Michael Braun's Blog

I had a thought-provoking conversation with someone while I was traveling for work last week. She and I seem to align quite closely on a lot of issues relating to work, and it was nice to get the perspective of someone who has been in the corporate world for many more years than me. The basic idea that she presented to me was in regards to working late for work, coming in on weekends, and generally going “above and beyond” for your employer. We agreed that those times stick in your memory greatly. I remember each and every time I stayed late at work or was forced to work on a weekend. The follow-up question: does your company remember those times as well? It’s pretty easy to come up with the answer for most companies; even if they do remember, the memory is not as deep or as strong as your own memory of that time. If you toss family into the equation, I bet your child, spouse, or significant other remembers those times strongly as well.

This weekend, I saw some folks working in a coffeeshop; they had their laptops out, typing away. Based on the small labels they had on their laptops, it was obvious what local software company they worked for. I knew what they were doing, and it made me sad. What do they stand to gain by spending their personal time (Mother’s Day, even) by putting in time for their employer? Are they up for a big promotion? Have they over-committed? Or do they simply feel that this is the expectation, someone believes that they will be working on weekends, evenings, round-the-clock, because that’s the kind of person they are?

A while back, while discussing ambition with my mother, I came up with a solid definition: the desire to achieve a goal that reaches beyond personal standing or stands to benefit others for the purpose of benefiting society. It is hard to tell someone to stop working on an evening or weekend when that person is trying to be ambitious. When there is a clear benefit to putting in that extra work, what right do I have to ask that person to forego that benefit?

Applying this definition to the folks I saw working, it’s hard to imagine that their work fits my definition of ambition. I can guarantee that they were not working on a goal that would benefit society as a whole. They weren’t teachers, government workers, or civil servants. A teacher grading papers reaches to benefit society by showing his kids that he cares about their work, showing them he is willing to put in that extra time for success. I know too that these people did not have something beyond their personal standing to reach for. There was not a promotion at stake. Perhaps they stood a better chance of getting a raise down the line; that’s such a nebulous goal that I do not believe it could cause feelings of ambition towards their immediate work.

Extra work without ambition is wasted time. It means the person is working purely for the benefit of a money-making body, a corporation. It means the worker has enmeshed herself into the gears of the machine. Workers of the world, unite! Once you become part of the machine, you cease to feel the pain of your fellow workers. You see things only from the perspective of the machine, whose purpose it is to consume all that it can. You have been consumed, if you can see things from the perspective of the machine. Did you feel the consumption, or are you so numb that you didn’t even realize you had gone through the gears?