Working Your Way to Happiness

We were working on our podcast scripts and Ryan needed a cup of coffee, so he headed into the kitchen, and that was when I heard it. I think that's that's pretty close. I think that was it. Ryan emitted the longest, loudest, and most terror filled shriek I've ever heard. Apparently a huge, terrifying rat had run through the kitchen, a rodent that was, at least, according to Ryan's retelling, about the size of a large Great Dane or a

small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's construction outside. A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely high tailed it out of the house, never to be heard from again. But just as I was explaining that we had absolutely nothing to worry about, the creature that I could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse

was back. It raced from the kitchen into the study around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct on the wall. But I wasn't worried, not because the rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for long because at Yale, when these things happen and you need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call Marty gilorin pest control operator. Marty is like the terminator for vermin. Within minutes, he was at my house, armed

with baits and traps galore. I like to get there as soon as I can to help people. Yeah, I don't like to leave, you know, call's waiting too long. And that was kind of an emergency call because it was a rat in a living space. While Ryan continued to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on the floor. He checked for the rat where we last saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty then set his traps like a general deploying his armies.

He strategized about all aspects of the rats moves, like what if the rat retreated here or made a break for it over there. Within minutes, all the traps were down, and almost as soon as Marty left, we heard, oh, I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a lot longer. Marty is a vermin afficionado, one of the most skilled professionals I've ever met, But few people want a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America.

Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and spend their working hours in the company of scary critters that can bite, scratch, and sting. I usually get stung about once a year. Kind of just comes with the territory. But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of person we should emulate if we want to find the

perfect job, or even just to be happier at work. Generally, because, as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong. We think that pay and perks and plush offices are what makes us happy in our careers. But as we'll see, happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying minds realize. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?

What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. What did you want to be when you grew up? I'm going to venture a guest that rat exterminator was pretty far down the list. It was for Marty two. He grew

up with the standard career aspirations. I mean, like every kid, I guess a fireman or a cop or when you're a kid. But Marty never joined the police department or signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted into a number of different jobs, just like restaurant work and security guard and filling vending machines. Things like that. They all paid okay, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with joy when he clocked in every Monday morning, and he

wasn't alone. According to a recent Gallop Pole from twenty eighteen, only about a third of American workers report feeling really engaged with their jobs. Over fifty percent admit feeling actively not engaged, they merely put up with boring work, and nearly twenty percent report hating what they do for a living. I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. I have to go to work. This is not good. It's Monday morning. It's probably not all that surprising, but hating

your job isn't that great for your happiness? Which raises an important question, what actually makes for a happier job? What could make work life better for the nearly one hundred million Americans who feel disengaged on the job. Many of us have a pretty strong intuition here, we'd be happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one LinkedIn survey from twenty fourteen. It found that financial compensation was the top value that most college students look for

when considering a new job opportunity. Compensation was chosen more often than work life balance, having good colleagues, or even career development. And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices, It's also affecting how we choose to live our lives. Generally. Consider the results of one study which has surveyed the values of incoming freshmen for the last half century. In twenty eighteen, more than eighty percent of freshmen said that

being well off financially was really important in life. It was more important than raising a family or developing a meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared to the answers their parents or grandparents gave. The number of students who think big salaries are key has gone

up dramatically since the nineteen sixties. But as our growing intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right, can employers really improve the well being of the nearly two thirds of people who hate their jobs simply by paying them more. When you ask people what would make their lives better or what would make their jobs better, the first thing they point to is my life so good, and if I only made ten percent more, it would

be perfect. This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, an author of the book Why Work People Are Wrong. This is not the case. Money does buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy a lot of happiness. We covered this in an earlier episode called The Unhappy Millionaire, but it's worth repeating here. If you're not making a living wage, more money will

definitely improve your overall well being. But if you currently earn a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, doubling or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super rich

can lead sad and lonely lives. For the most part, doing what you do in order to earn a little bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction, and it can have perverse effects in that if the amount of money you make starts to be the metric you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not and whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the wrong metric. I've seen so many of my Yale students heading exactly this wrong direction. After graduation. They pick a

job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers they kind of know they're going to hate just because it comes with a great paycheck, But they soon end up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs, that feeling of being stuck in a high paying job that you absolutely hate. And that's one of the reasons that professions we often think of as good jobs, the most prestigious ones with the highest salaries think doctor, lawyer,

Wall Street investor. The people who have these prestigious jobs have suicide rates that are one and a half times those of the average population. Higher paychecks are simply not having the positive effect on our mental health that we think. But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction so messed up? How did we come to think of more money as the answer to all our workwoes? And if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better than

what does. To get to the bottom of all these questions, we need to turn back to the very critter we started the show with, right the rat the Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Back in the seventeen hundreds, a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation a pin factory. Now, you might not think pinmaking would require that much innovation. I mean, at first glance, it doesn't

seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really, really simple straight kind. But back in the eighteenth century, creating each pin was tough. It took eighteen individual steps. First, you needed to measure and clip the length of wire, then straighten. After that, you carefully sharpened one end. Once that point was set, you prepared the other end to attach the head, which involved several steps like grinding the

top to make sure it was the right texture. Finally, the pinheads needed to be affixed, and after that they had to be placed in a perfect row onto a little sheet of cardboard that holds them. Pin manufacturer was a time consuming business. A worker on his own who did all of those steps one after another would only be able to make about twenty pins per day. But the management of the factory figured out how to speed

things up. They broke the work up so that each employee only did one or two steps over and over again. It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher, a scholar who later became known as the father of economics. Adam Smith. Smith began his famous book The Wealth of Nations with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized that the factories assembly line didn't just allow production to

go a little faster. On the day he visited, ten workers were able to make twelve pounds of pins, so forty eight thousand in total. That's a rate that's fifty

times faster than the traditional method. By splitting up the complex task, Smith argued, management could create way, way way more pins at a much, much, much lower cost, and that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply, and they might even think of new ways to use pins since they were now so cheap, which might increase the overall market for pins, making the factory even more money.

In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle of the assembly line, or what he called division of labor. It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing. But as psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book Why We Work, there was a big downside to division of labor, at least for the pin workers. So you're just taking appliers and straightening wire and handing off to the next guy.

Why would you show up at this job. There's only one possible reason to do this work, and that's for the paycheck. The idea that people need to get paid in turn for their labor was central to some of Smith's deeper ideas about human nature. His view was that people were basically lazy, and if they didn't have to work, they wouldn't and so the optimal life is lying on a couch eating Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do

you get people off their asses? You have to make it worth their while for them to do things, and they will work as hard as you make them work to get the payoff. What they do doesn't matter, since they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as you have the incentives right, you can get them to do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line, but Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work.

So break the work up into as efficient and meaningless chunks as you can so that people can do the same thing over and over and over again as fast as possible, and as long as you pay them, they'll do it. Smith's view of humans is lazy paychecksy pervaded the entire Industrial Revolution, but it would take more than a hundred years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically, and

that's where we turned back tomble rat. Seventeen decades after the publication of the Wealth of Nations, a bunch of rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the scientific veneer they needed. My training as a psychologist began in the framework developed by a guy named BF Skinner, who at the time was probably the most famous and

most influential living psychologists. Skinner invented the famous Skinner box, where you would take a rat and put them in a box, and they'd be hungry and or thirsty, and they'd run down on an alley, or they'd push on a bar and they'd get food, or they'd get water. And he thought that by understanding how payoffs influenced the behavior of rats, would understand what governed all the voluntary behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats,

He cared about people. But he thought that in this little simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work hard in the workplace because they want a paycheck or bonus or promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation is we do things to get things. This is very much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of the Industrial Revolution. Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the

scientific validation they needed. His rats provided proof that organisms are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find work to be inherently worth doing or fun, which means if you want to get people to work, you got to give him a reward. But Barry argues that there's a problem with this. People are so lazy you got to pay them. View the them is it's flat out wrong.

People won't work if they don't get paid, and they need to make enough money to support themselves in their family. But once that's done, that's not really what motivates people. What motivates people is they want to be working on something that matters, which from most of the time means has an impact on the lives of other people, not curing cancer impact, It could be a small impact. They want work that engages them, that forces them to think, to be active. They want work that's vary, not the

same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging, and all those things make jobs good. Given a constant pay, these sorts of intrinsic rewards, feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative, they make work worth doing and allowing workers to experience these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck, because a growing body of research shows that if you want good work done, you might want to try making your

employees jobs a little happier. You want people who show up in the office every day because they want to be in the office every day, and who leave every day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because of what they did. But if that's the case, why do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement. Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason, according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self

fulfilling prophecy. They're working with the same wrong theory of human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago, that people are lazy and that money is the only way to motivate them. So you create a world in which Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning, engagement autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated. And then you look at you point to people working in this world, and you say, see, I told you. People

just do it for the pay. And as Skinner showed, rewards do work. People will do mind numbing jobs like sticking heads on pins over and over and over. But they won't do it because of the normal human motivations for meaning or passion or any of the important things that make us want to get up in the morning.

And that worries Berry. The pin factory division of labor still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs, from boring data entry work to tedious telephone sales to the workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers over and over and over. Essentially, you've created a Skinner box. You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.

Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled. They are now also filled with the sorts of carrots and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to clock their every second with clients, HMOs that regulate doctors interactions with patients, Lots and lots of jobs are starting to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically

designed to treat us like skinners rodents. The biggest irony of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work, you inadvertently make people more miserable, and that means you get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers. Removing meaning can jeopardize a business's profits, and it makes you wonder why it is that people who want to make money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is

put into creating workplaces where people want to be. The good news, though, is that there is another path to follow. You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make people feel trusted and important in the work that they do. And that's why I want to turn back to Marty. I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of reasonably unattractive work cause aut for just to pick up a daddy animal or something, and some of that can

be pretty not very pleasant. In fact, when Marty first got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external rewards that many of us used to pick a new career. I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper and I saw an ad pest control company vehicle. Take That was really cool to me. I was like, twenty years old, they're going to give me a company vehicle a take on. Wow. But if you ask Marty what he loves about this career forty years later, that company

car has little to do with it. I just love the variety. I love you never know where you're going to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday, I was taking a possum off of a roof. I don't know how it got up on a roof. It's I don't know, it's just it's fun. When Marty gets talking about what he loves about his job, you're in for a really long conversation, because pest control gives him lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows

us makes his job worth doing. Like variety and mental challenge, it's about solving problems more or less. I remember chasing a bat out of one of the libraries. Actually here at Yale, and it was it was rather difficult. We had to bring an extension ladder in and while the way up to the top of the ladder with him that and it flew away and it just went into event and never never was heard from again. You just never know what you're gonna get and one day to

the next. Marty's job also gives him a sense of meaning beyond just working through creative solutions to problems. He also gets to help some very scared people. I had a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of bed until it was solved. So going there and solving something like that really, yeah, you know, it makes you. It makes you feel good. I get a lot of

thank you from the kids. Marty also gets to help his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about requiring his services in the first place. I try to explain to him that any it can happen to anybody. People get bugs, people get cockroaches the cleanest environments. It calms him down a bit, calms their fares and you know, they're less embarrassed. Do you think you do it if

they didn't pay you? I mean helping people? Yeah, because you know a neighbor or something and it comes over, Hey I have a bees and ask or something like that, and you've had the the experience and taking care of it. Or how do I get rid of the squirrels in my attic? Or Yeah, I think I'd still do it. There's really no other job like it. It's such a unique position, meaning different people, different problems. Every day is different. I do feel grateful and lucky that that I'm doing.

Us human beings aren't lab rats in a skinner box. We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety, challenge and having a positive impact on other people's lives. These are the things that get workers like Marty out of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that a lot of us don't experience the same joy that Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys. There are evidence based strategies you can use to enrich

your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll learn about all those strategies when the happy in his lab returns in a moment. Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands, or sports or political causes. Amy Razneski found herself drawn to something very different, a topic she turned over and over in her young mind. It has taken me a really long time to figure out why it's sort of weird for a teenager to become interested in something like this.

What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled? Well, she looked around at the people in her life, people in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and she saw a vivid and troubling divide and seeing people who were working incredibly hard but feeling at the end of the day kind of maybe empty, maybe not too strong a word about what it all meant, Versus people who felt like they bounded out of work every day to come home feeling as though they had done something

that really mattered and they had done it well and had changed people's lives. And the thing that's been for me, the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing. And I think that's a very cool puzzle to trying to unpack and think about figuring that puzzle out. Rot Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at

the School of Management. There's a whole research literature that analyzes kind of what's a good job and what's a bad job, and it just looks at the job like what is the person's doing, And as psychologists, we knew there might be actually more going on here in terms of how people really experience this work and think about this work. Research back in the nineteen eighties had shown that people tend to take one of three orientations towards their work. They either think of it as a job,

a career, or a calling. So people who view their work primarily as a job see the work as a means to a financial end. People who've either worked with a career orientation see the work as primarily a means to advance within the field or the work or the occupy they're in. It's stepping stone to the next thing that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on

the work itself. They see the work as an end in itself. These are people who, again if they hit the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel like it's a contribution that they would be more likely to want to stay involved in it. And interestingly, they see the work, regardless of what the job is, as contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make

it a better place. But the question that fascinated Amy was how a person comes to consider their work a calling. You might think the way to test this question would be to study professionals that we technically think of as well respected surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing. But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work orientations develop and seemingly not so great jobs. We were really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean

in hospital, so hospital custodial staff. The duties of a hospital janitor are easy to sum up. Mop the floors, sweep up wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage, bins filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff. These sorts of physicians don't require much previous experience or a formal education becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the typical person thought of this work. She was interested in

how the cleaning staff themselves describe their rules. So she just asked a group of hospital workers, how skilled do you think your job? Is? Simple question, except it yielded two really different answers. We had one set of participants who said it's not very skilled at all, and we had another set of participants who reported the work was really quite skilled. Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested

two kinds of staff members once with different duties. Maybe one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles, but that turned out not to be the case. Nothing about the structure of their job explained this difference, so Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled were generally dissatisfied with their jobs. They were part of that two thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work. But the staff members who saw their jobs requiring skill

absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly. They were meant to be kind of wafting in and out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean. They were instructed to not interact with patients, and what we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts of patient care and attentiveness to what was happening with patients and their families, what it was people might need.

They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and saw and described what it was that they were doing there as helping patients to heal. Amy calls this technique job crafting, of redesigning the specific work you do to match your personal strengths and values and thus amplify the

sense of meaning you get from your job. One of Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor who worked on a unit caring for coma patients, people who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of a miracle. That staff member did the usual duties mopping and tidying, but she also did one additional task that wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no

one had told her to do. She would take the artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this unit and swish it around to just sort of mix things up. Even though these patients were not conscious. She hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment that even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something, as it was a change that could help promote their healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.

Another janitor, Amy Encountered, was assigned to a particularly depressing set of duties. She had to clean up after patience on the cancer ward. Given that chemotherapy makes people very sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member, who again remember by the structure of the job, not really supposed to be interacting with patients. You're just supposed

to go and clean things up. Instead, turn this into an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients, because imagine you're an adult. You've just been sick all over yourself and all over the floor. It's embarrassing. Now somebody has to club and clean this up. You feel awful, right, this is not a good moment. And so this cleaning staff member would show up and say, I want to thank you for getting sick. I have a car, I have car payments to make. The more you get sick,

the more job security I have. And so you have someone who's now laughing in the context of this awful situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone who has gotten not any training and patient care or patient interaction, but who has taken upon herself to think about, how can I still do the cleanup, still do the work that's required of me, but do it in a

way that's transformative. The relationships that she has with her patients, getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that jobcrafting can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work. She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged with their jobs probably feel that way in part because they too jobcraft I think this happens all the time.

It happens in all kinds of jobs, but I think it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where people don't have permission to do it, or they're not encouraged to do it. They might actually be forbidden from doing it. We can all be better off if we just granted people more autonomy to bring their strength into the work that they're doing, while trusting them that they will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to

do for the organization. Now that Amy has answered the question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted to address a more practical question, how can we get

more people to jobcraft? Are there interventions that can be done that can help people connect more deeply with what it is that makes their work meaningful, not just by thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the job still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the organization for accomplishing in the work, but do it in such a way that it's tapping the things that they care most about, in the ways in which they most

want to contribute. It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore the task because you were hired to do. Job crafting isn't deciding you know, I'd really love to be the company guitarist, So I'm just gonna bring my guitar in and play, and I think everybody will appreciate that because I'm being my best my best self. The other barrier

to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like Adam Smith watching those pinmakers, your manager might still fall for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the only way to get the job done. I sometimes hear from managers who feel very nervous about this because it means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees to do this. It would be a mess. You know, people would be you know, freestyling and off roading or you know, doing things that would be really problematic in

the organization. And my response to that is, well, actually, if this is how you see it, what I can tell you is they're already job crafting, because this is happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you.

And so you have a choice. Is this something that you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you, or you want to continue to sort of drive this underground with employees who will still take the degrees of freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more of the kind of identity they want to enact in the work in any way they can and how they're doing the work. While I'm certainly not praying that my house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites,

or roaches. I do enjoy Marty's and frequent visits. His job is to set up trapped and put down poison, but I now realize that he does all the things that Amy studies in her job, crafting work. He genuinely enjoys the puzzles that has spring he and traits on the people who need his help, and he works quickly and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors, but if exterminators had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it.

Sure he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who need his help. I asked Marty if during the forty years in this job, he's ever daydreamed about doing something else, becoming a cop or a firefighter. Maybe I've thought about it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back

to this, and yeah, I do feel grateful. If you really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if you're not even making a living wage, then you should quit as soon as you can and search for something better. But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your daily work, then give job crafting a try, because that dream job that you fantasize about it doesn't really exist.

The research shows that any job can turn into a calling if you bring the right attic too, and maybe a few science back tips from the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Fridman checked our facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.

Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.