“The Worth of Work”
Given by Lloyd Newell
Have you ever wondered what makes people happy?
A noted psychologist made it his life’s work to find out.
Over a period of 25 years, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
from the University of Chicago studied the lives of athletes,
artists, and assembly-line workers. Through exhaustive research,
interviews, and surveys, he sought to discover what it is that
makes people feel the most alive, the most fulfilled — in short,
the happiest.
The more he studied, the more he realized that happiness didn’t
have much to do with what people did for a living. A janitor,
for example, might feel more fulfilled than a judge; a farmer
happier than a physician.
At the conclusion of his research, he discovered that genuinely
happy individuals are engaged in activities that stretch their
minds or bodies to their limits “in a voluntary effort to accomplish
something difficult and worthwhile.”1
He also concluded that happiness is not something that happens
by chance or is reserved for the chosen, lucky few. Happiness
is available to all who lose themselves in work that is meaningful.
To poets it could be writing a sonnet; to parents, raising
a family. To a modern-day pioneer, it might be putting the “shoulder
to the wheel” and taking one more step into the unknown. Whatever
our passion or task may be, if we “push ev’ry worthy work along
[and] put [our] shoulder to the wheel,”2 then we
too can discover the path to greater happiness.
1. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience (1990), 3.
2. “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel,” Hymns, no. 252.
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