Bestselling author Tyler Cowen on Is work fun

Bestselling author Tyler Cowen on Is work funBestselling author Tyler Cowen on Is work funThe following excerpt is reprinted from BIG BUSINESS A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen. Copyright 2019 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martins Press, LLC.Is work fun?Yes, running a business is rewarding for the CEO, but what about the workers? Worker exploitation is one of the oldest charges levied at capitalism, and it persists through the current day. For instance, in a recent Times Literary Supplement review of books about work, Joe Moran summed it up bluntly These books are about the misery. David Graeber, in his recent highly popular book, says it all in the title Bullsh-t Jobs A Theory. Jeffrey Pfeffer, from the Stanford School of Business, calls his latest book Dying for a Paycheck, even though there is established evidence that unemployment is worse for your health than working.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard coveri ng Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moraId like to suggest that productive work is one of the most fulfilling sides of our lives. For the most part, it makes us happier, better adjusted, and better connected to the social world. It gives balance to our home lives. It helps us realize who we are as human beings. This is one of the subtler ways in which capitalism is a creator- namely, a creator of our better selves.Ill get back to those points, but in the meantime I do need to put some bad news on the table. Its called work its also called labor. Those are not in every way positive words. If you said to a friend (or, rather, an ex-friend), Being with you is work, it would not be an entirely positive comment. Or it might be said that you labor under a delusion, but no one would say that you labor under a happy or ecstatic feeling.To oversimplify by only a bit, they have to pay you to do it. And that suggests work is not in every way fun. Furthermora, for mo st people work is the main way that they interact with business on a daily basis, which means that business is associated with the activities that take some of the fun out of our lives. Bits of fun are drained on a very regular basis, often five days a week, but the paychecks arrive less frequently in most cases and often by the less visible means of direct deposit. So the stresses and tedium of the work are for many people more vivid than the wages they earn. And that in sum is one reason business is not entirely popular with the American public- or, indeed, with the public elsewhere in the world. Business is like the parent who tells you that you cant have everything you want all the time.Some recent studies and surveys illustrate the potential burden of work. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Alan Krueger measure our daily affective experiences by having people wear beepers that go off at irregular intervals, at which time the people record what they are doing and thei r feelings. You can think of this as a technique for measuring moods. But the researchers ask about more than just the subjects feelings at a given point in time they also ask how happy people are with various aspects of their lives. The study thus considers both momentary pleasure and the overall feeling of satisfaction from a life well spent, because happiness isnt just a single thing with a unidimensional scale. For this study, the researchers recruited 909 employed women with an average age of thirty-eight and an average household income of $54,700.And what did the researchers find? The highest-rated activities, from most favored to less favored, were intimate relations, socializing, relaxing, and prayer/worship/meditation. In the middle of the list were watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone, among other mundane activities. The bottom five were childcare, computer/email/ internet, housework, working, and- dead belastung- commuting.So working is next to last in te rms of producing a positive mood, and that is sad news. But that doesnt mean we dont like work it only means we like other things better. And in fact, when you drill down, the ratio of people who have positive feelings about work to those who have negative feelings is just over 3.5 to 1. (Thats not as good as the5.10 to 0.36 positive-to-negative ratio for intimate relations, but sex always was going to beat out work anyway.)Consider also that the same data set shows people spending 6.9 hours a day working, whereas prayer/worship/meditation is done only about 24 minutes a day. Presumably that is because you are paid to work but not paid to pray. If people prayed 6.9 hours a day, most of them probably would find it less intrinsically rewarding, and arguably it would have a much lower score. (If you are wondering, intimate relations averages 12 minutes a day, and that too might be less popular if it were at 6.9 hours a day.) In that regard, work doesnt do nearly as badly as those numbe rs at first seem to indicate. People are doing so much of it precisely because it has a high net reward, even if not all of that reward is direct fun in the moment. Furthermore, work is often an important pathway toward both intimate relations and socializing, the two highest-rated activities on the list that induces many people to work more than would otherwise be the case.Do note an important caveat namely, that the women in this study were polled only on workdays. Had they been polled on weekends, perhaps work would seem a bit more welcome and a little less burdensome. How would children have done as a source of pleasure if the queries had been posed on the weekends too? We just dont know.It is interesting to see what the authors find about work as a source of lifetime satisfaction compared with immediate mood. Some of what we do, such as caring for our children, seems more importantfor lifetime satisfaction than for fun in the moment, as having kids can be pretty stressful. When it comes to work, the same is true a good job boosts overall feelings of satisfaction more than it helps our immediate mood. On this measure, the benefits of work are again higher than they may look at first.I am not trying to whitewash the burdens of the workday and the workplace. Nonetheless, a lot of the other evidence points us toward the more positive side of work. Work provides us with a lot of what we value in life, including affirmation of our social worth, a structure for problem solving combined with rewards, and an important source of social interactions with (sometimes) sympathetic or like-minded others. Many jobs are creative 82 percent of all workers report that their jobs consist mainly of solving unforeseen problems on their own.3Plus there is always the paycheck. Its not just the food and rent the money from work often gives us the means to make, keep, and stay in touch with some of those friends we value so much. In this regard, the value of work and the value of friends are by no means so separate. Of course, these benefits from work are no accident in large part they are created by employers to try to lure more talented workers. That is exactly what competition requires. Even if the bosses do not explicitly plan all of the social benefits of work, they allow them to persist and grow, for the purposes of worker morale, recruitment, and retention.Another way to think about the non-pay-related benefits of having a job is to consider the well-known and indeed sky-high personal costs of unemployment. Not having a job when you want to be working damages happiness and health well beyond what the lost income alone would account for. For instance, the unemployed are more likely to have mental health problems, are more likely to commit suicide, and are significantly less happy. Sometimes there is a causality problem behind any inference- for instance, do people kill themselves because they are unemployed, or are they unemployed because possible suic idal tendencies make them less well suited to do well in a job interview? Still, as best we can tell, unemployment makes a lot of individual lives much, much worse. In the well-known study by economists Andrew E. Clark and Andrew J. Oswald, involuntary unemployment is worse for individual happiness than divorce or separation. Often it is more valuable to watch what people do rather than what they say or how they report their momentary moods.The aggregate data on work hours are striking, and they show that Americans have fairly positive attitudes toward work. For instance, if we consider weekly work hours per American, that number rose from 22.34 in 1950 to 23.94 in 2000, hardly a sign of work falling out of fashion. Over this period, too, large numbers of women came into the workforce, many because they wanted to work and earn their own incomes. The reality is that preferences for work havent declined nearly as much as commentators had been predicting earlier in the twentieth centur y. Earning and spending money is fun, and many jobs are more rewarding, more social, and safer than they used to be. Even with much higher living standards now than in the immediate postwar era, Americans still basically want to stay on the job.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people

Interim Management Consultants Can Help Employers Shoulder a Long Hiring Process

Interim Management Consultants Can Help Employers Shoulder a Long Hiring ProcessInterim Management Consultants Can Help Employers Shoulder a Long Hiring ProcessThe U.S. economy has added more than 2.3 million jobs since the beginning of 2015, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and employers keep adding positions. The problem, however, is that many businesses find it challenging to fill those roles. Unemployment is also low, which means there are fewer candidates available for hire.As Robert Half senior executive director Paul McDonald noted in his coverage of the November 2015 jobs report, hiring is extremely competitive right now, which means the hiring process often drags on much longer than most companies anticipate.McDonald paints this picture of the hiring market in his post I cant tell you how many times I have encountered employers who are downright shocked that a job has remain unfilled for weeks - and, very often, months - on end. They had visions of bringing in someone right away and hadnt planned to be without a core employee for so long. Their current team is being asked to work shorthanded and running the risk of burning out. Worse, theres no relief in sight.McDonald points to job candidates ability to be selective in this market as one of the main reasons that many employers are struggling to hire for key roles. He notes that it is not unusual for highly skilled professionals actively looking for work to receive multiple offers. And passive job seekers often need to be convinced of the benefits of changing companies.Immediate business needs can add pressureIf your organization wants to hire specialized talent, particularly for senior-level roles, it is entirely possible that you will need to wait longer than expected to fill a position. While you might not be able to expedite the hiring process to meet your preferred timeline, your firm doesnt have to leave critical roles open - or put important business on the back burner.Augmenting your staff with an interim management consultant is one solution while you conduct a search for full-time candidates. These experienced professionals can take on essential roles, from accounting manager to chief financial officer.This staffing management approach can help employers facing a long hiring process to avoid making a snap decision that could lead to a poor outcome, according to McDonald Its tempting to bring someone - anyone on board when workloads are piling up, and your employees are unable to absorb even one more task. But desperation can easily lead to bad (and costly) hiring decisions.If engaging interim help during a protracted candidate search sounds like the right approach for your business, McDonald recommends enlisting the help of a staffing specialist.Additional resourcesHow Project Consultants Can Turn Your geschftsleben Problems Into Wins 3 Case Studies This post provides an overview of three ways that interim management and project consultants from Robert Half Management Resources have helped employers handle specific business initiatives and improve their bottom line.Robert Half Management Resources Areas of Specialization Whether your organization is expanding, consolidating, restructuring or undergoing a complex systems conversion, or preparing for an IPO, we can provide highly skilled senior-level professionals with extensive experience to help move your business forward.2016 Robert Half Salary Guide Foretells of ConsultantOpportunitiesResearch for Robert Halfs latest Salary Guide for accounting and finance suggests that many employers will need to engage skilled consultants next year. Read this post to learn which specializationsare expected to be in high demand.A Move to Consulting Attractive for Most Financial Leaders Are you a financial executive who is considering the consulting path? If so, you are not alone. According to our research, more than eight in 10 CFOs said consulting is an attractive car eer for senior-level accounting and finance professionals. This post explains why.

How to Differentiate Amateur from Professional writer

How to Differentiate Amateur from Professional writerHow to Differentiate Amateur from Professional writerHow to Differentiate Amateur from Professional writerOne of the most important deciding factors in whether you get a job or not is your resume. Its quality makes all the difference when edging closer to your dream career irrespective of your experience. In most instances, job seekers prefer to craft their own resumes without the help of professional resume writer. They simply research sample resumes from the internet. But how can you know identify a professional resume service? What is a professional resume writing service? Here is how to differentiate amateur from a professional writer.courtesy of B.Accounting unsplash.comAmateurs wait for the best time professionals take actionBefore figuring out what you want to do you must know what you are. Since so much of your creation is connected to what you are, you must know your identity. However, there is always a right way and a wro ng way of doing this. For you to be professional you must perform your way. You must start by believing in yourself before mastering the skill. This also applies to resume writing service. If you are not confident there is nothing much that you can do.A professional knows the templates, an amateur do notDo you know the design, template and fonts that you should use in designing the resume? A certified resume writer understands exactly which design, font, and template suit a particular resume. They know what the management expects once they glance at your resume. In job hunting, if you fail to stand out your resume will be rejected.Professional knows the candidate profiles amateurs do notWhen writing a resume do you know that the candidate is the best? Is the resume conveying the same message? Best resume writing service knows what to incorporate in a resume and what to blot out. He or she will talk about your accomplishments in the best way so as to grab the attention of the manager s.A professional sound like a pro but amateurs do notIs your resume sounding like a pro or not? If it does not sound well chances are amateurs has written it. Amateurs always do the job all heartedly thereby making the resume seem like something that has just been crafted for the sake of it. Before writing a professional resume you must decide to sound like a pro. In any case, why would the managers be attracted to an amateur? When hiring they are always looking for someone who can multitask and who is all rounder. He must show the zeal to do the job without any problems.A professional apply the rules while amateurs do notWhen it comes to crafting a resume there are several rules that should be used. These include modifiers, adjectives, and keywords to target. As a writer, you need to tell a story so as to reisepass a specific point across to the target audience. To portray the candidate as the best on a piece of paper is not very easy hence a professional resume writer should do th is in the best way possible. This is something that resume writers after mastered over time. They are always good in extracting what you are good at.A professional are remembers while amateurs are noticedA professional resume writer cares about his legacy. He is not just thinking about a onetime win. He is actually thinking about the long run and the effect of the resume long after he wrote it. He normally works on something that will endure for a very long time.SummaryThe job search process is a very hard process hence the candidate should prepare himself for a tough time. This can only be done if you hire a professional resume writer.