessarily just happiness and meaning, but perhaps a little bit more exploratory, going beyond comfort zone, maybe some challenges, difficulty here and there, more of the journey rather than
the outcome. And in the end we thought, wow, this sounds like experiential richness. You know, you're rich in terms of your life experiences, you know, stories. But then we thought if we say experiential richness, then some people, like we talked about Brunet in the elegance of Hedgehog, who is a concierge person and who is limited in their finance and so forth. But she has tremendously rich in her life through literature, through art, through films
and things like that. So in the end we came up with the label psychological richness, which seems to capture both sort of the firsthand experiences, but also sort of more subtle inner, you know, interior experiences. Thank you. Good setting the stage for this conversation. So we have kind of hedonic well being, which is largely about pleasure. We have Yuda well being, which many people just kind of reduce into
a sense of meaning and purpose. And now we have this third perspective which is psychological richness which you're introducing. And in fact those three dimensions, that's the name of a book that you've just released that's called Life in three Dimensions, which if anybody is interested in these ideas, I highly encourage you go check out. It's fantastic. We'll of course link to it in our show notes.
There's also great Academic and scientific articles that Shige and team have written that we can also link to that explores some of the science around all of this. But, but from the book there's a metaphor that you use pretty early on to be able to describe this, this psychological richness which really resonated with me, which was just the way that one thinks about chocolate. So maybe you can help us unpack what
psychological richness is by talking about chocolate. Sure. I, I think that the happiness comes from the pleasantness and sense of familiarity. So we have, we have great expectations about the chocolate. Right. So you know, everyday chocolates like you know, you eat and Halloween and so forth, like it, it's pleasurable, it gives you great sense of joy and happiness. But at the same time that experience is, is pretty singular, right? It's all sweet.
I, I cannot really afford the dark chocolate that much. But occasionally, right, when somebody serve expensive European dark chocolate, you realize oh, this is not sweet, this is much bitter. Sometimes it's salty, sometimes it's like there's different kinds of flavor and sensations. And so that's a little bit closer to psychological richness because it is something about unexpectedness, something about the diversity of experiences. Instead of sweet, just singular emotions and experience.
This one just has a temporal changes. Initially it's a little bit bitter than I expected and then becomes sweet. And then, oh wait a minute, there's a salt as well. And then what is this? Some like iron. What, what's that? Right. These curiosity wonder so that really riches experiences. So I think that's the metaphor for real life. I mean some events are so wonderful and pleasant. Just going to Disney World, you know, land at Disney
World or something like that. Right. It's a very pleasant experience. Maybe I don't do this, but all inclusive, like luxury, you know, vacations, right. Like you just show up and then they have a plan to entertain you and then you just relax and sit back and then just essentially have maximum of pleasure and minimum of displeasure and uncomfort and discomfort.
On the other hand, my trips tend to be like random backpack trips where like I don't have any hotel reservations and then just you get there and try to find some accommodations and so forth. Which is sometimes great, but a lot of time it's not great. But some people say this is a type 2 fun that is that it's not fun when you're experiencing but later on you can, you can, you know, talk about it and very interesting
unusual experiences. So I think that the psychological rich vacation for instance is more like the Dark chocolate. Whereas the luxury all inclusive vacation might be a little bit more like the typical sweet chocolate. Thank you. Based on some of the research that you and your colleagues have been doing over the last few years, why should we care about psychological richness? That's a great question. So happiness at exactly the same problem, right? Like people want to be happy, but are
there any benefits to be happy? And then Edina Laura King and Sonia Lieborsky have wonderful meta analysis showing that there are lots of positive outcomes, such as citizenship behaviors in the workplace. They're healthier, they tend to make more money, your bosses and colleagues tend to like you. Similarly, the meaning of same question was asked and essentially there are many benefits like that. So the same question is a very fair question. Are there any benefit for being or
pursuing psychological richness? So this research, our research is still very early stage and I remind you that Ed Dina's first happiness paper was published in 1984. And this meta analysis about the outcome came about 20 years later, 2005. So I think it will take another 20 years or so to really document whether there is actually very, very important desirable outcome. But we already have gathered some preliminary evidence.
For instance, we can ask this question, what kind of students are taking tough classes, challenging classes as opposed to easy a classes? Happy people do that. Those people who lead the meaningful life do that. Or psychological rich people. Among college students, we have evidence that again and again it's those students who pursue and who are leading psychological rich life are the ones who actually take these
challenging classes for the sake of learning. So if the important outcome is sort of the maximization of learning as opposed to maximization of your positive outcome or grades, then I think the psychological richness seems to have one positive outcome. Another study we did was I think in general, people think curiosity is a good thing. We should lead the intellectually curious life, because in the end, who will be a wise person? Wisdom is, I think, a prize and
at the end of the life, who will have it? And essentially those people who are curious and learned a lot about different kinds of way of life and so forth tend to become a wise person. All right, so we did some experiments where we manipulate having people write about why is it so important to be happy? What's so awful about not being happy? Vs why meaning in life is so important? And also afterward we ask, what's so awful about not
having meaning in life? And then the third condition was why is it so important to have psychologically rich, interesting life? And then we ask, what's so awful about it. And then there was an additional control where they just wrote about the typical day. Then we give this behavioral task where we measure curiosity. This task was developed by other cognitive psychologists, by the way. So questions. There are 15 questions like this. Who was the only U.S. president who had patent option
is you can skip. If you're not interested in. You can go to the next question. If you know already the answer, you can just hit the. I know the answer. And then if you're curious, you can, you can hit the wait button. But that comes with the cost. It has 10 seconds to 30 seconds. Wait, randomize. Really annoying. It goes 10, nine, you know, so when you do 15 questions like this, right, Behaviorally, actually curious people are worried, willing to wait. Whereas those who are not intellectually
curious just skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. And this is random assignment. Essentially 47 to 49% of them of the trial happiness, meaning and control condition, they wait. On the other hand, in the psych rich condition, the percentage goes up to 57%. So just purely randomly assigning people to think about what's the benefit of psychological rich life, what's so awful about not having it as opposed to happiness or meaning or typical day increased
people's curiosity. And also we have correlational data to suggest that already that those who say their life is psychologically rich, when we do this exact same task, they do wait for more Christians than those people who are less psychological rich and happiness slightly negatively correlated and the meaning is not correlated there. I think that there's some really interesting parallels to the workplace. Obviously we're talking about a podcast that's mostly focused on the workplace.
And I think that there's some really interesting. Well, there's some interesting research that you've done around pay scale research and its implications for job satisfaction, which probably is kind of a useful thing to throw in here now. So tell us about some of that research. Yeah, so the pay scale data
are amazing. I mean, I didn't collect this data, but like millions and millions of people essentially just, just rate their job, how satisfied they are with their job and how much they get paid and also how, how much meaning they find in their job. Then they aggregate across specific occupation. So essentially they, they give us the data showing that, well, you know, percent of firefighters are satisfied with their job and 85% of them find their job to be meaningful
and things like that. And it's interesting when you look at the rankings, actually, the people who just work on the number and risk estimate, they are surprisingly satisfied with their job data. Scientists Are quite satisfied with their job too. On the other hand, social workers, police officers, those people, teachers, they are not satisfied with their job that much. But what's interesting is when you look at the meaning, they find the degree to which
they find their job to be meaningful. Complete reverse occur. So the, the people who do actually or data science, they say no, their jobs are not that meaningful. On the other hand, teachers, police officers, social workers, of course they say very, very meaningful. So when you evaluate your job, then you can evaluate in two dimensions. One, how much happiness do you get? Or how much meaning do you get?
And if you want to maximize happiness, or this case job satisfaction, then the number one predictor was essentially salary. When you get paid well, I think get paid well to the type of job you do, then I think you can be quite satisfied. At the same time, when you look at the meaning, the pay doesn't predict their meaning that
much. So that is really important. I mean, we all know that if you want to make a difference in the world, you do something like teacher or police officers or social workers, essentially you're just helping others. That's the occupation that maximize meaning in life. But then interesting thing is that you can look at the writer, editor, art director. And I was really surprised that they are low on both job satisfaction and meaning.
In terms of job satisfaction, essentially artists or art director, editors and writers, their job satisfaction is as low as somebody who works in funeral home. But, but funeral people have a tremendous sense of meaning, right? Because they are helping these people who are mourning reduce their pain. So if there are only two dimensions, then you might say, oh, you're editor, you're not satisfied with your job, you're not finding meaning in your job.
Maybe you should consider switching to the funeral home director or something like that. But we wouldn't, we wouldn't, of course. The reason I think is that these people have tremendous amount of freedom, tremendous sense of creativity, self expression in their day to day job. Just that the pay scale hasn't really measured how interesting they find their job to be or how creative can you be in your job. And that's that I think the third dimension, the psychological richness
dimension of the job. And I need to talk to the pay scale people to add those questions. And then we can really see what kind of occupations are high on psychological richness. And my guess is that the writers and the art directors and you know, editors and those people finally have one dimension which they score high, I think. And then that's why they are sticking with their job, right? I find it so interesting. My background is in the arts. I worked in the
nonprofit art sector before I got into banking. So I got both of those. I got. I got. I got both exposures in my early career history. And there's so much about what you're describing that really, really resonates. I mean, there are certainly, within the context of the arts, so many jobs that are quite meaningful, but a lot of the times actually not that meaningful, especially when you're going through the slog of not necessarily creating.
It can be really, really frustrating. And it's certainly not a job where people feel deeply satisfied from a decency perspective or just from fundamen, equity or security or any of those things. However, those jobs really are jobs where freedom, creativity, autonomy, there's like a lack of confinement, maybe that's the best way that I can say it. The capacity to be able to explore, which is so liberating that you couldn't rip people away from even if you tried. Yeah, I mean, and those people
really appreciate the art itself. So I think just surrounded by art or literature or, or music, something like that inspire them is worth keeping despite relatively low level of meaning and satisfaction. I think that's great. Okay, so we know that again, these notions of freedom and innovation, creativity, autonomy, adventurousness are going to be important as criteria in
jobs that are going to have psychological richness. There's something else that you talk about in the book that I thought quite provocative, which is kind of the relationship between simplicity and complexity. And you talked about it even with the chocolate. Right. When you think about that in terms of a job task perspective, you know, job tasks that are simple, predictable, repeatable versus job tasks that are filled with complexity and intrigue
tell us more. So it is interesting that Samantha Heintzelman and Laura King found that the people who have routines tend to find their life to be meaningful. And they even have experiments where they do some drawing task which is more routinized versus just random drawing, then essentially more structured, habitual way of drawing and path, makes you feel like your life is more coherent and meaningful.
So obviously, even the simple task, if it becomes sort of a good way, rhythmic and good routines, then I think it gives you a sense of meaning. So that's fine. But at the same time, many jobs are so simple that repetition really ruins immediately you get bored. And boredom is really, really terrible on all three dimensions of life. So in our study, in our experiments, we manipulated the specialization. So some jobs are very, very specialized. Other jobs are not so
specialized. So, you know, I Ask Universal Virginia students. Just imagine like you got this ideal job, you wanted to get in this big consulting firm, right? And then they okay, great. I like to imagine that, right? But in this firm, you are specializing, you are working in a large team, and then you are essentially executing the same kind of task every day. What kind of life do you think you are leading every day? The other condition, we say, okay, exactly the same thing,
ideal job. You got a job in a big consulting firm. But this job require you to be a little bit of the generalist. You have to do a lot of things on this project. You're sort of on your own on this project. And as a generalist, what kind of day and life you think you're leading. So we do that and then we ask, how happy do you think with your life? Meaningful. And psychos, you're rich. And interestingly, the specialized people say, oh, I think I'll be happy in
the part of the big team. Meaning was not different. But in terms of psychological richness, generalists say, yeah, my life would be a lot more interesting. Less cliche, less boredom, more psychological richness. Not only that, in the subsequent study after this imagine specialist versus imagined generalist task, we also gave this behavioral curiosity task. Exactly. Same result happened. Essentially when they think about themselves as a generalist,
they're more curious. On the other hand, when they think about themselves as a specialist, they lose their curiosity. And I think this is really true. When you have to be specialized, you have to really know what is relevant and what is irrelevant. And your job is essentially paying attention to the relevant information and ignore irrelevant information. On the other hand, if you're a generalist, you never really know what could become
important and relevant. Right? That's why I think people are more open and more curious and more exploratory in the mind and motivation. So it is interesting. It's very difficult to change job descriptions, right. What you do. But I think even if your job is extremely specialized, I think you can essentially try to just tweak your routine a little bit. Deviate from your routine. Even the commute, you can just change it a
little bit less efficient way. Maybe stop at some galleries, Goodwill stores, or if you're taking train, just get off at the one station before and explore the station you never explore. So I think there are ways to enrich your life, even if your job itself is very repetitive and specialized. And my case, you know, when I have to give a lecture in a different building. After writing this book, I decided to just take a different route every day and then you discover something new a little bit.
I mean, these are the little things that you can do. Although in general it is very difficult to go beyond the task you're given. Sure, of course. I mean, as I'm listening to you describe some of these criteria, what makes for psychologically rich work experience or what might create a
psychologically rich work experience. One of the things I think a lot about in this generalist mentality is a big drive, I would say over the last 10, 15 years in big organizations, especially to move away from deeply specialized teams into
what are described as more agile teams. Teams, these kind of teams of generalists who come together to tackle problems and all come with different perspectives and are being kind of dropped into a specific context for two or three week sprints where they're kind of really working hard on something and then kind of step away. This is also a way that a lot of engineering teams operate. And it feels like this seems like a way of thinking about work
that is much more psychologically rich. Yeah. And also probably more creative as well, that you just try to think about it just beyond, you know, routine sort of way of thinking. It also makes me think that just the work of being an entrepreneur or potentially an intrapreneur in an organization, those people are likely going to be seeking more psychological richness, or at least be in a context where they'll find more psychological richness. And if you have a podcast,
this. Is a different way of going and doing some backpacking around the world. I gotta say, it makes me wonder, should we be trying to assess people's propensity to psychological richness as we think about different roles that we have in organizations? I think it's a good idea, and I think they already do. I mean, they give a lot of personality inventories in the organizations, and so probably they know that, you know, who is open to experiences and who is not so open
to new experiences. And psychological richness is best predicted by openness to experiences. So certainly if you have somebody who are open, then I think they are much more likely to enjoy the generalist type job. Whereas those people who are low in openness experiences, probably they want to get trained in a specialized area and they don't want
to do it too much beyond that. So there are some individual differences in terms of who likes to explore and go beyond sort of the professional boundaries and who is not really interested in going to beyond. And they could be very good in both ways. So just organization needs both type of people who's willing to go do different things and learn something new. And in general, of course, everybody should
learn something new, but. But if you don't like it, then maybe you can find some very, very skilled, specialized area. Do you think that there's downsides of having too much psychological richness? Yeah. So I think just like happiness and somebody who tried to maximize happiness or too much happiness, probably there is some downside. And we have a paper in 2007 sort of talking about optimal level of happiness and the
meaning. I don't know really whether there's too much meaning, but probably there is a downside to the meaning just for the sake of having meaning. Oftentimes people find some meaning in weird places. Not weird, but a place like terrorist organizations or cult sometimes and maybe some cases you're hurting some out group members more than helping in group members. Likewise, I think the psychological richness,
maybe there's a such thing as too much richness. And if you think about environments that are really, really rich, right. I mean, here we're talking about novelty and stimulations and things like that. I love Earth, so I love going to, you know, metropolitan museums in New York City and in place like that. But frankly, right. Met is just overwhelming, right? I mean, it's just so much
stuff. So I learned that it was, it was for me, just too much richness experience there that after 30 minutes of just going through the ancient Greek and Roman area, I was just depleted. I had to just sort of, you know, go to cafeteria, sit down and just recharge. And I think that's true. So when I lived in New York City, I often just go one section, a few galleries, just for one hour or one and a half hours or something like that. So really, maximumly I can observe and
relax as opposed to just check this, check that. Go, go, go, go, go. So, so I, I think there is a such thing as psychological too much richness. But at the same time, I have to say that we tend to have this familiality bias that we tend not to explore. So many studies show how conservative we are in terms of the mindset of exploration. We just explore a little bit and then just say, okay, this was enough. So I think we have to be aware that our tendency
is a little bit too conservative. So we should just try to push ourselves to go out and do more things at the same time. Some environment is hard, a little bit too much. When I've heard you present in, in the past about psychological richness, you've used the example of Anthony Bourdain as, as an Example of somebody who made it his mission in life, you know, to pursue. Right. The. The tastes unknown. Right. Like to really. To really do that. And of course, you know, Anthony Bourdin
is somebody who. Who died by suicide. I feel like many artists are constantly pursuing various forms of psy. Richness and are also miserable in different kinds of ways. What do you think the relationship between psychological richness
and mental health or mental illnesses? Yeah. So I think that there are people where like Anthony Bourdain at the end, I think he might taught that his life is psychologically rich, but at the same time I think he couldn't find the meaning or coherence or he didn't feel that his experiences was probably adding up.
And then the important part of the psychological richness to me is that just like material wealth and material richness is accumulation of the assets and money and so forth, we are talking about accumulation of the experiences and stories and so forth. So we have to cherish, we have to remember and you know, we have to essentially add them up. And unless you feel like these experiences are adding up, I think you do not feel the sense of richness.
And some of the artists and also some of the sensation seekers, essentially they go out around the world, experience a lot of things, but what's happening to them is that essentially they don't stop and reflect upon what they did enough, therefore, essentially instead of just experiencing, but after a week or so they go back to the bottom line, like essentially the baseline, therefore, or even deprivation. So they have to get back to the stimulated sensation area to experience something
new. So I think that is the problem with the mental health issue, that even if you're experiencing a lot of new things, unless you're accumulating, psychologically speaking, you don't feel well. So that's the very, very subjective part of the entire good life. Right. The happiness meaning also. Right. I mean, one of the economists I admire most, essentially same thing,
ended his life. And it was so puzzling to many of us because he was so successful professionally, he was clearly loved by family and colleagues and students and so forth. But the subjectively something was missing, something wasn't adding up, something wasn't. He didn't see a clear point of his contribution the way he envisioned. Perhaps even Tolstoy, right after writing War and Peace, he had this crisis that like that he cannot find the meaning and a point of
his life. So some of the mental health issue becomes very subjective evaluation of what you have accomplished. Right. And to some extent I think you have to feel Good about what you have done. And, you know, natural disaster, it's terrible difficult for some people. It's just horrendous experiences that essentially just prompt them to end their lives at the same time. Majority of us survive natural disaster stronger and feel
like we grew out of that experience. So these are, I think, all very subjective personal issues that for some people, they can find and then make sense of the experience and then they add up to the meaningfulness or richness or the happiness. But for some, it is very difficult to process the experience to, to see this from the positive end. And when you cannot see it positively, then it's not a good life, no matter how diverse and from the third person perspective, admirable life
is. I'll go back to the title of your book in terms of a life in three Dimensions. I guess what I hear you articulating is it's probably not good enough to just be high on just one of any of those three things. But a genuinely good life is a life where there's psychological richness. There's also meaning in that psychological richness. And you feel good ideally while you're doing those things. That combination is the thing to aim for,
not just one. Yeah, definitely. I mean, my motivation to write this book was that there are a lot of people who don't find their life to be meaningful or happy. Still they have a chance for at least the psychological richness dimension. But at the same time, even if you're happy, even if you find your life to be meaningful, I think that the richness can even help your life to be fuller because these are not mutually exclusive. And you know, Oliver Sacks, I mean, he was depressed during college,
so clearly he wasn't happy. But then he experienced a lot of different things. And then in the end, he found that, you know, love of his life. So he became happy in the end. He always, I think, found his work to be meaningful. And he touched so many people's lives through his books and speaking and of course as a medical doctor treating, you know, patients and family. So he, he, he probably had the tremendous sense of meaning in life, but different phase of life.
And then throughout his life, I think he had tremendous adventure and psychological richness. So I think at the end he had all three dimen. But when you look at his college day, it's probably he wasn't particularly happy. He didn't find meaningful. He wasn't exploring much either. So he wasn't high on any dimension either. So I think these things, you can accumulate happiness, you can accumulate meaning. You can accumulate richness in a different life, stage and phase and
so forth. While talking about accumulation of richness, let's talk a little bit about what folks can do if they want to increase the amount of psychological richness that might be in their world. I'm particularly interested. One of the things I so admire about Yoshige is the ways in which you have found to bridge the arts and the sciences and the depth with which you have been able to connect to the arts and humanities.
And so I'm curious to hear kind of your perspective about how the arts and humanities can play a role in cultivating, helping us cultivate psychology, psychological richness in our lives. Yeah, I think, I mean, I love books, I love literature, and Marcel Proust I think, said it most eloquently. Essentially, you know, novelist is so skilled that if you read good novels within the matter of hour or two, you vicariously experience somebody's whole life.
I mean, up and down, variety of emotions and events. In the real life, it takes 10 years, 20 years. Even throughout your life, you never, never, ever able to experience. So the beauty of literature or film and documentaries and art is that you can really, really vicariously experience somebody's life and you can really feel intense emotions and you can really add
the texture to your life. So I think that even if you're not a big traveler doing a lot of things out there, I mean, you can really, really enrich your life through literature and art and some perspective that you'd never seen before, you never had before. I mean, those are the moment of discovery and I think the great joy to me. So to me, just if you already like books, that's great. You're already leading probably psychologically
rich life. And if you are more of the timid person, then sometimes when your friends or family suggest something, some exotic vacations or travel, you should be agreeable and then say, okay, maybe I try, right? Just do it. Sometimes all you have to do is just say yes. Okay, let's try. And even if the experience was horrible, at least you have interesting stories to tell. Let's translate that a little bit into a work environment.
So for folks who want to try to think about how they might job craft their way into a bit more psychological richness, we can do a little bit of back and start brainstorming. So the first thing that I would think of is a stretch assignment or a growth opportunity at work would be an amazing way of being able to cultivate a psychological rich experience. Do something you don't necessarily know how to do force yourself into jumping into a little bit of the unknown.
What else? Say yes to the assignment. That's right. That you may not want to do. I think at work we're so, you know, scheduled, right? Very much, highly scheduled. So I think the playfulness sometimes really is important. And we are, we just are so serious,
you know, that we forget to be playful. And Erik Erickson said it right, that we need to take vacation from our social and economic realities once in a while and we should live in the fantasy world, somewhere between reality and fantasy world. So I think we have to be like a dog chasing the tennis ball or a 5 years old kid, you know, just, just sometimes at work too, just, just try to take, take a break and then think about what, you know, what kind of fun you
can make out of this, this project. You, instead of, you have to do this, you get to do this. And then just be playful, be spontaneous. And you know, sometimes you, you learn something new and discover something new and then you, you really grow. And um, I, I, I think that's that sort of the mindset that yes, efficiency and productivity is very important, but at the same time we shouldn't be obsessed with it. I love the idea
of bringing more playfulness into work. And it also just makes me think there's so many different ways in which you can do that. You have a presentation to give. How could you give that presentation in a different way? Exactly, exactly, exactly. You've got a task that you can do. How can you try that task in a, in a different way, in a more playful way? How could, how could you gamify something? How could you have fun with it? Right, right, right,
exactly. I think people will love you if you do that. It also makes me like going back to the storytelling aspect of it and the power of novels and the power of films and the power of art to tell stories. I feel like one of the things that probably most of us could do better in our work is to explore the stories of our work in different ways. There's some beautiful writing about the idea of a plotment, which is kind of one way that we can find the meaning of our story at work.
But how can you think differently about what that story is? How can you kind of weave in different kinds of psychological crafting, cognitive crafting, thinking about different metaphors that might make your work come to life? I had a manager at one point, Jerry Richman is her name, who knew that I loved cooking and would always kind of help me rethink about my job as different Ways of preparing a meal. I probably hated doing the dishes, but they were a necessary part be also, you know,
the preparation. But even the going and the going, the, the. The going shopping or even looking at recipes, all of those could be different ways of cognitively exploring the adventure that my job represented. And also I think, like, if you've been doing the same job for a while, I think you can just sometimes look back and how. How you were like when you just started, you didn't know anything.
And sometimes, you know, just seeing how much struggle you had, how little skills and knowledge you had, and how much growth you see in yourself, I think that those are the things that makes your story a lot more interesting. You might have not gotten this job then what else you might be doing because of meeting this person. I was able to do this and that. So I think it's a. Storytelling can be true. Happened in the workplace
as well. And think of your career, think of your job as a journey and the stories and the narratives and how you started, what kind of challenge you encounter, how you overcome it, and et cetera, et cetera. So my yes end to that is I know somebody who talks about being a culture detective in the early days of a job. So this to never waste being new in a new job. So every time you go into a new organization,
a new department, a new role, you have the opportunity to. To be literally a stranger in a new land and to use that as an opportunity to hunt and explore and try to be an anthropologist and understand what is the culture of this organization that I have joined and what is confusing that everyone else has just decided is par for the course and how we do things. How can you use that newness to tie into that psychological richness and really be an explorer?
That sounds great. I think that being an anthropologist is a good mindset completely to live it and learn. Yeah, yeah. And maybe that's kind of as a final. A final statement. I'll say one of the other things that Shiki, I think you've done so beautifully in this book is use metaphors. And just the power, I think, of using metaphors in our work, in our life as a way of tapping into psychological richness is in and of itself
a different way of thinking about storytelling. If anybody listening wants to learn more about psychological richness besides your book, is there anything that you would suggest them to look at? I think that psychological review paper 2022 is the most comprehensive academic paper, but other academic papers are very much sort of the more smaller topic. So it's a little bit harder to. Get the big picture and then that's great. So we will link to both the psych review paper and to the book.
Shige, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It was fun. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Meaningful Work Matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if this episode resonated with you, you please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us make this podcast better and reach more listeners. You can connect with me, Andrew Soren on LinkedIn or visit www.eubd.ca
to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making Meaningful Work Work matter. See you next time.