Work that matters
I’m in Salt Lake City with four of my best friends from college. One lives here and the other two flew in from New York last night. We’re renting a camper van and driving four hours south to Moab later today to hike and camp from Friday to Sunday.
This morning we all sat in the dining room and talked to my friend’s fiancée who’s a resident OBGYN at the University of Utah Hospital. She was just getting home from her night shift (something like 5pm to 8:30am), still in her blue scrubs and her hair up in a clip, clutching a cup of coffee.
The night prior, she performed her first unsupervised C-section.
She’d done about a hundred supervised C-sections before, but this was her first time doing it unsupervised because it was an emergency. The baby’s brain activity was declining and there wasn’t a supervising attendant available.
The operation was successful and the healthy baby was delivered to the family.
After she excused herself to go upstairs to get some sleep, Matthew and I walked down the street to get coffee.
We sat across from each other in the coffee shop and talked about our relationships and work.
He’s a data analyst for the New York Department of Health working on tuberculosis.
His day-to-day work is building the data flow from practitioners working with tuberculosis patients to case managers to the back-end database to the data visualizations that report tuberculosis data to the people who make decisions about public health policy.
So he’s not the practitioner actually in the room with the patients.
But he’s doing vital work to support the decision-makers who enact policies to improve care for the patients.
I would say he’s one or two degrees removed from the work that directly helps patients.
Whereas my friend’s fiancée is zero degrees removed from the work that directly helps patients. The lives of the mother and the baby directly depend on her work.
How many degrees removed is your work from directly helping others?
For me, most of my career has been selling B2B SaaS. More recently, I’ve been running a business to help people start their careers in software sales.
Selling B2B SaaS, I worked for one business that sold software to another business to help them do one of two things: save money or make more money.
Maybe that business we sold to did something to directly help other people.
So you could make the argument that by selling them our software we enabled them to continue to operate so that they could continue to help other people.
But more often than not, we were selling to other B2B SaaS companies.
So you can visualize this long line of businesses selling software to other businesses to enable them to continue to sell software to other businesses, and so on.
There’s supposed to be a consumer at the end of that line, but it’s convoluted. And whether or not the business is selling something that actually helps their end consumer is another question.
At the last tech startup I worked for, one of my colleagues on the sales team used to say, “We’re not curing cancer.”
What she meant was: what we’re doing “matters,” but it doesn’t really matter.
Now that I’m running Break Into Tech Sales, I feel a little closer to actually helping individual people. When you help someone land a job that significantly increases their income and drastically improves their lifestyle, seeing their joy and excitement feels good, feels right, feels like you’re doing something.
But I wouldn’t try to compare it to performing an operation that saves the life of an unborn baby and potentially the mother’s life too.
How do you define work that matters?
Maybe it’s not something to be defined, but more so something you feel, like do you feel that your work matters?
It feels to me like helping other people is the most obvious way to feel like your work has meaning, or that you’re doing something that matters.
I asked Pi, “Can you give me a scale of work that matters the most to work that matters the least?”
This is what it spit out:
Essential services: Jobs that are critical to the functioning of society and the well-being of its citizens, such as healthcare workers, first responders, food production workers, and essential infrastructure maintenance.
Public service: Jobs that contribute to the common good and help improve the lives of citizens, such as teachers, social workers, public servants, and environmental protection workers.
Innovation and progress: Jobs that contribute to technological, scientific, and cultural advancement, such as researchers, inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs.
Convenience and leisure: Jobs that provide services or products that make people's lives more comfortable or enjoyable, such as hospitality workers, retail workers, and entertainment industry workers.
Administrative and bureaucratic: Jobs that are primarily focused on managing systems, processes, and paperwork, such as many roles in large corporations or government agencies.
Where does your work fall on that scale?
Does it matter to you how much your work matters?
As I get deeper into my career and just older, I feel more of a desire to do work that actually matters.
I fear getting old and looking back and saying, “Gosh, none of what I did really mattered.”
But then again, why does it matter that your work matters?
Of course, you could make arguments about the duty you owe to society.
But the more simple, individual reason is just how it makes you feel.
Do you feel passionate, driven, motivated? Does your work make you feel alive? Like you’re doing something important that you’re proud of?
If not, why are you doing the work you’re doing?
Is that a good enough reason to continue doing the work you’re doing?
Or is it time to make a change?
I feel there are quite a few dimensions missing in the argument. I’m sorry I’m jumping guns.
First off, I have been living with this sense of disappointment and a lack of sense of accomplishment for over a decade now. I still remember my late college days when I used to repeatedly tell my friends and family, “one day you’re born without your choice, you’re sent to a school, get your scores and degrees, you’re supposed to marry someone to compliment your hormonal imbalances, now you bring kids into the world without their choice, you make money to help yourselves and the kids run their life, you retire hopefully seeing they settle and relive your cycle of life, and you’re dead one day without your intended action. Is this all about life or anything else”. I’m not an internal auditor and before this I spent about 7 years being in the 2nd line of business. I always asked, does what I do really matter, compared to all those who directly help the business make revenue?
Now that someone else is asking the same question for a change, I feel like defending myself. So what I’m writing here is basically sooth up my sense.
I am from India. Life is not given on a plate. Most begin with first cleaning up their family-created issues before they start building their own life. I’m not getting into details. It sums up to this. You first do what’s necessary, before thinking of doing what you want to. For a lot of youngsters, parents still choose their undergrad degree. A lot of us fail to recognize what we like until too late to pursue.
The other dimension is this. If the goal is only doing what matters, you know it doesn’t always have to be the job. It can also be outside it. One should just feel like doing it. It’s that simple, now that I write on this topic which I never did before.
You helped me clear a giant mess in my mind and tell myself, “just do it! Stop complaining and cribbing.” And the story of your friends and your perspective on your B2B sales job is very inspiring. I’m glad I read your piece first thing after I woke up this morning.
Have a good one.