Good Work/Bad Work

For some months I've been reflecting on work.  I am, to some degree anyway, like those people that Baz Luhrmann speaks about in his song "Sunscreen"

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life...

the most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives

some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't

One thing I am sure of is the following:  while "consulting" has paid the bills to date, I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with it.  There seems to be so little about it that is concrete.  By this, I mean that I battle to see whether anything I work on is actually useful to society, whether it helps my fellow man to flourish.  Sure, there are one or two exceptions but as my builder friend, Tim once said: "So really your job is just hocus pocus".

I've been reading "Let my people go Surfing" by Yves Chouinard, founder of Patagonia.  I am fascinated by the company's uncompromising commitment to design, product excellence and sustainability.  Everything is designed to last.  Everything is built single-mindedly around the needs and lifestyle of the outdoor "dirtbag", the sort of person who's more likely to spend his remaining 5 dollars on transport to his favourite climbing area than on clothes.  When he buys an item it HAS to last.  Patagonia is "responsible for the total" i.e. sourcing, design, quality, wearability, washability, durability, repairability and, ultimately, disposability.  

I see much of Patagonia's ethos in a fascinating article written by Dorothy Sayers just after the outbreak of World War 2.  Here are a few gems that stood out for me:

• "A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on Trash and Waste, and such a society is a house built on sand"

• "In all the world there are only 2 sources of real wealth:  the fruit of the earth and the labour of men.  You estimate work not by the money it brings to the producer, but by the worth of the thing that is made"

• “We should ask of our enterprise not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’;  of goods, not ‘can we induce people to buy them’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’; of employment, not ‘how much per week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’  We should fight tooth and nail not for more employment but for the quality of the work we do.  We should clamour to be engaged in work that is worth doing and in which we should take pride”

• "Work is not the thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.  It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual and bodily satisfaction and the medium in which he offers himself to God"

• "We should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we do"

• "The greatest insult which the commercial age has offered the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making in the first place"

As I go into 2019, I have come up with 3 sets of criteria to help filter the work on offer.  I hope I can live by them:

1.  Is the work on offer a legitimate outlet in which to express my gifts, talents and emotional energy.  Will I grow in and through this work?  Will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?
2. Is the outcome going to be measurably useful for i) the end customer?  ii) the client or intermediary?
3. Will the outcome be ethical and moral?  Will it help society to thrive, flourish and prosper?