Unhappy at Work ... What Would Bob the Builder Do?

Finding meaning at your workplace ... Ever question why you work, or feel like you only work for a salary? Best-selling author Daniel Pink has solutions for employees (and employers) on how to find meaning in work beyond the paycheck. – CBS TV

Dominant Social Theme: Let's bring authenticity to our lives by interrogating ourselves using the question asked by the main character of a toddler's TV program.

Free-Market Analysis: Only in America. We stumbled across several videos recently by Daniel Pink, including a CBS video that's a doozy. We went and looked him up on Wikipedia.

Daniel H. Pink is an American author and journalist. From 1995 to 1997, he worked for Vice President Al Gore in the capacity of chief speechwriter, and before that as an aide to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Pink graduated from Bexley High School in Bexley, OH. He received a Bachelor's degree Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University, where he was a Truman Scholar. He later received a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of The Yale Law & Policy Review. He has never practiced law.

Pink is the author of four books that focus on the changing workplace and that have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list: A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future and Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us as well as Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. His articles on business and technology have also appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Wired.

His 2009 talk on the surprising science of motivation is one of the 20 most-watched TED Talks of all time. In 2011, he was named one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.

Okay, a deep thinker ... So why is he on CBS TV talking about "bringing meaning to the workplace"? It occurs to us that Pink is a kind of elite propagandist, someone who has spent his life promoting the dominant social themes espoused by his erstwhile boss, Al Gore.

Gore is one of the pre-eminent emissaries of elite themes designed to promote world government, the overarching ambition of the power elite. Within this context it is interesting to note that Pink is now on a mission to provide people with meaningful workplace experiences. In the video at CBS TV (linked at the end of this article) he promotes three ways people can gain additional workplace self-meaning:

• Increase how much autonomy you have on the job.


• Ask yourself, "What progress did I make today?"


• Look at how you make a difference in the lives of others.

It occurs to us that a mass murderer could ask the same questions and thus presumably make his task more "meaningful." Let us, therefore, propose three suggestions of our own:

• Find and cultivate a meaningful personal philosophy that contributes to self-enrichment and enriches those around you from an emotional, intellectual and material standpoint.


• Find work that is congruent with this personal philosophy.


• Ask yourself, "What progress did I make today?"

This is a far better equation for personal and professional satisfaction than Pink's, in our humble view. It is not perhaps entirely a Randian perspective, but, heck ... take it for what it's worth. We guarantee it will serve you better than Pink's ambiguous and disingenuous advice.

Pink doesn't propose our three points because, in our view, the last thing Pink and his power elite employers want is people following Plato's dictum to "know thyself" and thus doing the hard intellectual work necessary to create their own personal philosophical perspectives. If they did so, they'd have to grapple with the idea that most of their waking lives they are contributing to a society that is exploiting them and is geared to the eventual destruction of their families and communities.

Pink ends the interview below by suggesting that people ask themselves a question posed in the "Bob the Builder" TV series: "Can we fix it?"

We have a question, too: What kind of adult self-help guru (one of the top 50 in the world) uses a toddler's TV program as a reference point for adult workplace satisfaction?

For a YouTube interview with Daniel Pink on motivating employees, see the short video at the beginning of this article (from Cisco's YouTube user channel).

Or you can see the CBS "This Morning" video at cbsnews.com.