What makes work - worth doing?

Is work worth doing based on what we accomplish? What we earn? The people we help? The skills we master? The feeling that we belong to something larger than ourselves? And if our work doesn’t feel meaningful, does that mean we need to find different work, or might we need to look differently at the work we already do?    My guest, Samuel Halpern, has dug into those questions. His new book, Wellsprings of Work: Surprising Sources of Meaning in Your Career and Retirement, explores the often hidden sources of meaning and motivation that can run through our working lives, -- and which continue long after the last paycheque.    Sam comes to these questions through an unusual career of his own. His work took him from Wall Street to Warren Buffett to advising investment funds for Major League Baseball players, Broadway stagehands and governments from Beijing to Bangkok.     Then retirement, and an unexpected triple-bypass surgery just weeks before it, prompted a different question: What had all that work amounted to, and what did he want to do next?     On this episode of Career Buzz, we’ll hear some of Sam’s career story, but mostly we’ll explore the ideas it led him to: the role of values, craftsmanship, belonging, competition, mastery, legacy and contribution to future generations; the difference between earning a living and experiencing a life through our work; and whether the search for the perfectly meaningful job might itself send us down the wrong path.    And we’ll ask what happen to all of this as AI changes not only the work humans do, but our relationship with work itself. Sam calls that challenge “protecting ‘I’ from AI.”     For career counselling for you or someone you care about, start with a free discovery call: careercycles.com For gamified, story-based professional development, learn about and schedule a demo of Who You Are Matters!