The formula for Happy Work

In this episode of Do Happy Work, I explore the idea that we may be looking at work—and life—through far too small a lens.

I use the analogy of a sandbox and a mathematical bracket to question our constant drive to accumulate more: more money, achievements, degrees, possessions, connections, and professional success. We keep trying to fill the space, believing that more will eventually bring us meaning and fulfillment.

But what if the real value isn’t in what we put inside the sandbox, but in the context surrounding it?

I talk about the importance of zooming out and looking at the consciousness and intention we bring to our work. When we approach life from competition, scarcity, and the need to extract, everything inside the bracket is affected. But when we approach it from peace, presence, generosity, and flow, everything changes.

This episode is an invitation to step back and examine the perspective you bring into your work every day—and to ask yourself: Am I flowing with what is, or am I simply trying to put more things into the box?

Because happy work may begin not with what we achieve, but with the consciousness we bring to everything we do.

Follow on Linkedin: Olivier Egli 

Transcript

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I'm your host Olivier, and this is the Do Happy Work Podcast, where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm Olivier, your voice of nature and business. Today I bring to you a topic that's very dear to my heart. We talk about context. We talk about perspective and we talk about zooming out. Traditionally, we have a misconception about life. And I like the analogy, two analogies actually, of the sandbox and the one that is found in mathematics of the bracket. And both relate to the same idea. And the idea is that which we have learned from our teachers, which school systems provide us with, that life is actually a box. And the goal in life is to fill that box with as many things, as many valuable and shiny things as possible. And when we're young, of course, we fall for this idea. Because of course, if you're innocent and suddenly you're threatened to be left by your parents and put on your own and responsible for yourself, supposed to become a self-responsible person, and you have to provide for yourself, this concept makes sense because it appeals to something very instinctive in us, it appeals to survival. In the realm of survival, having more, having more in your bag, having more useful things in your bag makes sense. The problem is just that we have turned this wisdom into the way we view life and the way we view work. And now work has become this thing with which we just amass things and put it inside of this sandbox. Or in the mathematical sense, we amass numbers, values, ever higher numbers inside of that bracket. Now there is a thing that psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, which is the idea of the cycle within which we find growth, validation, self-confirmation, where we define our achievements. It's this kind of like cycling pattern in which we deal with failure, with setbacks, but also victories and wins and gains. We always do it within this sandbox. We always do it within this bracket, within this keyhole perspective on life. And I will get to why this matters in just a moment. For now, I want you to imagine your life just like that. Imagine everything that you know to be true about your work, about how you view work, how you do work, how you create and share value, how you get paid as happening within the sandbox. There are all these things that you do on the daily, all these things, all these principles, all these methods that you learned, and they all somehow relate to being located somewhere in this sandbox. And now, of course, you want more things in this sandbox. You want more toys, you want more people, you want more money, you want more possessions, you want more degrees, chips, stripes, badges, what have you. This is normal and understandable in the context of what the world tells us, but it is insufficient. And we know that it's insufficient because even people with sandboxes that are full of things, they still want more. They still want to find ways to cram more into that sandbox. They still want more degrees, they want a better job, they want more businesses, they want their businesses to accelerate and scale even more. There is this incessant need to cram more inside of that sandbox. And if we have to be fair, the sandbox never really grows in size. It's kind of like a given. The sandbox is our life, and our life has a beginning and an end, and we have our natural progression within it. So now, of course, we also have on top of that impatience, the urgency to collect and gather more shiny objects within a shorter span of time, because to add insult to injury, most of us don't even have their entire life to do so because they believe in their work self that there is such a thing as retirement. So by the time we retire, we have to have all these things in place. I have worked with a lot of people who had a lot of things. I myself, in my corporate time, I had amassed quite a few of them. I know how vain they can feel. I know what it is like to wake up to all these things and feeling like they mean nothing. Even today, sometimes I lost for a thing, and then once I have it, I forget about it. It is there in my sandbox, but because it lacks this kind of greater connection, it also lacks this kind of meaning that it should bring. But mind you, our teachers have done a great job in making it seem like having more inside of that sandbox equals a better life, equals a more meaningful life. It's almost as if we had this idea that at some point, once we feel the end nearing, we will reach inside of that box or inside of that bag, and we will feel all those shiny objects, these gemstones, these jewels, and we will somehow feel great about it. There will be some kind of magic that will hit us and we will suddenly feel like it was all worth it. That is what we think. But does that really happen? Do you right now, dear listener, do you have verifiable proof that such a magic moment will happen at some time? Sometime in your life? Will it? Is there a finishing line when you will go about looking through your books and you will gather your things, you will take a hard look at your sandbox and feel great about it? You will think that everything you've done up to this day was worth all of that. It is the fallacy of the transactional mind. The mind that resides in a modus that resides in a function that is outside of itself that makes you believe that that's true. If you think that's true right now, and the the likelihood is very high because it is a popular way of looking at life and work within it. The likelihood is very high that you have succumbed to the idea of commodities. Because you think that commodities are important, you trade in commodities, you gather commodities, you buy commodities, you sell commodities, your work has become a commodity, and for this reason, the greater picture, life itself has become a commodity. The commodification doesn't stop in business, it doesn't stop in work, it has reached the edges, the corners of our existence. And when you deal with death, when you deal with actual loss, when you deal with the human psyche, when you deal with consciousness, you understand that that's not enough. The sandbox is not enough. And now I want to get to my point. The sandbox is real. I am not here to tell you to get rid of all your things. I'm not telling you that shiny objects are not valuable in their own right. I'm not telling you to be without things and people and degrees. I'm not telling you this at all. What I'm telling you is that you need to take care of the context in which your sandbox exists. The likelihood is always that we think that the sandbox is all there is. Just like a little bit like human beings have thought for the longest time that there is somehow an end to the universe, or that the limits of our body, the fingertips, if you will, are kind of like the extent of ourself. But this is all an illusion because context is really what makes the sandbox great or not so great. And this is where I want to shift to the other the other analogy, the one of the mathematical bracket. A bracket is an object that encloses several other items that then together give the bracket its value. And the idea right now is that we have to cram as much as we can inside of that bracket so that the value inside of that bracket is as high as possible, right? So we we add things and we're busy bodies. We we do all these things, we get all these degrees, we get involved in all these enterprises and efforts and endeavors. We commingle with so many people, we draw all these things into our lives because they all land inside of the bracket, and with it the value inside of the bracket increases. That's just basic math. However, that would be true if there was only the bracket. But and as I just said before, the bracket is not the extent of life, the bracket is not the extent of anything, the bracket is just one element. What if you actually zoomed out and realized that in front of that mathematical bracket, in front of that, as part of this formula, there's a number. And this number, as we all know, who have basic schooling in math, this number defines the real value of the bracket in the end. Because if it's zero, then no matter how much you amass, no matter how much you find in your sandbox, it will still be zero. But what if this number is truly high? What if this number is almost infinitely big? Well then anything in your bracket also gets scaled and multiplied by this factor. And this is the picture that we miss, or rather, this is the layer that we miss when we are too focused on the small things, too focused on the things we can amass, too focused on what's inside our sandbox, on the things that become list items. That's what happens. We miss the factor outside of the bracket. We miss the factor that will turn what we have, what we do, into something great or into something that's worth nothing. And to make this practical, I have to reduce everything to energy. Because energy is really, it's not even an analogy for our work and our life. It is, in the end, everything. So if in your bracket you have all these things that you amassed, you equate with energy, then on the outside you have this factor that makes this energy great or small. And in terms of energy, there's only one outside thing, one context that can make what's inside of that bracket big. And that's your consciousness, the consciousness with which you approach your life. Because the consciousness with which you approach your life is the consciousness with which you approach your work, with which you approach everything in it, the value creation, the connections within it, the products you develop, the value that you forward to others. All of it is touched by this factor that sits outside of all the things you amass. And when it comes to that, it's very simple. It's this old thing that I always talk about where you have intention and attention. And intention is what sits outside of the bracket, and attention, the things that you focus on sit inside of the bracket. Now, an intention of peace equals an infinite amount of energy. Because with peace as our consciousness, we make ourselves fully available to the present. We don't fight who we are, we don't fight what is, we don't show up with a competitive mind, with the willingness to extract, to mine, to reduce, remove. We show up as truly generous giving entities, as collaborators. But that is a context you have to find for yourself first. But when you have that, when you truly show up as a peaceful entity, you have this factor that's so high. Now you can take care of what's inside the bracket. And what's great is that if you truly fall into peace, if you fall into peace at a basic level of your existence, not just as a discipline or as a tool or as a trick, but if you do so, as a general perspective, as an attitude that you have from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, well, everything inside of that bracket gets maximized, but you also get rid of the things that counteract that peace. And that is huge. Because now all these things that you do, the choices that you make, the habits that you have, the rituals that you keep close, the people in your life, you sift through them with a perspective of peace, whereas before you did it with a competitive urge to extract, to win, to fight scarcity. And that is a huge difference. It is not just an element in your life, it is the factor that decides what your life is going to be in terms of energy. And that is the context we need to wake up to. This is what I mean when I say that we need to zoom out and grasp the full picture. Your happy work hides behind this realization because happy work can only come as a consequence of a mind and a consciousness that acts in alignment with peace, which absolutely embraces flow, which doesn't counteract the truth of the moment. And that's huge. I know it's so easy to talk about everything that's inside of the bracket, and we should we should do that. We should continue these conversations, but we should do them in the context of this greater perspective that we hold. This is an invitation for you to sit down and investigate your perspective, to understand what is this automatic perspective that you bring into your day that pervades all aspects of your life? Am I flowing freely with what is? Am I easy to accept the truth of the moment and to act out of the present, or am I constantly looking for things that I can reap, that I can push into this bracket, into this sandbox, and make my own? Are a lot of my dealings and actions baseless because they happen within this context that's probably near zero, or maybe even negative. Ask yourself. And if you have any questions or if you have anything to add to the conversation, reach out to me. I am always willing to hear. I have conversations through email and on LinkedIn all the time about this. Reach out. It is important that you journal, that you consider these conversations, that you stay in this flow, because this is that which will help you break through the wall and get to your happy work. Until next time.