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• 1.Why this book?

  • An eye-opening, groundbreaking tour of the purpose of work in our lives, showing how work operates in our culture and how you can find your own path to happiness in the workplace.
    
    Why do we work? The question seems so simple. But Professor Barry Schwartz proves that the answer is surprising, complex, and urgent. He explores why so many believe that the goal for working should be to earn money, how we arrived to believe that paying workers more leads to better work, and why this has made our society confused, unhappy, and has established a dangerously misguided system.
    
    How do we change the way we work? With great insight and wisdom, Schwartz shows us how to take our first steps toward understanding, and empowering us all to find great work.
    
    Wharton professor Adam Grant said, “A meaningful look at why we’ve lost meaning at work, and where we can find it.”

• 2.The Crucial Question -- Why do we work?

  • When you squeeze yourself into subway every morning and spare no time to finish day-to-day tasks until the sun goes down, have you ever stopped for one second and think “why do we work?” Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living lives composed of one pleasure-filled adventure after another? It is a simple question, but the answers are various. Some people may think the motivation for work is to make a living. Of course it is, but is that it?
    
    We wouldn’t work if we didn’t get paid, but that’s not at the core of why we get up in the early morning and sit behind our desks before 9 am. If you ask people who are fulfilled by their work the reason why they are, money might never be the first answer. The list of nonmonetary reasons people give for doing their work is long and compelling.
    
    One of the most significant reasons is satisfaction. People feel a sense of satisfaction when they are in charge and achieve a level of mastery or expertise. Years later, it is these working experiences that drive them to be stronger, knowledgeable, skillful and resourceful. Other people go to their workplace and do their work in order to utilize a platform for social engagement. People meet colleagues, make friends, and even participate in online communities to engage and relieve the sense of solitude or loneliness.
    
    According to a massive report published in 2013 by Gallup, the Washington, D.C.-based polling organization, there are twice as many “actively disengaged” workers in the world as there are “engaged” workers who like their jobs. In total, it has polled 25 million employees in 189 different countries. Overall, Gallup found that only 13 percent of workers feel engaged by their jobs.
    
    If work provides us with satisfaction for our mental needs, social engagement and belonging, why do the overwhelming majority of people fall into the category of anti-work? We will see how the author explains it further.

• 3.The False Rationale

  • For more than two centuries, we have all agreed upon the relationship we have with our work. Unlike social phenomenon or scientific invention, this relationship has been considered as a long-accepted belief that people do things for incentives, for rewards and for money. We absorb and adapt to this belief day-by-day as early as childhood. The inventor of the free market, Adam Smith, pursued this belief into theory.
    
    Adam Smith argued that it is beneficial for organizations to divide labor into simple, easily repeated, essentially meaningless units. As long as people were getting paid for what they created, it didn’t matter what their jobs entailed. Also, by dividing labor into little bits, society would gain enormous productive efficiency. Adam Smith’s theory took into account the nature of capitalism and shaped our minds into an “everything’s rewarded mechanism.” However, the missing factor is our attitudes and aspirations towards work.
    
    Many people may think the “pay-for-work” model is very normal, even natural. It is because this idea has been implanted into our brains, social system and customs for hundreds years and people lost the awareness of its existence. Let’s step back for a second and think, is it really within human nature and our relationship with society to continue like this? Maybe we just live in this “theory” of human nature and neglect and eliminate the instinctual and inner feelings of our true nature.
    
    Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz asserted that human beings are “unfinished animals.” What he meant by “unfinished” is that the evolution of society partly shapes our nature. Human nature is more created than innate based on social demand. In conclusion, if we truly want to have human nature, have a positive attitude towards work and enjoy the satisfaction of work and social engagement. We have to abandon those misconceptions from hundreds of years ago. We need to fill the big hole of disengagement and emptiness with the fresh air that encourages people to feel self-confident, enjoy the satisfaction of work and social interaction.

• 4.When Work Is Good

  • The question following the result of Gallup’s survey is: why are there so few people getting satisfaction from their work?  Some people believe that satisfying jobs are the ones that permit them to find meaning, engagement, discretion, and opportunities to learn and grow, such as becoming a lawyer, teacher, and doctor or software developer. Unsatisfying work is just the price people pay for affordable cars, cable TV, cell phones, and computers. So is there any solution to achieve both satisfaction and the need of material prosperity? Let’s see an example.
    
    Luke works as a custodian in a hospital. In an interview with researcher Amy, Luke said he once cleaned a comatose young patient’s room twice. The reason was the patient’s father, who had been keeping a vigil for months, hadn’t seen Luke clean the room. So Luke cleaned it again. But reviewing Luke’s job description, nothing there indicated Luke was responsible for it. Why? Luke said, “I can understand how the father felt. It was like six months that his son was here. He’d been a little frustrated, and so I cleaned it again. But I wasn’t angry with him. I guess I could understand”. What is it that enabled Luke to do work like this? In a simple way, Luke felt satisfied by utilizing his skills to make his patients comfortable and better. Peter Warr, a professor of work psychology, has pointed out, to be satisfied with our work; we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do.
    
    There is no doubt that the attitudes people bring to their work are important, but the author thinks there are limits to what an individual can do psychologically to interpret a tedious job as a meaningful one. At the same time, organization plays a crucial role. Here are six characteristics Management expert Jeffrey Pfeffer summarized that effective organizations have in common:
    
    1. They provide a high degree of employment security.
    2. They rely on self-managed teams and decentralized decision-making.
    3. They pay more than the market demands, which makes employees feel valued. 
    4. They provide extensive training.
    5. They measure employee performance, but trust them.
    6. They put great emphasis on the company mission.

• 5.How Good Work Goes Bad

  • The author goes on to talk about a series of summer job experiences he had at the end of high school and early in college: serving as labor at clothing factory with a horrific working environment, filing financial reports under strict scrutiny, and picking boxes in a shipping center. None of those responsibilities are as sophisticated as a lawyer’s or banker’s. He hated the first two jobs; but surprisingly enjoyed picking boxes in his family business. The major reason is that he felt deeply engaged in contributing. He said, “Feeling like I was a key part of a worthwhile enterprise was enough to make me look forward to going to work, and to doing good work myself.” From his personal experience, the difference between the good and the bad had less to do with actual duties than it did with the general context. When the company creates an environment in which workers are respected, they want to be there and they want to work.
    
    In fact, it needn’t take a lot to turn bad work into good.  It also works in reverse; it needn’t take a lot to turn good work into bad. Now, we’ll delve in the process of switching the nature of a job from good to bad. Mostly people proceed through life under the mistaken assumption that employees don’t want to be there, and thus have to be carefully monitored and incentivized to do their work. But that isn’t the full story.  Let’s take the American Education System as an example.
    
    Donna Moffett, abandoned her $ 60,000-a-year job as a legal secretary to earn $ 37,000 teaching in one of New York’s most troubled schools. She recalled, ““I want to manage a classroom where children experience the thrill of wonder, the joy of creativity, and the rewards of working hard. My objective is to convey to children in their formative years the sheer pleasure in learning.” But that’s not what she got.  What she faced is American education system’s fixed routines and careful instructions, including an actual script and specified allotted times to spend on each activity, from thirty seconds to forty minutes. Because of the No Child Left Behind Act, all states are required to follow these standards. Teachers will be paid and rewarded based on their students’ performance on these standard tests. This incentive system forces teachers to teach no more than the standard syllabus.
    
    We can see from this example, incentives can be a dangerous weapon. When we lose confidence that employees have the motivation to do good work, we turn to incentives, but it is also because of these incentives that good work is going bad.

• 6.The Technology of Ideas and Designing Human Nature

  • Every time a new building is built, the designer faces a new issue regarding where to locate the asphalt walkways that go between buildings. The ideal scenario is that pedestrians will use and follow the path the designer designed. But in real life, things don’t always work out this way -- People may just trample the grass without walking on the path. In this chapter, the author will try to show that at least sometimes, when social scientists build theories, the people unexpectedly come.
    
    Is discovery and invention the same? Of course not, discovery is about telling how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. So is human nature a discovery or invention? Just like fish that don’t know they live in water, we live with the idea that human nature is so locked and impenetrable that we don’t even realize there are other ways to look at ourselves. Let’s review ourselves from a different perspective--where do our ideas about human nature come from?  It is essential to understand “idea technology.”
    
    There are two things about “idea-technology” that make it different from most “thing-technology.” First, because ideas are not objects, they can have profound effects on people before they are even noticed. Second, ideas, unlike things, can have profound effects on people even if the ideas are false. How can idea-technology take root, even when the ideas are false, or even when they are ideology? How does ideology become true? The first way ideology becomes true is by changing people’s attitude towards their own actions. For example, someone who volunteers every week in a homeless shelter might one day read a book that tells him it is human nature to be selfish. In turn, he might label himself as acting altruistically. The second mechanism by which ideology becomes true is via what is called the “self-fulfilling prophecy.”  A sample example of this process is the teacher who pays more attention and works harder with children identified as “smart” than one identified as “slow,” thereby making the “smart” ones smarter. However, her prophecy about the smart students might be wrong in the first place.
    
    Another example for better understanding human nature. We all know the story about the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river and promises he will never sting the frog. However, when they are in the middle of the river, the frog realizes the scorpion has stung him.  The frog asks for an explanation. The scorpion replies, “I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.”
    
    Human nature strongly differs from scorpions because we can control the way we shape it. When we give shape to our social institutions— our schools, our communities and our workplaces— we also shape human nature. Thus, human nature is the most sophisticated product of human design. So if this is true, why don’t we design a workplace that values every employee and gives him sense of security and satisfaction that, in turn, makes that employee go to work happy? Unfortunately, the ideology that people don’t work without incentive systems has already taken root.
    
    The author insistently focuses on the structure of work and workplaces that people face because he thinks that there are real limits to what people can do as individuals in environments that are extremely inhospitable while the goal is to accomplish work that is meaningful. When we start taking responsibility to shape human nature by building the structure of the workplace, here are several questions we need to ask -- “Why” “How” and “When”:
    
    Why – What is the purpose of this work?
    
    How – How can we give workers the freedom to complete their tasks without trust issues?
    
    When – When should we transform our work environment into a better place?
    
    If we work together to create human nature that is worth living up to, the world will be filled with better doctors, lawyers, teachers, hairdressers, better-educated students, and more satisfied clients.

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