As the team has worked to build Holloway over the last two years—traversing the nooks and crannies of the idea maze of how to get knowledge in the hands of the people who need it—we’ve had a lot of conversations about quality. Hell, most of the team recently read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (link is to our favorite paperback edition), a 418-page philosophical exploration of what it means for something to have Quality with a capital Q. Just as Zen’s author, Robert M. Pirsig, was obsessed with what made something Quality, we’re captivated by what makes work good.
What is Good Work? Neither goodness nor work are the kind of thing you can look up in Webster’s, stick in your pocket, and arrive at dinner ready to impress. But we know good work when we see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, or feel it. Most importantly, we know Good Work is indisputably real because we have all known its absence.
I’m fascinated by Tim Urban’s “Your Life in Weeks.” The post is a largely graphical sucker punch of a point maker. When you visually represent all the weeks of your life as blocks, the section assigned to “career” is like this imposing death star. It’s, well, basically your whole life. If you want to get fancy with math, it’s about eighty-nine thousand four hundred and forty hours if you work forty-hour weeks from twenty-two to sixty-five. If you’re just starting out in work, you’re staring down about 90,000 hours on the clock.
Each of us has our own relationship with work. To some of us, work is a job. It’s a place we go to get a paycheck, pay the bills, and keep our heads above water. To others, work is a creative extension of the self. We even have this beautiful phrase I think is so neglected, your life’s work. And then there’s how the work of everyone around us works for us, or harms us, or changes us. It is because of people’s work that we have traffic and pollution, and it’s equally true that a smile from behind the counter can make my day just as much as the smog can quietly poison it.
Our choices about work—who we work for, what we work on, how we approach our work—some of these are choices we make, and some of them are choices others make for us. All of them have consequences.
Good Work is not a definition and it’s not an answer. There are many aspects of what makes Good Work, and we hope to discuss our evolving ideas on all this in this newsletter each week. But one way to think about Good Work we want to share now: it’s a reminder to consider how what you do with your 90,000 hours affects those around you, in ever increasing circles, from those you share a home or a desk with to everyone you’ll never meet.
The Good Work newsletter will be an earnest effort to examine the briar patch of modern work. Each week we’ll open with a short letter from me (or a guest curator!), and then we’ll share a set of links to perspectives that we think are worth pondering. We’ll get into global economic systems like capitalism and how our solutions are only ever our latest best effort in a long-chain of attempts to build something that’s a bit better. We’ll dive into our individual relationships with work and our social ones, like how much work is enough work—20 hours? 40 hours? 80 hours? We’ll share perspectives that get us thinking, talking, and arguing. Finally, we’re looking forward to sharing ideas of how we—all of us—can do Good Work that works for all of us.
In this newsletter, we’ll be sharing different perspectives and interesting discussions on capitalism as an economic theory and political structure.
That’s Good Work for this week. See you next week.
Andy and the Holloway Team
Good Work is written and curated by Andy Sparks, Courtney Nash, Dmitriy Kharchenko, Hope Hackett, Joshua Levy, and Rachel Jepsen.