Why do We do It?
The question in the title there is a compass. It’s a sort of rhetorical totem, a little tiny question wherein we can stuff a whole ton of other questions, sidewise between the letters maybe.
Why do we do it? The work, I mean. The thing we’re doing, building, writing, creating. Why do we do it?
Why are we doing it at all? Because we need a job? Because we need money to eat and to live and pay rent and raise kids, buy video games or have Netflix or smoke weed or play guitar? OK, that’s fair. We’ve got to do something, right?
But OK so why it? Why this particular thing? Why not some other thing, since there are almost an infinite number of ways to make money, why not do the other thing? Maybe it’ll make us happier. Maybe it’ll make us more — or maybe less — money. Maybe the other thing is a better thing. But we’re not doing that, we’re doing this. Why this? Because this is what we went to school for, maybe. Because this is what our dad did and we grew up around it. Because this is the town we grew up in and the factory’s always been the heart of the town. Everyone works there, or somewhere in orbit around it. And mom got sick right after we got married to our high school sweetheart so we stuck around to take care of her, and when she died she left us the house and now we’ve got a couple kids of our own. Maybe this is what we love to do and we’re one of those guys, those I dO wHaT I LoVe aNd nEveR wOrKed aNotHeR dAy iN mY LiFe guys the rest of us want to slap right off the TED stage. Maybe you don’t know how to do anything else. Fine. Whatever. You have your reasons.
Why us? Why are we the ones to do this particular thing? Why not someone else? Is it a thing that needs doing and, if we’re not the ones doing it, someone else will just pop along and do the thing? Or is it a thing only we can do? That’s rare, really rare. When you think about it, it’s almost not rational that there’s anything that only one person in the world can do. So why are we the ones doing this thing and not someone else? And maybe then we’d be doing the thing they’re doing. Why not? If we go and do the other thing, is that a better or worse configuration than the current one, where we’re doing this thing and they’re doing that thing?
So we do something because we have to make money. And we do this because, for whatever our reasons, it’s what we do. And maybe someone else could do it, but they don’t. We do. And this simply is. We do it.
But if we look out into the world at all the things being done, at all the people doing them, for whatever their reasons for doing them, can we see some other potential configuration that could be better than the current one? Is there some other place we can be, and some other someone who could come and take our place here, and if that happened would that world be — even if only a little — better or worse than the current one?
When we think of our society and where it intersects with our economy, and we look at some of the conditions we create at that intersection, things like competition are curiously idiosyncratic. Because when we’re in competition with that other firm, where does the competition fit in the question? Why? Because we’re in competition. Why us? Because there has to be competition, the other guy sucks. Why this? Because they’re doing this and we do this better. But what if we chose not to compete? What if we retooled the factory and left the competition here in this space to eat the rest of the market, and we went and did that blue ocean thing where there was no competition? Created a new space, a new market where there was no one else and built an entirely new value chain out there? Would that world be — even if only a little — better or worse than the current one?
And if it were a complete break-even — if we could simply stop competing and just do something else — why wouldn’t we? Let them be here and we’ll be there, and everyone still eats. Maybe some of the people in my firm would rather be there and vice versa — why not do that too? Why not let the people gravitate to the firm doing the thing they want to be doing?
Sure, that would be a perfect world, right? Everyone just relaxed and groovy and being who they want to be in the world they want to live in. But we know that’s not reality, and we know that we’re here, today, right now and that there’s work to be done in front of us. And we’re here because we made a series of choices — each of us did — that created the condition of us doing this for reasons. So fine, here we are. And even if we can’t change it by snapping our fingers, we’ve asked the question and we at least understand how and why we’re here. And we can be honest with ourselves about whether we want to persist that condition or change it.
