If anything contributes to this being an Age of Anxiety, it would have to be the decision anxiety we face at every turn. Nowhere is this more poignant than the ubiquitous "career choice." When in former times you normally took on the career of your parents (when Millers milled and Smiths smithed), nowadays Americans will change careers at least three times in their lives. But perhaps we're doing it all wrong, and need to take a page from those who do less-than-glamorous work but have managed to find passion and purpose in their jobs.

Here are two stories from which we can draw lessons on how to achieve meaningful work:

Treating yourself like an athlete

Probably the best treatment on this subject is found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In addition to being a seminal work of accessible psychology, his book is a treasure trove of stories about people engaged in perfect activity fulfillment. This one in particular has lingered in my mind for years as it deals with a factory worker who turned a mundane career into something he relishes with enthusiasm:

The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at his job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit. In part he tries to improve his performance to earn a bonus and the respect of his supervisors. But most often he does not even let on to others that he is ahead and lets his success pass unnoticed. It is enough to know that he can do it, because when he is working at top performance the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful for him to slow down. "It's better than anything else," Rico says. "It's a whole lot better than watching TV." Rico knows that very soon he will reach the limit beyond which he will no longer be able to improve his performance at his job. So twice a week he takes evening courses in electronics. When he has his diploma he will seek a more complex job, one that presumably he will confront with the same enthusiasm he has shown so far.

This story became the inspiration for how I handled my first job after graduating from college. After college, I took up an entry-level job at Google in the AdSense department, approving and rejecting sites into their program. While initially the job was inherently repetitive and boring, I found two ways of making the work enjoyable. The first was opening up a stop-watch app on my computer, and having it hover over my work the whole time. I jotted down times and set goals for myself, and the hours did indeed fly by. The second way was engaging in side social banter with my co-workers. We'd tell each other jokes and chit-chat, and after awhile, the computerwork faded into the background of my consciousness. It's like how you would imagine two friends spending hours working on a crafting project together, blissfully engaged. Often these tasks are repetitive, like gluing 100 jewels onto the edge of a Homecoming float. But in the context of hanging-out with your friends, it isn't so bad. Actually, it's a lot of fun!

Be mindful of the work process

Here is a video David Ullin, who in his old age shines a youthful joy when talking about the passion and purpose he finds in tree-cutting. What's even more interesting is how he articulates the larger life-philosophy implications of his attitude toward work. It's compelling to watch and I'll let it speak for itself:

I believe there are parallels between his process and that of mindfulness (for a good introduction to mindfulness read Mindfulness in Plain English). Mindfulness, as I've understood it, is usually taught in relationship to meditation, wherein the practitioner becomes keenly in touch with his senses. By focusing on your breathing, for example, you can "become one" with your body, and in some cases, feel every single muscle movement as your lungs expand and contract. Under the right conditions, this state can be called samadhi which I find very similar to Mihaly's concept of flow. To apply this concept to your job, you have to deconstruct the work activities into sub-processes and focus on how all the little things add up to achieve the desired results.

These two stories remind me that while we often naively believe that changing our surroundings will quell our anxieties, probably the most important change needs to occur within.