Top 5: Finding Joy in Any Job

To mark the podcast's fifth birthday, Dr Laurie is revisiting some of her favorite episodes. And this show - Working Your Way to Happiness - has a special place in her heart. Marty kills rats... but if you asked him what his job is he'd say it was "solving problems" and "helping people". How we view our work can contribute greatly to our daily levels of happiness - far more than money or status. Dr Laurie examines how we all came to ignore the importance of job satisfaction and hears from Professor Amy Wrzesniewski about "job crafting" - the reframing skill that happy people like Marty use to see their careers as more than just a way to make money. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:08Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:19Laurie Santos?

  It's an exciting time here at the Happiness Lab because the Happiness Lab is having a birthday. Our podcast has just turned five years old. And to celebrate, I sent my producer, Ryan Dilly, deep into the archive to grab about the five episodes that I found the most memorable from all the hundreds that we've made together. So, Ryan, which episode is up next?

• 1:37Speaker 04

  So this show is from season two and is called Working Your Way to Happiness. This is one where I have a slightly humiliating cameo appearance, but that's not why you chose it, right?

• 1:45Laurie Santos?

  No, it's totally why I chose it. I really enjoyed your scream in that episode.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  A lot of this show is built around, as listeners will find out, a lot of this show is built around me seeing a rat that had run into a house.

• 1:57Laurie Santos?

  Which is the part of the wonderful cameo because we get to hear at least a reenactment of the scream that you gave when you saw the rat. But the episode's not about Ryan or screaming. It's really about kind of the job of someone who has to deal with folks who see. Rats all the time. We interviewed Yale's pest management person, Marty, and he was the perfect guest for this episode because it was an entire episode about what we can do to be happier at work and the misconceptions we have about happiness at work, like the idea that being a pest control person might not be the best job, when it turns out Marty really adores what he does for work.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  And this episode also includes a research-backed idea that gets more pushback than any other thing that we mention about. People get so angry. And that is, the amount of money that you make doesn't predict how happy you will be.

• 2:41Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, this is something that the science has shown us for a while with some nuance, right? If you're not making enough money to put food on the table or put a roof over your head, definitely more money will make you happier at work and beyond. But for folks making a reasonable wage, money doesn't seem to be the path to happiness that we think. At work, it seems to be other things. And that's really what Marty was so great at teaching us. So this is one of the reasons that I've loved this episode. It features good screams from my beloved producer, Ryan, and some really important science about what makes us happy at work. I hope you'll love this episode, too. Working your way to happiness.

• 3:17Laurie Santos?

  No, no, it was much more like terrified than that.

• 3:27Laurie Santos?

  I'm going through my sound effects library with my friend and producer, Ryan Dilly. I'm trying to find a very specific scream, one that's forever etched into my memory.

• 3:37Laurie Santos?

  No, that's like way more of a manly, brave scream. I think we need it more high pitched and frantic and fearful. We're trying to reenact a rather horrifying moment that Ryan and I experienced a few months back. We were working on our podcast scripts, and Ryan needed a cup of coffee. So he headed into the kitchen, and that was when I heard it.

• 4:01Laurie Santos?

  I think that's, that's pretty close. I think that was it. Ryan emitted the longest, loudest, and most terror-filled shriek I've ever heard. Apparently, a huge terrifying rat had run through the kitchen, a rodent that was, at least according to Ryan's retelling, about the size of a large Great Dane or a small horse. I assumed he was exaggerating and that it was probably just a harmless mouse, the kind we get on college campuses from time to time, especially when there's construction outside. A tiny mouse that was probably now feeling so terrorized by Ryan's scream that it had likely high-tailed it out of the house, never to be heard from again. But just as I was explaining that we had absolutely nothing to worry about,

• 4:45Laurie Santos?

  the creature that I could now clearly see was definitely not a tiny mouse, was back. It raced from the kitchen, into the study, around our feet, and then slithered into a heating duct on the wall. But I wasn't worried, not because the rat wasn't huge or terrifying. It was definitely both. I just knew it wasn't going to be a problem for long. Because at Yale, when these things happen and you need someone to resolve the issue quickly, you just call.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Marty Gilorin, pest control operator.

• 5:14Laurie Santos?

  Marty is like the Terminator for vermin. Within minutes, he was at my house, armed with baits and traps galore.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  I like to get there as soon as I can to help people, yeah. I don't like to leave, you know, calls waiting too long. And that was kind of an emergency call, because it was a rat in a living space.

• 5:31Laurie Santos?

  While Ryan continued to stand bravely on the sofa, Marty was sprawled on the floor. He checked for the rat where we last saw it, face pressed up against the air duct. Marty then set his traps like a general deploying his armies. He strategized about all aspects of the rat's moves. Like, what if the rat retreated here, or made a break for it over there? Within minutes, all the traps were down. And almost as soon as Marty left, we heard...

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Oh, I got lucky on that one. Sometimes it takes a lot longer.

• 6:01Laurie Santos?

  Marty is a vermin aficionado, one of the most skilled professionals I've ever met. But few people want a job like Marty's. In fact, pest control is usually included in lists of the worst possible jobs in America. Some exterminators face low wages, deal with dangerous chemicals, and spend their working hours in the company of scary critters that can bite, scratch, and sting.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  I usually get stung about once a year. Kind of just comes with, with the territory.

• 6:28Laurie Santos?

  But Marty, it turns out, is the exact kind of person we should emulate if we want to find the perfect job, or even just to be happier at work generally. Because as you'll hear in this episode, science suggests that our intuitions about good jobs and bad jobs are all wrong. We think that pay and perks and plush offices are what makes us happy in our careers. But as we'll see, happiness and human motivation work much differently than our lying minds realize.

• 6:58Laurie Santos?

  Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 7:22Laurie Santos?

  What did you want to be when you grew up? I'm going to venture a guess that rat exterminator was pretty far down the list. It was for Marty, too. He grew up with the standard career aspirations. I mean, like every kid, I guess, a fireman or a cop or, you know, when you're a kid. But Marty never joined the police department or signed on at the fire station. After graduating, he drifted into a number of different jobs. Just like restaurant work and, you know, a security guard and filling vending machines, things like that. They all paid OK, but Marty wasn't exactly filled with joy when he clocked in every Monday morning. And he wasn't alone. According to a recent Gallup poll from 2018, only about a third of American workers report feeling really engaged with their jobs.

• 8:07Laurie Santos?

  Over 50% admit feeling actively not engaged. They merely put up with boring work. And nearly 20% report hating what they do for a living. I've had jobs where I've had that problem before. Like, I have to go to work. This is not good. It's Monday morning. It's probably not all that surprising, but hating your job isn't that great for your happiness. Which raises an important question. What actually makes for a happier job? What could make work life better for the nearly 100 million Americans who feel disengaged on the job? Many of us have a pretty strong intuition here. We'd be happier if only we had a bigger salary. Take one LinkedIn survey from 2014. It found that financial compensation was the top value that most college students

• 8:51Laurie Santos?

  look for when considering a new job opportunity. Compensation was chosen more often than work-life balance, having good colleagues, or even career development. And our intuition that a bigger paycheck means a happier career isn't just affecting our job choices. It's also affecting how we choose to live our lives generally. Consider the results of one study, which has surveyed the values of incoming freshmen for the last half-century. In 2018, more than 80% of freshmen said that being well-off financially was really important in life. It was more important than raising a family or developing a meaningful philosophy on life. And that's a big change compared to the answers their parents or grandparents gave. The number of students who think big salaries are key

• 9:35Laurie Santos?

  has gone up dramatically since the 1960s. But is our growing intuition about a link between money and job satisfaction right? Can employers really improve the well-being of the nearly 2/3 of people who hate their jobs simply by paying them more?

• 9:50Speaker 05

  When you ask people what would make their lives better or what would make their jobs better, the first thing they point to is, "My life's so good, and if I only made 10% more, it would be perfect."

• 10:01Laurie Santos?

  This is Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of the book, Why We Work.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  People are wrong. This is not the case. Money does buy a little bit of happiness, but it doesn't buy a lot of happiness.

• 10:17Laurie Santos?

  We covered this in an earlier episode called "The Unhappy Millionaire", but it's worth repeating here. If you're not making a living wage, more money will definitely improve your overall well-being. But if you currently earn $100,000 or more a year, doubling or even tripling your salary won't have any effect on your emotions or your stress levels. Even the super-rich can lead sad and lonely lives.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  For the most part, doing what you do in order to earn a little bit more is putting your energy in the wrong direction. And it can have perverse effects in that if the amount of money you make starts to be the metric you use to evaluate whether you're successful or not and whether you're getting anything out of your work, it's the wrong metric.

• 11:03Laurie Santos?

  I've seen so many of my Yale students head in exactly this wrong direction after graduation. They pick a job based only on salary. Sometimes they even choose careers they kind of know they're going to hate just because it comes with a great paycheck. But they soon end up experiencing what's come to be known as the golden handcuffs, that feeling of being stuck in a high-paying job that you absolutely hate. And that's one of the reasons that professions we often think of as good jobs, the most prestigious ones with the highest salaries, think doctor, lawyer, Wall Street investor. The people who have these prestigious jobs have suicide rates that are one and a half times those of the average population. Higher paychecks are simply not having the positive effect on our mental health that

• 11:47Laurie Santos?

  we think. But why are our intuitions about money and job satisfaction so messed up? How did we come to think of more money as the answer to all our work woes? And if a huge paycheck doesn't make a job better, then what does? To get to the bottom of all these questions, we need to turn back to the very critter we started the show with. That's right. The rat. The Happiness Lab. We'll be back in a moment.

• 12:17Laurie Santos?

  There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie. Specifically, Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear it every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere and organic cotton.

• 13:02Laurie Santos?

  And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more, from leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. With the holidays coming up, I've been thinking a lot about how to make my new sabbatical place feel a little more like home and a little more festive for hosting friends and family. So after recently getting an awesome new living room rug from Wayfair, I wanted to pull the whole look together.

• 13:47Laurie Santos?

  I found these gorgeous round ruched velvet pillows on Wayfair and bought them in a bunch of different colors to complement the rug. They're soft, they add a fun pop of color, and they make my apartment feel so much more pulled together and ready for the holidays. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high-quality, customer-trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without the stress. And with Wayfair Verified, you can create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Their products are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. These days, I've been using Wayfair a lot, and I think you should too. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home.

• 14:31Laurie Santos?

  That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 14:37Laurie Santos?

  What if I told you your skin and your brain are often in conversation? It's true, and that's why what you feel shows up on your skin. Think goosebumps, blushing, and even signs of stress. Tatcha harnesses the skin-mind connection to create skincare rituals that care for both skin and mind. At the heart of Tatcha's formulas is Hadasei-3, their proprietary complex that counteracts visible signs of stress on skin. It's made up of three Japanese ingredients that are double-fermented to harness 400-plus micronutrients. These micronutrients synchronize your skin's natural renewal cycles and boost resilience to daily stressors for visibly firmer, smoother, breathtaking skin.

• 15:19Laurie Santos?

  Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off.

• 15:35Laurie Santos?

  Back in the 1700s, a famous Scottish philosopher visited an innovative manufacturing operation: a pin factory. Now, you might not think pin making would require that much innovation. I mean, at first glance, it doesn't seem all that complicated to make a simple pin. And we're not even talking about safety pins here, just the really, really simple, straight kind. But back in the 18th century, creating each pin was tough. It took 18 individual steps. First, you needed to measure and clip the length of wire, then straighten. After that, you carefully sharpened one end. Once that point was set, you prepared the other end to attach the head, which involved several steps, like grinding the top to make sure it was the right texture.

• 16:20Laurie Santos?

  Finally, the pin heads needed to be affixed. And after that, they had to be placed in a perfect row onto a little sheet of cardboard that holds them. Pin manufacture was a time-consuming business. A worker on his own, who did all of those steps, one after another, would only be able to make about 20 pins per day. But the management of the factory figured out how to speed things up. They broke the work up so that each employee only did one or two steps over and over again. It was this innovation that especially impressed that visiting philosopher, a scholar who later became known as the father of economics: Adam Smith. Smith began his famous book, The Wealth of Nations, with a story of this humble enterprise. He realized that the factory's assembly line

• 17:05Laurie Santos?

  didn't just allow production to go a little faster. On the day he visited, 10 workers were able to make 12 pounds of pins, so 48,000 in total. That's a rate that's 50 times faster than the traditional method. By splitting up the complex tasks, Smith argued, management could create way, way, way more pins at a much, much, much lower cost. And that meant that customers could buy pins more cheaply. And they might even think of new ways to use pins, since they were now so cheap, which might increase the overall market for pins, making the factory even more money. In the end, this simple pin factory inspired Smith's principle of the assembly line, or what he called "division of labor."

• 17:49Laurie Santos?

  It was an idea that completely changed the Industrial Revolution and paved the way for modern capitalist manufacturing.

• 17:58Laurie Santos?

  But as psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book, Why We Work, there was a big downside to division of labor, at least for the pinworkers.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  So you're just taking a pliers and straightening wire and handing it off to the next guy. Why would you show up at this job? There's only one possible reason to do this work, and that's for the paycheck.

• 18:18Laurie Santos?

  The idea that people need to get paid in return for their labor was central to some of Smith's deeper ideas about human nature.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  His view was that people were basically lazy, and if they didn't have to work, they wouldn't. And so, the optimal life is lying on a couch, eating Doritos and watching Netflix. So how do you get people off their asses? You have to make it worth their while for them to do things. And they will work as hard as you make them work to get the payoff. What they do doesn't matter, since they'd rather be doing nothing than something. As long as you have the incentives right, you can get them to do anything. Nobody likes working on an assembly line, but Smith's point is that nobody likes doing any kind of work. So break the work up into as efficient

• 19:08Speaker 05

  and meaningless chunks as you can, so that people can do the same thing over and over and over again, as fast as possible. And as long as you pay them, they'll do it.

• 19:17Laurie Santos?

  Smith's view of humans as lazy paycheck seekers pervaded the entire Industrial Revolution. But it would take more than 100 years before Smith's concepts were tested scientifically. And that's where we turn back to...

• 19:32Laurie Santos?

  the humble rat.

• 19:35Laurie Santos?

  Seventeen decades after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, a bunch of rats would finally give Smith's ideas of human nature the scientific veneer they needed.

• 19:44Speaker 05

  My training as a psychologist began in the framework developed by a guy named B.F. Skinner, who, at the time, was probably the most famous and most influential living psychologist. Skinner invented the famous Skinner box, where you would take a rat and put him in a box, and they'd be hungry or thirsty, and they'd run down an alley, or they'd push on a bar. And they'd get food, or they'd get water. And he thought that by understanding how payoffs...

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Influenced the behavior of rats, you would understand what governed all the voluntary behavior of all living things. He didn't care about rats, he cared about people. But he thought that in this little, simple environment, you basically were capturing why people work hard in the workplace, because they want a paycheck, or a bonus, or a promotion. And that's the nature of human motivation, is we do things to get things. This is very much in the spirit of Adam Smith, the father of the Industrial Revolution.

• 20:52Laurie Santos?

  Skinner's work finally gave Smith's ideas the scientific validation they needed. His rats provided proof that organisms are in fact lazy, that they needed a reward for getting off their butts, and that they'd probably never find work to be inherently worth doing, or fun. Which means, if you want to get people to work, you gotta give them a reward. But Barry argues that there's a problem with this people are so lazy, you gotta pay them view. The problem is, it's flat out wrong.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  People won't work if they don't get paid, and they need to make enough money to support themselves and their family. But once that's done, that's not really what motivates people. What motivates people is they want to be working on something that matters, which for most of the time means has an impact on the lives of other people. Not curing cancer impact, it could be a small impact. They want work that engages them, that forces them to think, to be active. They want work that's varied, not the same thing over and over again. They want work that's challenging. And all those things make jobs good, given a constant pay.

• 22:03Laurie Santos?

  These sorts of intrinsic rewards, feeling engaged, finding meaning, getting creative, they make work worth doing. And allowing workers to experience these internal rewards, it turns out, would be a smarter thing for employers to focus on than a paycheck. Because a growing body of research shows that if you want good work done, you might want to try making your employees' jobs a little happier.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  You want people who show up in the office every day because they want to be in the office every day, and who leave every day feeling like somebody's life has been made better because of what they did.

• 22:36Laurie Santos?

  But if that's the case, why do so many careers lack things like meaning or engagement? Why do so many people hate their jobs? The reason, according to Barry, is that employers bought into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're working with the same wrong theory of human motivation that Smith had hundreds of years ago, that people are lazy and that money is the only way to motivate them.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  So you create a world in which Smith's vision is true. You create a world in which meaning, engagement, autonomy, control, and challenge have all been eliminated. And then you look at, you point to people working in this world and you say, see, I told you, people just do it for the pay.

• 23:18Laurie Santos?

  And as Skinner showed, rewards do work. People will do mind-numbing jobs like sticking heads on pins over and over and over, but they won't do it because of the normal human motivations for meaning or passion, or any of the important things that make us want to get up in the morning. And that worries Barry. The pin factory division of labor still reigns in lots and lots of modern jobs, from boring data entry work to tedious telephone sales, to the workers who have to put buns on fast food hamburgers over and over and over.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Essentially, you've created a Skinner box. You've created an environment in which Smith's view is correct, because you've eliminated every other factor that might influence people.

• 23:59Laurie Santos?

  Barry has also seen this trend emerging in careers that are often considered to be much higher status and more skilled. They are now also filled with the sorts of carrots and sticks you need when people's hearts and minds aren't into what they're doing. Law firms that force attorneys to clock their every second with clients, HMOs that regulate doctors' interactions with patients. Lots and lots of jobs are starting to feel more like a rat race because they're specifically designed to treat us like Skinner's rodents. The biggest irony of this, though, is that by removing meaning from work, you inadvertently make people more miserable. And that means you get less productive, less motivated, and less conscientious workers. Removing meaning can jeopardize a business's profits.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  And it makes you wonder why it is that people who want to make money are leaving money on the table by creating workplaces that drive productivity out of their workforce. No effort is put into creating workplaces where people want to be.

• 25:00Laurie Santos?

  The good news, though, is that there is another path to follow.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  You can make reasonably unattractive work attractive if you make people feel trusted and important in the work that they do.

• 25:12Laurie Santos?

  And that's why I want to turn back to Marty. I mean, Marty's job seems to fit the definition of reasonably unattractive work.

• 25:19Speaker 06

  We get calls a lot for just to pick up a dead animal or something. And some of that can be pretty, not very pleasant.

• 25:25Laurie Santos?

  In fact, when Marty first got into exterminating, he was focused on the same external rewards that many of us use to pick a new career.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  I was doing a maintenance work at a local newspaper, and I saw an ad, pest control, company vehicle. That was really cool to me. I was like 20 years old and they're going to give me a company vehicle to take home. Wow.

• 25:44Laurie Santos?

  But if you ask Marty what he loves about this career 40 years later, that company car has little to do with it.

• 25:50Speaker 06

  I just love the variety. I love that you never know where you're going to be from one day to the next. Just yesterday, I was taking a possum off of a roof. I don't know how it got up on a roof. It's, I don't know, it's just, it's fun.

• 26:01Laurie Santos?

  When Marty gets talking about what he loves about his job, you're in for a really long conversation. Because pest control gives him lots and lots of the internal rewards that science shows us makes his job worth doing, like variety and mental challenge.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  It's about solving problems, more or less. I remember chasing a bat out of one of the libraries, actually, here at Yale.

• 26:22Laurie Santos?

  Oh, really?

• 26:22Speaker 06

  And it was, it was rather difficult. We had to bring an extension ladder in and go all the way up to the top of the ladder with a net, and it flew away. And it just went into a vent and never, never was heard from again. You just never know what you're going to get, and then one day to the next.

• 26:36Laurie Santos?

  Marty's job also gives him a sense of meaning. Beyond just working through creative solutions to problems, he also gets to help. Some very scared people.

• 26:46Speaker 06

  I had a student once that woke up and saw a cockroach on her bedroom door, which was about six feet across the room, totally terrified, in tears, wouldn't get out of bed until it was solved. So going there and solving something like that, really, yeah, you know, it makes you, it makes you feel good. I get, I get a lot of thank yous from the kids.

• 27:03Laurie Santos?

  Marty also gets to help his clients overcome the feelings of shame they have about requiring his services in the first place.

• 27:10Speaker 06

  I try to explain to him that it can happen to anybody. People get bugs, people get cockroaches, the cleanest environments. It calms them down a bit, calms their fears and, you know, they, they're less embarrassed.

• 27:22Laurie Santos?

  Do you think you'd do it if they didn't pay you?

• 27:24Speaker 06

  I mean, helping people, yeah, because, you know, a neighbor or something that comes over, hey, I have a bee's nest or something like that, and you've had the, you know, the experience in taking care of it, or how do I get rid of the squirrels in my attic, or, yeah, I think I'd still do it. There's really no other job like it. It's such a unique position, meeting different people, different problems, every day is different. I do feel grateful and lucky that I'm, that I'm doing this.

• 27:46Laurie Santos?

  Human beings aren't lab rats in a Skinner box. We're motivated not just by monetary rewards, but by variety, challenge, and having a positive impact on other people's lives. These are the things that get workers like Marty out of bed on a Monday morning. The problem is that a lot of us don't experience the same joy that Marty finds in his work. But you don't need to quit your job to find the happiness that he enjoys. There are evidence-based strategies you can use to enrich your work, no matter what your actual job description. We'll learn about all those strategies when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

• 28:26Laurie Santos?

  There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know, when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear it every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium

• 29:08Laurie Santos?

  materials like Mongolian cashmere and organic cotton. And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more. From leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. What if I told you your skin and your brain are often in conversation? It's true. And that's why what you feel shows up on your skin. Think goosebumps, blushing,

• 29:52Laurie Santos?

  and even signs of stress. Tatcha harnesses the skin-mind connection to create skincare rituals that care for both skin and mind. At the heart of Tatcha's formulas is Hadasei-3, their proprietary complex that counteracts visible signs of stress on skin. It's made up of three Japanese ingredients that are double-fermented to harness 400-plus micronutrients. These micronutrients synchronize your skin's natural renewal cycles and boost resilience to daily stressors for visibly firmer, smoother, breathtaking skin. Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off.

• 30:35Laurie Santos?

  If I could permanently delete one thing from my brain, I think it would be the memory of all those little awkward interactions that my brain insists on replaying at 2:00 a.m. You know the ones. You said something madly embarrassing during a dinner party, and suddenly your brain decides it's time for a full cinematic replay. As a psychologist who studies happiness, I know that our minds aren't always great at deciding what deserves our attention. We tend to give these awkward moments way, way more mental real estate than they deserve. But knowing that intellectually doesn't mean it's easier to let them go. And that's one of the reasons that therapy can be so valuable. Therapy gives you a chance to step back and to understand the patterns that you're stuck in, so that you can find healthy ways to move forward. If you're thinking about trying therapy, you should check out BetterHelp.

• 31:20Laurie Santos?

  BetterHelp will connect you with a licensed, experienced therapist, and they do the initial matching work for you, based on your needs and preferences. And if your first match isn't right, BetterHelp will let you switch therapists at any time. BetterHelp is now in-network, with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/Laurie. That's better, H-E-L-P, dot com slash Laurie.

• 31:59Laurie Santos?

  Most teenage obsessions revolve around bands, or sports, or political causes. Amy Rizneski found herself drawn to something very different, a topic she turned over and over in her young mind.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  It has taken me a really long time to figure out why, it's sort of weird for a teenager, to become interested in something like this.

• 32:18Laurie Santos?

  What was the thing that had Amy so puzzled? Well, she looked around at the people in her life, people in her family, her neighborhood, in stores and offices, and she saw a vivid and troubling divide.

• 32:29Speaker 06

  Seeing people who were working incredibly hard, but feeling, at the end of the day, kind of maybe empty, maybe not too strong a word, about what it all meant, versus people who felt like they bounded out of work every day to come home, feeling as though they had done something that really mattered, and they had done it well, and it had changed people's lives. And the thing that's been, for me, the most fascinating part of this puzzle is that it's not necessarily contingent on the kind of work people are doing. And I think that's a very cool puzzle to try to unpack and think about.

• 33:02Laurie Santos?

  Figuring that puzzle out brought Amy here to Yale, where she's now a professor at the School of Management.

• 33:08Speaker 06

  There's a whole research literature that analyzes, kind of, what's a good job and what's a bad job, and it just looks at the job, like, what is it that the person's doing? And as psychologists, we knew there might be actually more going on here, in terms of how people really experience this work and think about this work.

• 33:24Laurie Santos?

  Research back in the 1980s had shown that people tend to take one of three orientations towards their work. They either think of it as a job, a career, or a calling.

• 33:34Speaker 06

  So people who view their work primarily as a job see the work as a means to a financial end. People who view their work with a career orientation see the work as primarily a means to advance within the field or the work or the occupation they're in. It's a stepping stone to the next thing that's going to come. Whereas people who see the work as a calling are not focused on financial outcomes primarily, or career advancement primarily, but instead are primarily focused on the work itself. They see the work as an end in itself. These are people who, again, if they hit the lottery or something like that, feel so deeply about the work that they're doing, feel fulfilled by it, feel like it's a contribution that they would be more likely to want to stay involved in it. And interestingly, they see

• 34:17Speaker 06

  the work, regardless of what the job is, as contributing to the world in a meaningful way to make it a better place.

• 34:23Laurie Santos?

  But the question that fascinated Amy was how a person comes to consider their work a calling. You might think the way to test this question would be to study professionals that we typically think of as well-respected: surgeons, concert pianists, podcast hosts, that kind of thing. But Amy did something different. She studied how positive work orientations develop in seemingly not-so-great jobs.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  We were really interested in understanding the experience of people who clean in hospitals, so hospital custodial staff.

• 34:55Laurie Santos?

  The duties of a hospital janitor are easy to sum up: mop the floors, sweep up, wash soiled bed linens, dispose of garbage bins filled with hazardous waste. It's not fun stuff. These sorts of positions don't require much previous experience or a formal education. Becoming a hospital janitor is considered neither glamorous nor all that skilled. But Amy wasn't interested in what the typical person thought of this work. She was interested in how the cleaning staff themselves described their roles. So she just asked a group of hospital workers, "How skilled do you think your job is?"

• 35:29Speaker 06

  It's a simple question, except... It yielded two really different answers. We had one set of participants who said it's not very skilled at all. And we had another set of participants who reported the work was really quite skilled.

• 35:40Laurie Santos?

  Amy figured she must have inadvertently tested two kinds of staff members. Ones with different duties. Maybe one group had more senior janitors or more specialist roles. But that turned out not to be the case.

• 35:52Speaker 06

  Nothing about the structure of their job explained this difference.

• 35:56Laurie Santos?

  So Amy dug a little deeper. Those who considered themselves unskilled were generally dissatisfied with their jobs. They were part of that two thirds of Americans who were disengaged from their work. But the staff members who saw their job as requiring skill absolutely loved what they did for a living. Many of them even saw it as a calling and acted accordingly.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  They were meant to be kind of wafting in and out of spaces and making sure that those spaces were clean. They were instructed to not interact with patients. And what we were finding was they were engaging in enormous amounts of patient care and attentiveness to what was happening with patients and their families, what it was people might need. They really engaged the job sort of quite differently and saw and described what it was that they were doing there as helping patients to heal.

• 36:45Laurie Santos?

  Amy calls this technique job crafting. The art of redesigning the specific work you do to match your personal strengths and values, and thus amplify the sense of meaning you get from your job. One of Amy's favorite examples of job crafting came from a janitor who worked on a unit caring for coma patients. People who were severely ill, fully unconscious, and in need of a miracle. That staff member did the usual duties, mopping and tidying. But she also did one additional task that wasn't strictly part of her job description and that no one had told her to do.

• 37:19Speaker 06

  She would take the artwork off the walls of the hospital rooms in this unit and switch it around to just sort of mix things up. Even though these patients were not conscious, she hoped that maybe by changing something in their environment, that even if it seemed like they weren't aware of what was going on, maybe it would stimulate something or spark something as it was a change that could help promote their healing and speed them along whatever journey they would take.

• 37:42Laurie Santos?

  Another janitor Amy encountered was assigned to a particularly depressing set of duties. She had to clean up after patients on the cancer ward.

• 37:51Speaker 06

  Given that chemotherapy makes people very sick to their stomach, there was a lot of throwing up to contend with. And so this cleaning staff member, who, again, remember by the structure of the job, not really supposed to be interacting with patients, you're just supposed to go and, you know, clean things up. Instead, turned this into an opportunity to really bring comfort and humor to the patients. Because imagine, you're an adult, you've just been sick, you know, all over yourself and all over the floor. It's embarrassing. Now, somebody has to come clean this up. You feel awful, right? This is not a good moment. And so this cleaning staff member would show up and say, "I want to thank you for getting sick. I have a car. I have car payments to make. The more you get sick, the more job security I have." And so you have someone who's now laughing

• 38:37Speaker 06

  in the context of this awful situation by this transformative set of moves done by someone who has gotten not any training in patient care or patient interaction, but who has taken it upon herself to think about, "How can I still do the cleanup, still do the work that's required of me, but do it in a way that's transformative on the relationships that she has with her patients?"

• 38:58Laurie Santos?

  Getting to know happy hospital cleaners convinced Amy that job crafting can have a transformative effect on people's happiness at work. She hypothesized that the third of Americans who feel engaged with their jobs probably feel that way in part because they too job craft.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  I think this happens all the time. It happens in all kinds of jobs. But I think it's important to recognize that it happens in jobs where people don't have permission to do it, or they're not encouraged to do it. They might actually be forbidden from doing it. We could all be better off if we just granted people more autonomy to bring their strengths into the work that they're doing, while trusting them that they will keep in mind the things that they're responsible to do for the organization.

• 39:39Laurie Santos?

  Now that Amy has answered the question that's bugged her for decades, her research has shifted to address a more practical question. How can we get more people to job craft?

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Are there interventions that can be done that can help people connect more deeply with what it is that makes their work meaningful? Not just by thinking about it, but by encouraging people to redesign the job, still accomplish what it is they're responsible to the organization for accomplishing in the work, but do it in such a way that it's tapping the things that they care most about and the ways in which they most want to contribute.

• 40:09Laurie Santos?

  It's worth mentioning here, though, that deciding to pep up your job doesn't mean you can ignore the tasks you were hired to do.

• 40:15Speaker 06

  Job crafting isn't deciding, you know, I'd really love to be the company guitarist, so I'm just gonna bring my guitar in and play. And I think everybody will appreciate that because I'm being my best, you know, my best self.

• 40:27Laurie Santos?

  The other barrier to crafting your job might be your boss. Just like Adam Smith watching those pinmakers, your manager might still fall for the lie that giving a big paycheck is the only way to get the job done.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  I sometimes hear from managers who feel very nervous about this because it means giving up control. We can't possibly allow our employees to do this. It would be a mess, you know, people would be, you know, freestyling and off-roading and, you know, doing things that would be, you know, really problematic in the organization. And my response to that is, well, actually, if this is how you see it, what I can tell you is they're already job crafting because they're, this is happening everywhere. It's just that they're hiding it from you. And so you have a choice. Is this something that you want to help facilitate and encourage and what have you? Or you want to continue to sort of drive this underground with employees who will still take the degrees of freedom they can find to derive more meaning and more of the kind of identity

• 41:20Speaker 06

  they want to enact in the work in any way they can in how they're doing the work.

• 41:26Laurie Santos?

  While I'm certainly not praying that my house gets infested with rats, bats, or possums, or mice, hornets, termites, or roaches, I do enjoy Marty's infrequent visits. His job is to set up traps and put down poison. But I now realize that he does all the things that Amy studies in her job crafting work. He genuinely enjoys the puzzles that pests bring. He concentrates on the people who need his help, and he works quickly and calmly to reassure his jittery clients. It's mixing metaphors, but if exterminators had a bedside manner, Marty has perfected it. Sure, he kills bugs, but his real focus seems to be eradicating the stress and worry of the people who need his help. I asked Marty if during the 40 years in this job,

• 42:09Laurie Santos?

  he's ever daydreamed about doing something else: becoming a cop, or a firefighter, maybe. I've thought about it in the past, honestly, but I've always come back to this, and I do, yeah, I do feel grateful. If you really hate your job, if it's making you ill, or if there's a bad workplace culture or discrimination, or if you're not even making a living wage, then you should quit as soon as you can and search for something better. But if you're simply feeling kind of disengaged from your daily work, then give job crafting a try. Because that dream job that you fantasize about, it doesn't really exist. The research shows that any job can turn into a calling, if you bring the right attitude. And maybe a few science-backed tips from the Happiness Lab, with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 43:01Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. When it comes to taking care of their customers, Amica goes the extra mile. From listening to your insurance needs to following up after a claim, Amica provides coverage with empathy. Because as a mutual insurer, Amica is built for its customers and prioritizes you. It's the way insurance should be. Amica: We're your priority number one. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust Forimprint. With thousands of high-quality, customizable products, like premium apparel, drinkware, tech, and more, it's easy

• 43:46Laurie Santos?

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• 44:04Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.