Interviews

Transcending the Rat Race
I want to help change the world by helping to change the world of work.

Work fills most of our waking hours. Work provides enormous opportunities to help or harm others. At work, we meet representatives of cultures we may have been taught to fear or hate. Too often, we face enormous pressures to work not from our wisest and most compassionate selves, but from our most shallow and competitive ones. Workplace cultures make it hard to know how many of our colleagues also yearn for a more ethical, more satisfying work-world.

Work with Meaning, Work with Joy is filled with tips and stories from people who have learned to turn situations filled with stress and the potential for burnout or corruption into sources of insight, energy, and goodness. These tips and resources come from all levels of the corporate ladder, from all faiths, and from much individual creativity.

This book is dedicated to my father. From him I learned that meaningful work isn't measured by job title or size of accomplishment, but by attitude and commitment to integrity. By integrity he meant not just honesty and ethics. In the bigger context, integrity means bringing our full selves to our work and creating a seamless integration of all that is meaningful with all that is necessary.

I hope that by sharing what I've learned from many people who now work with meaning and joy, that many others will discover how to work more ethically and joyously, then go home full of energy. That means more time for self, for family and friends, for service, creative projects, and just plain fun.

A world where more people go home with a smile on their faces. A world where we can better trust accounting statements and product claims. A world where the peace and vitality at work ripple out into all corners of everyday life. That's what I was hoping for when I wrote this book, and I hope many others want the same. Pat McHenry Sullivan