Wednesday Wisdom

Work Worth Doing

If you’ve been studying Theodore Roosevelt for a while, you’ve likely come across one of our personal favorite Roosevelt quotations—“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”—which comes from his 1916 pamphlet, The Keys of Success in Life.

In this instance, Roosevelt focused on the work, rather than the worker, so we were delighted to find another instance in his writings about “work worth doing” that focused on the individual behind the work, which is today’s #WednesdayWisdom.

Today’s quotation comes from a November 22, 1902 speech that Roosevelt delivered at the dedication of a new high school building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: “The man or woman who does work worth doing is the man or woman who lives, who breathes that work; with whom it is ever present in his or her soul; whose ambition is to do it well and to feel rewarded by the thought of having done it well.”

We like this quotation because it describes Roosevelt himself so well—and what many admire most about him—his joie de vivre, as the French would say, or joy of life. Throughout his life, Roosevelt pursued his work with endless energy and passion.

Whatever he set his mind to, Roosevelt focused his full attention on that. He believed in working hard and playing hard, and many of our previous Wednesday Wisdom posts have dealt with work in some way like Roosevelt’s thoughts on honest work and really great work.

But what we see as unique about today’s Wednesday Wisdom is Roosevelt’s emphasis on the environment in which good work or work worth doing takes place. It reminds us of the concept of flow, popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s long after Roosevelt’s death.

Someone who is in a state of flow is so entuned with the task at hand that it becomes a part of them. This description of flow was certainly true of Roosevelt, who spent the majority of his life in a state of flow. By making the activity in front of him autotelic, or its own intrinsic reward, Roosevelt experienced deepened happiness and what makes life worth living.

And in his speech in Philadelphia, he expresses the need for others to approach work in the same way. And if they didn’t, their work would suffer: “The man or woman in public or private life who ever works only for the sake of the reward that comes outside of the work, will in the long run do poor work.”

Today if we want to do meaningful work like Roosevelt did, we need to see our work in the same way he did: as part of our soul and as an intrinsic reward for doing it well.

Read Roosevelt’s entire speech in Philadelphia in which he praises the American education system and the development of future citizens here.

---