Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Good work affects much more than the size of an individual’s house. People whose goals and values are more intrinsic agree with statements like, “I want my work to provide me with opportunities for helping other people and increasing my knowledge and skills.” For example, a surgical doctor makes great money and also saves lives, learns something new every day, and uses his or her training and skills to meet one unique challenge after another. However, these days, physicians in general are often told exactly how much time they can spend with each patient. The waits are long and the doctor visits short when cash becomes more important than caring. Says one European neurologist, “They’re applying the logic of machines to people. Lots of doctors are frustrated—they want to have time to treat the person, not just the disease.”14

  In fact, according to Dr. Daniel Goleman, “Surveys find signs of burnout in 80 or 90 percent of practicing physicians—a quiet epidemic.” On the positive side of health care, there is a resurgence of doctors who choose to make house calls rather than seven-figure incomes; and there’s also an increase in classes offered to medical students dealing specifically with patient-doctor communications and empathy.15

  By choosing good work, we contribute to a world that, with luck, produces more biological, economic, and cultural assets than liabilities—or at least stays even. A culture improves largely by the work of its people—employers, employees, activists, and caretakers. Certainly, not all work that’s important is salaried. For example, a recent study by Salary.com calculated that a stay-at-home mother or father—who works an average of 91.6 hours a week as a de facto housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive, and psychologist—would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all of the work, including overtime—an amount similar to a top ad executive, marketing director, or judge. Is any work more important than this?16

  Good Work

  Though many regard the word “employment” with the same disdain that economists give to the word “unemployment,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research demonstrates that we often achieve a greater sense of “flow” at work than in leisure time. (A recent Pew Research Center poll found that employed people are as likely to be “very happy” as retirees.)17 One reason we lead the world in average hours worked per week may be that work is sometimes more like a game than the American version of leisure. Work usually has clear goals and rules of performance, just like in a game. It provides challenges and feedback, encourages concentration and lack of distractions, and, ideally, matches the worker’s skills with the task to be done—all aspects that characterize flow. It can also offer social connections and a feeling of accomplishment.

  World-acclaimed viola player Geraldine Walther has been in the flow of music since she was seven; she always knew that playing violin and viola was her passion. She is the newest member of the Takács string quartet, considered by some music critics to be the greatest string quartet in the world. When I heard the group perform a few months ago, I was swept away by their playful, buoyant intensity. The concert seemed to fill me up; to heal whatever needed healing. As I listened, I felt I could be what they were playing—their sense of celebration burst through the music and inspired me. The next day I called the group to request an interview with Geraldine (Jeri), because I wanted to ask her how this musical magic came about.

  Over lunch, she tells me she’s recently left the San Francisco Orchestra, where she played for thirty years as primary violist, because she wanted to challenge herself. “I had a comfortable job with the orchestra, and the salary was great,” she says. “I knew that I could have coasted indefinitely, but music is such a central part of my life; I needed more.” By accepting the new job with Takács, she hadn’t taken the easy road—string quartets are widely known as the riskiest venue in classical music. “There’s nowhere to hide,” Jeri says with a smile. “But the guys are so expressive and so generous; they help me be the best I can be. I feel like I can’t let them down …

  “Each performance is like an improvisation—I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but then we find a way to stretch individually and stay together at the same time. We’ll feel someone about to do something different and we each make minor adjustments—it’s a fantastic feeling … I lose myself in it. She adds, “I consider it a joy, privilege and responsibility to be playing in this group.”

  I ask her how the audience connects with the energy of a given piece. “There seems to be a cycle of energy. We feel the attention and the involvement of the audience; everyone wants and expects us to play as well as we can, and we don’t want to waste their time.” She mentions a certain movement in a Bartók piece, which the composer meant to be amusing. “The audience always laughs when we come to that part—the humor comes across.”

  First crafted in the 1500s, violas are slightly larger than violins, often providing harmony. According to violist Geraldine Walther, “Some say the cork is the first violin, the cello is the bottle, and the wine is the viola and second violin.” Credit: Susan Benton

  Jeri’s work connects her intimately with her colleagues, demanding that she rise to her highest potential. It also connects her to audiences all over the world that are uplifted and empowered by the music. Clearly, hers is good work.

  Teri Rippeto also had a youthful realization about the kind of work she wanted to do. “I always had curiosity about food,” she tells me. Her Aunt Judy was a mentor, teaching her at a very young age how to can fruits and vegetables. “Canning is from your heart,” she says, “and that’s the most beautiful and most important part of cooking.” In fourth grade, Teri won a 4H blue ribbon for her chocolate chip cookies, and thirty-five years later, she runs a restaurant, Potager, with a staff of nineteen and a customer base that includes the mayor of Denver—and me, of course. I’m particularly impressed with her emphasis on serving the freshest, highest-quality food she can find. She’s a regular at the well-known Boulder Farmers’ Market, whose vendors grow all the organic produce they sell. The meat she serves is local and grass fed; lobster, scallops, and clams are express-mailed by a friend in Maine; and fresh fish is delivered by an airport courier right to her restaurant.

  Quality comes first, but Teri’s next priority is to cook with vegetables, fruits, and herbs that are locally grown and in season. In mid-December, I didn’t expect she’d still be preparing seasonal dishes from local sources, but she surprises me. “On the menu right now are dishes with locally grown potatoes, winter squash, onions, garlic, fresh salad greens grown in cold frames and greenhouses, Jerusalem artichokes, beets, and cold-hardy leafy greens like kale, chard, collards, and mustard greens.” She is so passionate about the meaning of food that last year she mailed a monthly newsletter to 1,500 people, with staff-written articles about knowing where your food comes from, the health benefits of organic produce, and how to use what’s in season to create gourmet meals. Her sous-chef teaches classes on healthy cuisine at Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs, and she wants to become involved with gardening programs at local elementary schools. When I ask her if she considers her work “play,” she says she wouldn’t go that far—but without a doubt, her work shows that the time we spend making a living can enrich lives.

  The Algonquin Hotel in New York City recently celebrated the ninetieth birthday of one of its most revered employees, Hoy Wong, a gentleman originally from Hong Kong who, in his fifty-eight years of bartending, has served drinks to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, and Judy Garland. Once, when the Duke of Windsor ordered a “House of Lords martini in and out on toast,” the veteran “Mr. Hoy” had the expertise to serve him a martini with a lemon twist, ignited with a match. The bartender knew his trade. “After he drink, he liked it,” Wong said proudly. “And he had a second one.” Says the Algonquin’s general manager, “He never misses a day. If the weather’s bad he shows up early. It’s just really an honor to work with someone like Mr. Hoy.” The hotel showed their respect for him by inv
iting 350 friends and admirers to a party in his honor. Mr. Hoy’s good work is about doing his job well, with pride.18

  One of my pet peeves (in addition to the term “pet peeves”) is dealing with sales people, government workers, and others who distance themselves from their work, essentially becoming prisoners of their paychecks. They do the work just well enough to get by, as if they are worthy but the work is not. As an aspiring writer who spent seven years in the computer control room of a sewage treatment plant, I learned firsthand that pride in one’s work is not about social distinction but self-esteem. No matter what the job is, it needs to be done well or not at all.

  Making Work More Playful, and Play More Purposeful

  What can we learn from athletes, musicians, and other masters of play to help work be more enjoyable? Interestingly, in some cases monetary rewards become an obstacle to enjoyment. In research with two groups to observe the effect of extrinsic rewards on behavior, one group received money for solving a puzzle and the second group did not. The group that was paid stopped playing after the first game, while the unpaid group continued to enjoy the puzzle for its own sake. Researcher Edward Deci concludes, “Rewards seem to turn the act of playing into something that is controlled from the outside: It turns play into work.”19 If we want work to be more like play, it seems we need to emphasize the joys of challenge and creativity, as well as the social value of what we are doing.

  The money’s important, but so are other, more intrinsic rewards. Athletes tell us that the winner doesn’t always “take all.” In both work and play, the greatest value comes from qualities like peak performance, involvement, pride, respect for others, and continuous learning and improvement. These values make life worth living, regardless of trophies or salaries. If we’re relatively content in both work and play, extrinsic rewards become less important. It seems we need to devote more time to teaching and mentoring children that there’s more to life than working and spending. I believe we need to learn, again, how to reconnect with activities that challenge us—for example, how to cook, build a table, or be politically active. We need to breathe life into workplaces so even menial jobs can be enjoyable, by offering more opportunities for autonomy, more employee-defined challenges, more emphasis on quality and the “story” of the product or service, and more direct feedback on work performance (as opposed to just quarterly, numerical score sheets).

  Can workplaces become kinder, gentler, and more soulful? There seems to be a movement to bring “spirit” into our offices and places of business—which essentially means treating employees with greater respect (leadership from the heart, not just the head) and working together to create meaning in the product. The annual Business and Consciousness Conference is now one of North America’s largest events, and books like Reawakening Spirit at Work and Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work are being used as texts in business seminars all over the country. Business leadership coach Lance Secretan points to SAS Institute, the largest independent software company in the world, as a good example of spirit at work. The company shuts its offices promptly at five o’clock, recognizing that people have lives outside of work. They also provide other work-life amenities, such as “Free Breakfast Fridays,” soda fountains and snacks in every break-room, on-site childcare centers, employee health-care centers, fitness centers, and wellness programs. Staff turnover is 3 percent in an industry that averages 20 percent, and a few years ago they received 27,000 applications for 945 job openings. The bottom line is that SAS saves an estimated $50 million a year in recruitment and training costs.20

  “Getting a life” includes both work and play. We’ve become world champion consumers partly because our culture doesn’t know how to enjoy leisure; instead, we try to buy it. Writes author Susan Ertz, “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” and psychologist Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi would agree. “The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it,” he says. “People are unhappiest when they are alone and nothing needs doing. In our studies, people who live by themselves and do not attend church find Sunday mornings to be the lowest part of the week, because with no demands on attention, they are unable to decide what to do.”21

  Priceless moments await us in both work and play. Both are interrelated with the other assets this book presents: creating a rich sense of self, using time well, maintaining great health, learning from history, and so on. However, to become more satisfying, it seems that work and play need to be better balanced. Right now, work dominates the lives of a majority of Americans, leaving little time for learning how to play. Most economists, philosophers, moneylenders, and media moguls assume that we need constant growth to create more work and perpetuate an ever-expanding standard of living. This assumption—that jobs and growth are the backbone of the economy—is systemic in tax structures, educational planning, health-care coverage, and insurance plans. Maybe it’s time we rethink what we want the ultimate product to be. Do we want limitless economic growth, or satisfied people?

  Creating Playful Work and Purposeful Play

  Overall goals:

  • Reach for values that move satisfaction from the “end product” (winning, output, high salaries) to the everyday process of work and play.

  • Elevate play (not just leisure) to a higher status in American culture.

  • Strive for cultural consensus on “what work needs to be done.” For example, as many people now work in the recycling industry as in the automobile industry, and recyclers outnumber the mining industry workers three to one. To become a less consumptive, wasteful society, we also need better minds and more workers in the fields of renewable energy, healthy food, and green design.

  A Few Strategies:

  • Offer greater flexibility to choose part-time work. Workers should be able to choose shorter hours if they are more satisfied with free time than they are with higher income. For example, 36 percent of the Dutch labor force works part-time (34 hours or less per week), and those part-time workers are legally entitled to a proportional share of pay, bonuses, holidays, and other benefits.

  • Increase opportunities for lifetime learning and life enrichment classes at universities, churches and other institutions, where adults and children can learn new skills (e.g., cooking, carpentry, film appreciation, civic involvement).

  • Watch for personal signs of dissatisfaction at work, such as: apathy, feeling overwhelmed by deadline pressure or workload; project procrastination; a toxic relationship with your boss; withdrawal from friends and family members; sleeplessness; increased smoking, drinking, or caffeine consumption; increased physical symptoms such as headaches, colds, exhaustion, ulcers, or heart condition. Change jobs if necessary.

  • Increase the use of tools that help students and job applicants find work that aligns with their passions and aptitudes.

  • Provide management approaches that make work more like a game, with clear rules, continuous feedback, and teamwork; (e.g., the “total quality management” initiatives of the 1990s emphasize quality circles in which each employee is trained in all aspects of the business).

  • Give greater emphasis to quality and the “story” of a product or service, to enhance both worker and consumer satisfaction.

  • Emphasize healthy lifestyles that optimize both play and work; e.g., many workplaces have improved the quality of food in cafeterias; have implemented employee outings that are active and healthy; and have built “high productivity” facilities where employees have more individual control over temperatures and air quality and where atriums, sunspaces, and indoor forests bring nature into the workplace.

  • Hire human resource consultants like Barbara Brannen (letsplaymore.com) who intentionally bring play into the workspace with “appreciation programs,” “moments of laughter,” and projects in which employees perform charitable functions together. Fear is replaced by pride as a motivator, leading to higher productivity and gre
ater employee satisfaction.

  Public and Cultural Assets

  10

  The Real Wealth of Neighborhoods

  Designing for People, Not Cars

  When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose places to be.

  —Rick Cole

  The loss of a forest or a farm is justified only if it is replaced by a village. To replace them with a subdivision or a shopping center is not an even trade.

  —Andrés Duany

  The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

  —James Kunstler

  The only way you run into someone else in LA is in a car crash.

  —Susan Sarandon

  Imagine “zooming in” with satellite imagery all the way to the roof of your house or apartment. Beneath that virtual roof, sitting at your computer, you’re effectively hooked up to a consumer-support system. Not only is your Internet cable an umbilical, but also the natural gas lines, pipes that carry water in and wastes out, electrical wires, telephone wires and waves, streets, postal trucks and delivery vans. These days, just about everything we need to be champion consumers is delivered right to our homes—except of course the money to buy it all, and the ethics and values to make sense of it. The fact is, beneath that zoomed-in roof, you may not be as healthy as you’d like. Maybe you spend so many hours browsing on the Web (and we can see what you’re looking at) that you neglect other important aspects of your life.