Why do you work?

Before we decide where to work, we need to know why we work. Or at least, we should. I asked hundreds of executives why they work. Now I’m asking you.

I worked in Executive Search, recruiting top-level professionals into C-suite positions. On paper, it’s an interesting, exclusive, impactful and lucrative job. The people I interacted with on a daily basis were exceedingly successful executives. The roles I was hiring for were accessible only to the best of the best, individuals who had spent decades clawing their way up the corporate ladder. These people had dedicated their lives to their professions, to their work, and had become the best in their fields. Their apparent passion for their careers felt alien to me.

So I took to asking them: why do you work?

I figured, who better to help me on my existential quest than these apex corporate professionals? If anyone can articulate why they work, and why I should keep working, it will be them. I gathered thousands of answers over the years, from people of different generations, nationalities and backgrounds, religions, education levels and political affiliations.

I was first shocked by how many were unable to answer the question. I discovered the majority of these senior business leaders had never stopped to consider why they did what they did. But with patience and more refined questioning, I was able to establish a pattern.

There are three reasons people work, and one reason people work in business.

The first reason is People. Everyone wants to work with good people. No one wants to work with difficult people. Life’s too short to work with difficult people.

The second motivator is Challenge. Humans need to be challenged. But it has to be the right amount of challenge. Too easy and it’s not engaging; too difficult and it’s demoralising and draining. The exact nature of the challenge matters, and varies from person to person, but the urge to be pushed just outside one’s comfort zone is universal.

The third (and grandest) is Impact. Of the three, impact is the broadest, most personal, and most vulnerable to changing over time. In general, people want to do good. To change the world, even if just a little bit. To contribute to the arc of humanity’s shared history. If possible, to be remembered. Ultimately, to have mattered. What qualifies as impact? It can really be anything. From something as small as saving a company 10% in cloud server costs through incremental efficiencies, to something as intangible as increasing the happiness of one’s team, to something as grand as building out 10GW of renewable energy. More often than not, regardless of whether they achieve what they set out to, people are always able to find some impact in the work they are doing. If they aren’t, they won’t be doing that work for long.

These are the three things people seek in their jobs. People, Challenge and Impact. But none of those explain why you would pursue a career in business. You could, conceivably, find great people, a challenging role and a major impact coaching handball to seven-year-olds. So what draws people to the business world?

It’s money. It usually goes unsaid because it just feels a bit gauche to mention it. Or because people assume it’s obvious that they work for pay and it goes without saying. There is nothing wrong with being explicit about it. In addition to needing it to survive, money also buys security, comfort and freedom. And, perhaps most importantly, with money comes social capital. For better or for worse, material wealth is one of the main ways society ranks people’s standing, competence and desirability - if not to say their value. For good reason, the fourth motivation for work and the main reason people work in business is Money.

In the latter days of my career, I found myself in a crisis. I was successful: I had been promoted multiple times, the hours were good, the money was great, the job entailed speaking with interesting and accomplished people. But I wasn’t fulfilled, and so I wasn’t happy. I thought back to moments earlier in my career where I had felt more engaged in work and more satisfied. I set out to understand what had changed using these four motivators as a framework. Not: why do I work; why did I work?

When I first started working, I was ambitious, impressionable, naive and young. I wanted to change the world, and prove myself in the process. I joined a prestigious, competitive company whose mission was, quite literally, to “change the world, one leadership team at a time”. My motivation: Challenge + Impact.

Over time, work became less novel and more repetitive. The challenge became about speed and volume (a reality made clear when my mentor called me a “candidate generation machine”). Though the challenge no longer interested me, I had by that point made friends in the company. I had grown attached to a team which made me feel valued, respected and important. Plus, I still believed I was changing the world. My motivations had shifted; they were now: Impact + People.

Later, the impact that I had once attributed to myself began to feel artificial. My work seemed to make less and less of a difference, and the knowledge that if I stopped doing it, someone else would step in and do it just the same made me feel utterly impactless. But I was still attached to that great team, and they kept me going. And this crisis in purpose coincided with a jump in pay, which proved quite an alluring benefit. During this third phase, my motivations were: People + Money.

After a few years, I left that first company and joined a new, sexier, younger, and (most importantly) higher-paying company. I suffered through the emotional pain of leaving behind the team I had grown so linked to. The group I joined was composed of equally great people, but the attachment didn’t exist. The job was the same, so my cynicism for its impact persisted. And the challenge was also largely unchanged. I found myself reduced to only one motivation: Money.

I started working to change the world and prove myself. And yet, I was seduced. I told myself I could find people, challenge and impact outside of work, but my time and energy were absorbed by work. Predictably, phase four created greater disillusionment, boredom, frustration, and an urge to go do something else, somewhere else.

Finding fulfilment from work comes down to finding the right role for the right person, something I was paid to do for other people, but haven’t done for myself. But to find the right role, you have to start by establishing what matters most to you. How do you prioritise between challenge, impact, people and money? Why do you work?