Power That Binds

It is ‘meaning’ that brings work and life together.

- Danny Gutknecht

In many countries, and certainly in the US and India, work and leisure hours tend to bleed into one another. In India, people are more likely to stay at the office, but they interject a lot of social time into the work day. In the US, people may leave the office earlier, but once away they will use their mobile devices to stay connected and continue working. Along with this breakdown of the demarcation between personal time and work time, more and more people realise that they want their work hours to offer more than a paycheck. They want them to contribute to what matters to them as a human being. They want them to be meaningful.

When work is just a pay cheque, the time spent working beyond the contracted hours becomes an imposition—a theft of personal time. But everything changes when people find their work personally meaningful. At that point, it is not just about advancing in your career, but about growing into the kind of person you want to be. When that is the case, unravelling work problems becomes as compelling as solving puzzles, but with the added benefit of serving values that resonate with you. Putting in the extra hours in order to see the final product of a project you are invested in is not a cause of frustration. And during leisure time, when your mind is engaged with less pressing matters, you frequently have a welcome eureka moment around a sticky issue at work. These are the characteristics of high performers in an organisation.

A good life includes meaningful work