#35 - Rethinking Work

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I've been preparing for a keynote I'll be giving at the Rethinking Education conference. My topic: "Rethinking Work" - something I've been thinking and rethinking about for most of my career.

My research brought me to this wonderful article by Mark Harris, called "The Benefits of Play." In it, he retells one of my favorite Csiksentmihalyi stories. And so I share it with you:

In Flow: Living at the Peak of Your Abilities (Mihaly) Csikszentmihalyi tells an interesting story about a sixty-year-old factory worker named Joe who lived on Chicago’s South Side. This man’s job entailed building railroad cars in a huge hangar. The conditions in the hangar were harsh, unprotected as it was from Chicago’s extremes of weather. Joe, who had only a fourth grade education, was also on the low rung of the factory.

Yet, as Csikszentmihalyi describes, Joe was one of the happiest people he had ever met. At work Joe was exactly where he wanted to be. He had no desire to be a foreman because he only wanted to fix the machinery. And fix the machinery he did. All of it. Better than anyone. In fact, the word around the plant was that if Joe retired, they might as well close up shop because he kept everything going.

But Joe’s passion for fixing things didn’t end at work. At home he had built a rock garden with an underground watering system. The garden also included a lighting system designed to produce rainbows. Thus, Joe and his wife could sit on their porch in the evenings surrounded by rainbows. Joe had made of his life one seamless expression of a particular passion; in this case, a passion for building and fixing things. He possessed the gift of being able to completely absorb himself in his interests. In his living and in his working, Csikszentmihalyi concludes, Joe was a man who knew how to play.