Learn True Labor
Disce Verum Laborem was omnipresent as our school motto: on the seal, on the school gates when we drove in each morning, and engraved on our class rings we got sophomore year as part of a long-standing tradition. When I transferred there in eighth grade, the motto felt less like a goal than a warning — the school assigned me roughly five times the homework of my old one. Learn true labor, indeed. Throughout my adult life, on major “buckle down” days, I still actually wear my class ring as a physical reminder that I need to get things done.
As a student, I conflated “true labor” with “hard work,” but now, after a few decades of work, I interpret it differently. At 15, I wouldn’t have thought much about the distinction, but it took me the better part of 20 years to catch what that motto was actually asking for — and, fine, one very tired client to finish the job. It was never “work harder.” It’s labor with truth in it: work worth the hours you’re spending.
A client crystallized this for me recently when she said all she wanted from her job was “stability and value.” Stability, from someone in a volatile tech startup, I understand, but I pushed a little on value, assuming she, like many of us, wanted more money.
She told me she wants her 50 hours of work per week to matter. She has a full life and a family. She wants the hours she spends away from the rest of her responsibilities to count.
My father was a cardiologist; no one questions whether that work has meaning — a heart isn’t working, and then it is (glad all those years of “Take Your Daughter To Work” visits allowed me to explain his job in such detail today). When I started my career in advertising, I had no false expectations of life-saving work. In an informational interview, however, one ad exec offered his own framing: he acknowledged that a Doritos campaign didn’t solve world hunger, but that marketing ultimately fueled the economy. It drove job creation and, maybe at the Super Bowl, it entertained.
Some work hands you its meaning. The rest you have to build.
Strip meaningful work to its core and you get two ideas: self-realization (i.e. you become or express something through the work itself) and social contribution (i.e. the work reaches past you and serves someone else). That is really just a fancier version of the rule we keep in our house: be helpful or kind, ideally both, but definitely one.
Do both and the work is whole.
Do one and it still counts.
Do neither and it's just a job.
While that may define the type of work, the way we experience work every day is so much more than assignments or job descriptions: it’s culture, process, communication, and people.
We’ve spent decades optimizing how work gets done — speed, volume, tools, efficiency — and left why it’s worth doing almost entirely unexamined. Automation is where that finally catches up with us. Every decision about what to automate is also a decision — whether we acknowledge it or not — about what remains for humans to do. So the question isn’t “which tasks can AI do?” but rather “which parts of work are where the meaning lives — the judgment, the mastery, the interpersonal relationships — and are we protecting them, or optimizing them away?”
The Danes have a word — arbejdsglæde — for the joy one feels in doing one’s work. It suggests not merely being satisfied with a job, but feeling a deeper connection to the work itself. That there is no single-word English equivalent is telling, and the more I talk with friends, clients, and colleagues, the more I hear the concept on everyone’s mind.
Disce Verum Laborem. Learn True Labor.
If we continue to optimize the process but hollow out the work, we’ve learned labor but nothing true in it.
