Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Enjoying Your Work

After a long day trying to clear the paperwork and a long evening trying to clear the drains, I read this article on the BBC site. It veers from banal observations to fairly random quotes, but there were also a whole load of good lines. A top five, slightly paraphrased:

1. As noted by the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, there are three paths to meaning - work, love and suffering.

2. Meaning is a bit like happiness - the more you go out looking for it the less you find.

3. However menial your daily tasks, do them well. According to Richard Sennett's new book, The Craftsman, this ability to master a skill and then practice it well satisfies a basic human need.

4. Managing is one of the most thankless jobs in the world. What managers are mainly trying to do is to get other people to do things that they don't want to.

5. Petty bureaucracy is what destroys pleasure at work. The meetings, the second guessing, the pointless duplication, the politics, we all moan. Just let us do the damned job.

2 comments:

Ann Cardus said...

Hope you managed to clear the drains.

Rana said...

Sadly not yet. One thing I've learned over the last few days - clearing the drains is actually more fun than clearing the paperwork.