“If you find a job you really love, you’ll never work again.”
– Winston Churchill

I’m listening to “The Upside of Irrationality”, by Dan Ariely, because I like to hear how stupid we people are. I like books that take down things that we’ve been taking for granted, like for example, that the bigger the bonus, the better the performance. (According to Ariely, a moderate bonus works best, and a huge bonus actually makes people choke, or lose focus).

He also writes about the importance of meaning in work, and cites several of his experiments as proof of how not only money, but the meaning of the work we do, matters. “Even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way,” he says.

In one of the experiments he pays people to build Lego, but as the subjects realize that their creations get disassembled as soon as they’re finished, they lose their enthusiasm as well.

The same applies to the people who took notes of consecutive “s’s” in a text made up of random sequences of letters, only to see their notes to get shredded, without even being read.

Now, another group also had their notes collected, only, theirs weren’t shredded, they just didn’t get to write their names on the sheets of paper. Theirs were collected, the collector nodded “in a positive way”, and put the sheets in a pile with the others.

The pay was the same for all groups.

The group that did get to also sign their work, completed, on average, 9.03 sheets, while those who got to see theirs get shredded finished only 6.4, and those who simply didn’t get acknowledged … 6.77. As Ariely says, “their work wasn’t destroyed, but neither did they receive any feedback of their work.”

“If you’re a manager who wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts,” Ariely writes.

Now, sitting in a mid-season funk as I am, that hit a little too close to home with me. A freelance writer like myself, one who doesn’t have a column in a major paper, who writes about different topics, in customer magazines, often in Finnish, hardly ever gets any feedback. I always joke about how the only feedback I get – and want – is the payment of my invoice, but of course it also sometimes makes me ask that dangerous question: “What’s the point?”

Is there one?

Money motivates, sure.

And, of course, often the point seems to be the actual process of writing a piece, learning something new, and meeting interesting people. However, after all that, I then come back home and check this blog’s stats, and the number of visitors.

I often try to guess the number while the page loads. There’s a short pause, just enough for me to close my eyes and mumble the number of visitors I think I’ve had (not the one I hope to have had) and if the actual number of visitors is higher than my guess, I do a little fist pump, just by myself.

Readers give writing meaning.

That’s why I make Wife read all my blog entries, and sit next to her, or opposite of her, to see if she laughs in the right places. And when she does, it all makes sense.

Now, all this is just an elaborate scheme to get your attention, and to make you notice my new Facebook page, for my writing. (There’s a box in the navigation sidebar). So, “like” it, “like” this page. Even a small amount goes a long way.