TED Radio Hour
The Meaning of Work
Love it or hate it, most of us have to work for a living. So, how can we make work more meaningful? TED speakers explore our values and motivations when it comes to the workplace.
By Guy Raz • • 1 min readDrawing from an experiment with chickens, entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan explains how our cultural obsession with individual success is threatening our potential for collaboration and productivity. Psychologist Barry Schwartz says our current thinking about work focuses too much on paychecks and too little on all the ways we find fulfillment — even in jobs many might consider mundane. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely says we work hard not because we have to, but because we want to. He examines the intrinsic values we need to feel motivated to work. What's in a name? For tech entrepreneur Dame Stephanie Shirley, bidding contracts under the name "Steve" enabled her to launch and grow a freelance software company with a virtually all-female staff.
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