Not happy with your work? Here's what you can do about it.

A few months ago, I went on a meditation retreat, a weekend-long excursion into the suburbs of Beijing, where a facilitator guided myself and a group of 14 people through a series of activities designed to help us achieve greater mental and emotional peace and clarity. At the beginning of retreats like this, it is usually suggested that each participant set an intention: an issue or problem in their life that they would like to improve or solve. As each person shared their intention with the group, I distinctly remember the comments of one woman: “I’ve hated every job I’ve ever had, and I don’t know why. I’d like to improve that.”

This woman seemed to have the kind of career most people dream about. She had left China after high school to study in the US, where she earned degrees from top schools, and then went on to work for prestigious financial and consulting firms in New York and Beijing. Why would someone like that, who has earned coveted titles and paychecks, be so dissatisfied with her work?

Sentiments like that woman expressed are not uncommon. According to Beijing-based social science research and consulting company Wonder Tech, 91 percent of the Chinese post-nineties generation they interviewed reported being unsatisfied or unhappy with their jobs. This is not just a “China problem” either. The miserable office worker, whose joy has been ripped out of them by soul-sucking office work is a common theme of TV shows and films like The Office, Horrible Bosses, and Office Space.

So as we say goodbye to the year of the chicken and welcome in the year of the dog, how can you identify your sources unhappiness and have a more satisfying career and life? In recent decades there has been a great deal of research on the topic, and here are a few useful findings:

Understand how money impacts your happiness

It’s an old adage that “money can’t buy happiness.” That is true…kind of. It’s also not true. In reality, one’s relationship with the concept of money is one of the most important factors in determining their satisfaction in life, it’s just far more nuanced than a direct correlation. In fact, according to a study of hundreds of thousands of people across over 150 countries, researchers found that money does make people happier… to some extent. Money was found to have a dramatic impact on an individual’s feeling of well-being, but only when that money made the difference between poor and middle-income. For example, in the US, where median household income is between 50,000 and 70,000 dollars per year, increased income made a profound impact for those making less than $40,000. Between $40,000 and $70,000 it still made an impact, but less dramatic. Even less of a change for $70,000 to $110,000, and only minimal difference for $110,000 to $210,000.

In the end, the study showed that someone would have to go from making $40,000 per year to $210,000 per year in order to achieve the same boost in life satisfaction as someone going from $10,000 to $40,000 per year. 

These results, however, were when people were asked about their “general life satisfaction” in the abstract sense. When asked about how ‘happy’ people say they are right now, the relationship is weaker. One large study found people in countries with average incomes of $32,000 were only 10% happier with their lives than those in countries with average incomes of just $2,000; another within the US could find no effect above a $40,000 income for a single person.

These studies also only showed correlation, not causation. For example, if someone is physically and mentally healthy, they will likely be happier, and also capable of earning more money. If someone is bedridden and mentally ill, it will likely lead to unhappiness as well as a failure to keep a job.

However, I think most of us can agree that having some money is certainly better than not having any, and that, in general, it’s better to have too much than too little. What we do see from the data, though, is that money, as a driver of happiness, suffers from what economists call the “law of diminishing marginal utility.” This law states that as a person increases consumption of a product while keeping consumption of other products constant, there is a decline in the usefulness that person derives from consuming each additional unit of that product.

For example, let’s imagine you are moving into a new apartment. At first, the apartment is empty, with no furniture. You need a sofa. The difference between having no sofa and one sofa is huge. Getting that first sofa is very helpful. Then you get a second sofa. That sofa is useful, but not as essential as the first one. Then you get a third, then a fourth, and so on. Eventually, your house becomes so full of sofas that you are unable to fit a table, chairs, or bed in there. After a certain point, the additional sofas provide negative utility, and you would even be willing to pay someone to take some away.

Psychologically, an inability to recognize diminishing marginal utility is called addiction. Take alcohol, for example. If you go from having no beer to one beer, it has a pretty good effect. You relax a little, and feel better. It’s a good thing. But what happens if you have six, or seven, or eight? What happens if you drink that much every day? What was once positive now starts to be detrimental. In the mind of an addict, they look at an apartment full of sofas and think “you know what would look great in this place? Another sofa.”

While most of us associate addiction with substances like alcohol and drugs, it is something we experience in many areas of our lives. “Many of my clients suffer from addictions that they are not aware of,” explains Chen Jiejun, a China-born psychoanalyst who has practiced in both Boston and Beijing. “I work with successful businesspeople who are addicted to money, or power, or sex. I also work with parents who are addicted to worrying about, or pressuring their children. In reality, it is the greed and excess of the businessperson that is contributing to their unhappiness, or the anxiety and pressure that are contributing to the unhappiness in the family and failure of the child. In each case, what the person thinks they need more of is actually contributing to the problem.”

In many cases, even when people are aware of the negative effect of their addiction, it is difficult for them to break the habit. “People use their addictions to distract themselves from the problems their addictions cause. The alcoholic drinks to forget about the problems caused by her alcoholism, and the workaholic dives deeper into their work in order to avoid the difficult home life that is a result of the alcoholism,” says Chen.  

It is not uncommon to find an “earning,” “wealth,” or “status” addiction among people. For many families in China’s big cities, the di yi tong jin (“first pot of gold”) felt amazing, going from poverty to a middle-class lifestyle, or from laboring to relative wealth. However, as wealth increases, it tends to diminish in utility. Despite this fact, when these negative feelings return, we tend to think, “the problem is that I drive a VW, I need a Tesla instead,” or “I’m not successful enough as a director, I need to be a VP.” In reality, it is what is sacrificed or neglected in the pursuit of the addiction that causes their unhappiness.

It is true that having money can rescue us from the misery of poverty, but more money does not equal more happiness.

The “Ikigai” effect

So if money isn’t what makes us happy in our work, what does?

Understanding may lie in the Japanese concept of ikigai, or “reason for being.” According to Japanese culture, each person has their own ikigai in life, and it can transcend simply one’s profession, including things like hobbies, and raising children as well. Discovering one’s ikigai, and living in harmony with it, can help an individual achieve a sense of satisfaction and wellbeing.

How can you find ikigai in your daily work and life? Achievement of ikigai seems to fall somewhere amidst the convergence of four things: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. In other words, it is the harmony of passion, mission, harmony, and vocation.

Japanese psychologist Kobayashi Tsukasa characterizes ikigai this way:

“People can feel real Ikigai only when, on the basis of personal maturity, the satisfaction of various desires, love and happiness, encounters with others, and a sense of the value of life, they proceed toward self-realization” 

The identification and pursuit of ikigai requires thought and introspection, and seems to be a coming-of-age point for many in life, a turning point from the foolishness of childhood to the wisdom of maturity.

What prevents someone from being able to find a life of ikigai? At least in the case of the Chinese post-nineties generation, it seems to come most frequently from a lack of introspection and understanding of one’s own skills and passion, combined with life decisions that are dictated too strongly by outside factors. According to Wonder Tech, individuals surveyed were most likely to report dissatisfaction in their career choices if they were dictated by parents, or by their university major. Those most likely to report satisfaction in their careers were those who claim to have chosen their path based on their own interest or skills. 

Your job doesn’t dictate your happiness, how you think of it does

To some people, however, talk of a concept like ikigai can be a luxury, a fantasy for the wealthy and privileged, or the lucky few who have the talent to pursue their dreams without the restrictions of life’s realities. “It took me months to find a job, and now I spend most of my job selling machinery I don’t care about, to customers I don’t care about, for a boss I don’t care about,” explained a young friend of mine. “I hate it, but it’s a job and it pays. Finding something better right now isn’t really an option.”

For many of us, we toil away in jobs that we hate, hoping to one day get the opportunity to move into careers that we love. That career is some kind of idealized version of work in our imagination, usually characterized by a well-paying and powerful position at a high-status organization.

However, according to Yale University psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski, job satisfaction comes less from what job you have, but how you view your job. In her research, Wrzesniewski interviewed a group of janitors at a local hospital, and asked them about difficulty and complexity of the tasks that they completed each day. One segment of the group described the work as being not very high-skill and easily done, while another segment characterized their work as complex and challenging.

In looking at the differences between the two types of cleaners, they found no difference in their shifts, job titles, or length of tenure at the hospital. Instead, what was different was what they described as being the kinds of tasks that they did throughout their daily work. The segment who viewed the work as low-skill stuck very strictly to their job description. To them, the purpose of their job was to complete a list of tasks. That list, while extensive, involved very little interaction with doctors, nurses, or patients. The second group of cleaners, however, in addition to naming the list of tasks mentioned by the first group, also listed the kinds of things that they regularly did for and with the staff, patients, and visitors at the hospital.

In many instances, these “extra tasks” were not in their job description. Wrzesniewski refers to this as “job crafting,” redefining the boundaries of their work in a way that made the work more meaningful and fulfilling. This included learning and finding out when would be the appropriate times to, for example, give a patient a drink of water, or help a patient move, or assist a patient’s families with an urgent request. In these cases, the cleaners had developed complex methods to learn how they could complete these helpful tasks without breaking hospital rules.

For example, one staff member spoke about rearranging the artwork in the room of a comatose patient. While it was not in her job description, the thought that maybe a change in the patient’s surroundings could spark something inside which them which would prompt them to wake up. Another cleaner mentioned checking the ceiling of each room for any dirty spots which might annoy patients who were forced to look at them all day. For many of these people, they talked about thinking about patients and family members like “what if they were my family member in that bed? How would I care for them?”

While the former group of cleaners viewed the work by the tasks that they were doing, the later group had internalized the greater mission of the hospital, and they viewed their work as contributing to that mission. It was this group that consistently reported being happier at their jobs, and were also more likely to be considered “top performers.” After all, when employers talk about how they want to encourage a sense of “ownership” among employees, what could possibly be a better example?

For the first group, the job was just a job, but to the second group, it was more of a calling, a way through which they could express their lives’ ikigai. Did these people dream of being hospital janitors? I doubt it. But that did not prevent them from finding greater meaning in their work, and enjoying it more in the process.

Final thoughts

What can you do to find greater satisfaction in your work in the year of the dog? Here are a few actionable steps:

• Be mindful of your emotional relationship with money

Money is an important part of life, and also one of the most quantifiable, but because it is so easily measurable, we frequently place outsize importance on it, overemphasizing its impact on our happiness, and underemphasizing the impact of less quantifiable, but more important, factors. This can create perverse mental incentive structures, and thus harm psychological wellbeing.

To mitigate this effect, it can be helpful to keep record of your mental thought processes, taking note of your emotions in detail. Not simply “positive” or “negative,” but the more nuanced “gray area” emotions. Take record of them daily, and observe not just the first-order consequences of thoughts and actions that you have, and the second and third-order “ripple effect” impact that these patterns have on your wellbeing.

When specifying how I’m feeling I find it useful to use a chart like this:

Our relationships with money, like those with any other powerful emotion-influencers (romance and alcohol, for example), are incredibly complicated, and what feels good in the short term may not help us achieve sustainable well-being. Only by recognizing those complex patterns can we begin to adopt habits to best manage those relationships.

• To find your ikigai, identify your values and priorities

Many people go through life without clearly identifying what is important to them. This can lead to confusion, trouble in decision-making, and in many cases, a deep sense of self-loathing and regret. When I coach people who are dissatisfied with their lives and work, it is frequently because their personal values are not something that they understand very well.

To help individuals identify those values, I use a technique introduced to me by Andy Clark, long-time mainstay of the corporate training scene in China, and co-founder of soft skills training firms ClarkMorgan and Shine Training. This technique requires a deck of cards, but not just any deck of cards. On each card is a value that someone might have in their life or work: one card is “love,” another is “friendships,” others are “financial reward,” “fame,” “stability,” “personal growth,” and so on.

I ask every client I work with to go through the deck of cards, read them, and explain to me their understanding of the concept. Then I ask them to organize the cards into three piles: On the left, they place the things they want in life. In the middle, they place the things they don’t care about. On the right, they place the things that they actively do not want. While most of the cards go into the “want” pile, it is interesting to see what they don’t want, and the emotions or values that cause them to put those cards in that pile:

At this point, the piles might look something like this:

For this person, “family,” and the other cards beneath the “family” card, represent things that they want in life. “Adventure/Risk-taking” might be something that they don’t think or care about, and “Fast Pace/Time Pressure” is something that they actively do not want in their life. In other words, this person would probably not be suited to be a tech entrepreneur in China :).

Next, I ask them to remove the “don’t care” and “don’t want” piles, leaving them only with the ones that are important to them, like this:

Then, things get a little more difficult. I ask the person to remove all of the cards, except the ten that are most important to them. Once they have done that, I ask them to make a pyramid, with the most important value at the top, followed by two in the second tier, three in the third, and four in the fourth. This forces the individual to make difficult decisions, cutting some values in favor of others. After all, for those who are fortunate to have enough opportunities in life, we can, within limits, have just about anything we want in life, but it is impossible to have everything you want in life.

For example, here is my pyramid:

The benefits of such an exercise are numerous. By clarifying your values and priorities, decisions become easier to make, but conflicts also become clearer. For my own pyramid, my need for independence and personal growth may come in conflict with family. I must continuously seek for ways to be committed to my “family” card without compromising my own growth and independence.

Most useful, I find the pyramid to be a bit of a “life anchor,” a central place from which individuals can operate. In difficult moments, reminding one’s self to calm down and “remember the pyramid” is a habit which produces a sense of confidence and resoluteness when dealing with the outside world, as well as harmony and tranquility within one’s own heart and mind.

• “Job craft” to integrate your “calling” into your work

Even if your current position is not ideal, you can find ways to integrate it with your broader sense of mission, like the janitors did in Amy Wrzesniewski’s study. This approach can not only improve your current job satisfaction, but set you up for more suitable work in the future.

I saw this approach work in my own life, when I worked for a company that was in serious financial trouble. My job responsibilities included areas of training, talent development, and corporate culture, but following my specific job description specifically was pretty useless, as morale was low and the future for most people at the company looked increasingly grim.

Rather than disengage, I chose to ask myself “what do the people at this company need?” I took it upon myself to check in on people whose work was particularly stressful. Discussions in training courses began to focus less on the company in particular, but more about lessons that could be applied to work and life in general. I organized after-work activities, including a few large parties at my own apartment, to allow colleagues to have fun and relax while also socializing with each other, forging and solidifying some of the relationships that will improve their professional networks.

Did this make each day more tolerable? Absolutely. But it also sent a message to my colleagues. By “job crafting” I was clarifying to those around me how I perceived my ikigai. People saw what I was good at, and what I was passionate about, and many of those same people keep me in mind when they see opportunities that fit with my passion and strengths, helping me match my “what I’m good at” and “what I love” parts of my ikigai chart with “what the world needs” and “what you can get paid for.”

Honest pursuit of one’s ikigai is recursive. When you’re honest about what you love to do and what you’re good at pursue it in a reasonable way, it is not uncommon for the rest of the chart to “figure itself out,” but in order for that to happen, you need to recognize and pursue it for yourself first.