It’s time to update on philosophy of work; I’ve got some more info for you. A lot of this is going to be review, but I think it’s absolutely critical that we put ourselves in the right mindset towards work. It’s important because work is what actually produces the things that we then associate with productivity. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of a lot of weird stuff going on in our heads about work.
 
Our perspective on work has significant impact on our lives and our productivity:
  • We’re more likely to procrastinate things we “don’t like”
  • We have more stress around them, quality of life
  • We tend to rush at them without thinking about how we could get better at them
  • Your brain gives you what you expect – if you expect “miserable” that’s what you get
So, can we change our mindset? We just want to get these things out and inspect them get our mindsets right about work, and get rid of some of the weird stuff.
 
We’ll cover:
  • A historical perspective on work
  • Cultural ideas about work
  • What might work mean for humans
  • More recent ideas 
Historical view of work
  • Hunter/gatherer to agriculture and herding – reduction of risk
  • The rise of business (work for money)
  • The era of slavery in the West and America
  • Modern employment is sometimes compared to these other kinds of work
  • Model of work as slavery, drudgery, serfdom
Cultural issues with work
  • Only ‘hard’ work is virtuous; sweating is virtuous, and not sweating is not virtuous.
  • Things that are easy (for us?) are not accorded much virtue.
  • We glorify the hustle culture in America.
  • Artifacts of a consumerist culture – The ’cash problem’
We’re working critters
  • We enjoy working as ‘making the world and ourselves into what we want them to be’
  • Most of us despise the idea of doing nothing. We call it boredom.
  • We can’t avoid goal seeking based on imagination and problem solving
Currently common ideas
  • Start With Why?
  • We can “choose our own adventure” to some degree
  • Your standard (of quality) is your own; think about your standard.
  • Minimum effective dosage (Matt Reynolds via the AOM podcast) there’s such a thing as as doing it the easy way
Think through these mindsets and determine where yours has come from. Check it against reality to see if it matches up. If not, try to learn to think in different ways. If we consider our work to be joy, then we’ll get joy from it.