Four Ways People Find Meaning Through Work

Helping others live a life of meaning has been something that’s animated my own purpose ever since I first grappled with Viktor Frankl’s philosophy, logotherapy.

Having purpose at work is also something we hear much more about these days. More individuals over the last couple decades sought jobs in harmony with their life purpose.

As we wrote in our bestselling book Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career:

“Many, for instance, are realizing that they want to do more purposeful work. For them, the definition of making progress in their careers is better aligning their work with what gives their lives meaning.”

But we also saw in our research that finding purpose at work didn’t explain many of the job switches of the 1,000-plus people we studied. What was universal is that those who switched jobs were trying to make progress in their life—as they defined it—in the context of their struggles, circumstances, and goals.

That helps explain what Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools and currently a venture partner at Equal Opportunity Ventures, told me:

“[Young people] don’t really care a ton about… what the work is,” she said. “They want it to fit into their lifestyle. And it’s clear that those folks, like, they need income, right. They got to pay the bills, they gotta have something to eat. But I think there’s also something else out there that is, you know, more meaningful to them that they want to spend the majority of their time on potentially.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to square the importance of purpose with these dual realities since our book’s publication a year ago. It’s among the reasons I’m so excited to attend the Human Potential Summit in Utah, a gathering of business leaders focused on reshaping the talent ecosystem from the inside out, on November 12th. At the Summit, Gallup will share its findings from the research it has conducted to understand where different people are finding meaning in their lives and the intersection with work.

I’m intrigued to compare what they’ve learned with the insights that were staring us in the face from our research of over 1,000 job switchers—but we didn’t explicitly call out in the book.

Our research suggests that some people are looking to their job for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Others aren’t sure what their purpose is or what gives them meaning—and they are looking to discover it through work (consistent with Frankl’s views of one way to find meaning in one’s life).

Some people aren’t necessarily looking for their job to be their life’s purpose, but they do want whatever they do at work to have real meaning and impact—as they define it.

And still others are looking to their job to allow them to pursue their purpose outside of work. They view work as a means to meaning elsewhere, in other words.

I’d love to hear your perspective.

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Share in the comments which of the 4 patterns resonates with you most at this moment in your career and life:

1. Finding meaning in your work

2. Discovering purpose through your work

3. Creating impact through your work

4. Using work as a means to pursue purpose elsewhere

What else am I missing that’s staring at us in plain sight to help individuals make progress in their lives through the work they do?