The work we do isn’t just about paychecks, benefits, or a career path. It also changes us. From the discipline we learn to develop, the wisdom, and skill from mentors and positions, to the passions it fuels or snuffs out and the relationships it creates, our jobs are part of who we are. They’re not just part of our identity and character; they shape the very fabric of our lives, our values, beliefs, and even our personality.
The scientific definition of work explains how it can be transferred to an object: the product of a force and a displacement (or a change in position). It’s important to note that this is not a constant-force/distance relationship; the relative directions of the force and the displacement determine whether the work done is positive, negative, or zero.
When we think of work, we generally imagine a physical exertion of some kind: a horse pulling a plow in a field, a parent pushing a stroller down the aisle of a grocery store, a weightlifter lifting a barbell above their head, or an Olympian throwing a shot-put. However, these examples are not true work according to the scientific definition, because they don’t involve a change in an object’s state or direction.
An object must be displaced for work to happen, and this is why many things we commonly consider to be work are not actually work according to the scientific definition. For an action to be considered work, it must have a force and cause a displacement, and this is why a person climbing a ladder does not count as work – the height gained is not an appropriate change in the position of the body.
In addition, the force must be proportional to the displacement. The SI unit for work is the joule, named after English physicist James Prescott Joule (1818-1889). Other units of work include the newton-metre, the foot-pound, the foot-poundal, the erg, and the kilocalorie.
The future of work is about moving beyond the narrow confines of traditional, structured job descriptions that define and limit how we perform our work to more open-ended, creative opportunities for identifying, solving, and implementing unseen problems/opportunities, which can be both rewarding and challenging. It will be work that requires a new type of collaboration, one that allows us to see the bigger picture and to work together to achieve it.
Ideally, this new type of work will provide a balance between the parts of our jobs that we enjoy (e.g., interacting with customers or colleagues) and the parts that we don’t enjoy as much (e.g., updating Excel files or sitting in on conference calls with our managers). It will also require the willingness to take risks and the ability to change. Changing how we do our work takes time and effort, and it’s not easy to get right. But if we do, the rewards can be enormous. We’ll be able to do more work than ever before, and we’ll have a much better chance of finding a job that we love.
