May 03, · Our panel of judges — Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andrew Light, Michael Pollan and Peter Singer — chose the essay below as the winner. It The New York Times Magazine September 13, When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system," I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that Feb 21, · The New York Times Magazine. Magazine | America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable Close search Site Search Navigation. Search blogger.com
My first, charmed week as a student at Harvard Business School, late in the summer offelt like a halcyon time for capitalism. AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and Napster were benevolently connecting the world. Enron and WorldCom were bringing innovation to hidebound industries. President George W. Bush — an H. graduate himself — had promised to deliver progress and prosperity with businesslike efficiency.
The next few years would prove how little we and Washington and much of corporate America really understood about essay about new york economy and the world. But at the time, for the first-years preparing ourselves for business moguldom, what really excited us was our good luck. A Harvard M. seemed like a winning lottery ticket, a gilded highway to world-changing influence, fantastic wealth and — if those self-satisfied portraits that lined the hallways were any indication — a lifetime of deeply meaningful work.
Another had learned in the maternity ward that her firm was being stolen by a conniving essay about new york. Read about the new labor movement in our Future of Work issue. Those were extreme examples, of course. Most of us were living relatively normal, basically content lives.
But even among my more sanguine classmates, there was a lingering sense of professional disappointment. They talked about missed promotions, disaffected children and billable hours in divorce court. They complained about jobs that were unfulfilling, tedious or just plain bad, essay about new york. My work feels totally meaningless. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, essay about new york, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible.
After our reunion, essay about new york, I wondered if my Harvard class — or even just my own friends there — were an anomaly. What I found essay about new york that my classmates were hardly unique in their dissatisfaction; even in a boom economy, a surprising portion of Americans are professionally miserable right now, essay about new york.
In the mids, roughly 61 percent of workers told pollsters they were satisfied with their jobs. Since then, that number has declined substantially, hovering around half; the low point was inwhen only 43 percent of workers were satisfied, according to data collected by the Conference Boarda nonprofit research organization. The rest said they were unhappy, or at best neutral, about how they spent the bulk of their days.
Even among professionals given to lofty self-images, like those in medicine and law, other studies have noted a rise in discontent. This wave of dissatisfaction is especially perverse because corporations now have access to decades of scientific research about how to make jobs better. Much more important are things like whether a job provides a sense of autonomy — the ability to control your time and the authority to act on your unique expertise. People want to work alongside others whom they respect and, optimally, enjoy spending time with and who seem to respect them in return.
And finally, workers want to feel that their labors are meaningful. One of the more significant examples of how meaningfulness influences job satisfaction comes from a study published in Two researchers — Amy Essay about new york of Yale and Jane Dutton, now a distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Michigan — wanted to figure out why particular janitors at a large hospital were so much more enthusiastic than others.
So they began conducting interviews and found that, by design and habit, essay about new york, some members of the janitorial staff saw their jobs not as just tidying up but as a form of healing. One woman, for instance, mopped rooms inside a brain-injury unit where many residents were comatose. She talked to other convalescents about their lives. In a study led by the researchers, another custodian described cleaning the same room two times in order to ease the mind of essay about new york stressed-out father.
My stock-in-trade are sources who feel their employers are acting unethically or ignoring sound advice. The workers who speak to me are willing to describe both the good and the bad in the places where they work, in the hope that we will all benefit from their insights. The smoothest life paths sometimes fail to teach us about what really brings us satisfaction day to day.
They often seem to love their jobs and admire the companies they work for. They essay about new york them enough, in fact, to want to help them improve.
They are engaged and content. They believe what they are doing matters — both in coming to work every day and in blowing the whistle on problems they see. Even for Americans who live frighteningly close to the bone, like the janitors studied by Wrzesniewski and Dutton, a job is usually more than just a means to a paycheck. When I was speaking to my H. classmates, one of them reminded me about some people at our reunion who seemed wholly unmiserable — who seemed, somewhat to their own surprise, to have wound up with jobs that were both financially and emotionally rewarding.
I knew of one person who had become a prominent venture capitalist; another friend had started a retail empire that expanded to five states; yet another was selling goods all over the world. There were essay about new york who had become investors running their own funds.
And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned essay about new york lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz.
had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else. A core goal of capitalism is evaluating and putting a price on risk. In our professional lives, we hedge against misfortune by taking out insurance policies in the form of fancy degrees, saving against rainy days by pursuing careers that promise stability.
Nowadays, essay about new york, however, stability is increasingly scarce, and risk is harder to measure. Many of our insurance policies have turned out to be worth essay about new york much as Enron. standards field of journalism. Some of my classmates thought I was making a huge mistake by ignoring all the doors H.
had opened for me in high finance and Silicon Valley. Finding meaning, essay about new york as a banker or a janitor, is difficult work. Usually life, essay about new york, rather than a business-school classroom, is the place to learn how to do it.
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May 03, · Our panel of judges — Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andrew Light, Michael Pollan and Peter Singer — chose the essay below as the winner. It The New York Times Magazine September 13, When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system," I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that Feb 21, · The New York Times Magazine. Magazine | America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable Close search Site Search Navigation. Search blogger.com
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