The OffBeat #33: The 6 Elements of Meaningful Music (and Work)

Getting into the groove

A few years ago at the suggestion of a friend and fellow marketer I read this awesome little book called “Lifework” by Drew Taylor; it’s no longer available on Amazon or Bookshop.org but you can get a preview through Google Books here and get the e-book through Google Play here. It’s part journal, part wayfinding guide to identifying meaningful work you love.

I read a lot of these types of professional soul-searching books earlier in my career—Robert S. Kaplan’s What You're Really Meant to Do, Janet and Chris Attwood’s The Passion Test, Alexis Irvin and Chip Hiden’s Build Your Dreams—and they were great. There was never any eureka moment of “so that’s what I’m meant to do!”, more so they helped me explore the workplace values I wanted to align myself with and, more importantly, nudged a window open and let the realization shine through that you don’t need to be inherently passionate about what you do to feel fulfilled. (If you’ve never seen NYU business school professor Scott Galloway’s rant about how the advice to follow your passion is b.s., you can watch it here.)

That said, what stuck with me from the Lifework book was the author’s six principles of meaningful work:

Source: Lifework, Wright

If you’ve got all six principles in full swing, you’re grooving. Importantly I think this framework is even more useful to guide how you manage people. How would they rate their work experience on each of these six principles on a monthly basis? That’s a good barometer for how content they are and where you may need to lean in.

Six seems to be a popular number of principles. You’ve got six elements of Buddhism, Aristotle’s six elements of drama—and six key elements of music:

• Dynamics: Differences in volume

• Rhythm: The timing of sounds

• Pitch: The frequency of a sound wave

• Form: The structure of a piece of music

• Timbre: The mood or tone color of music

• Texture: The effect of different layers of sound and the relationship between them

It’s an interesting thought exercise to map these six elements of music against the six principles of meaningful work:

The same way you can tune your ear to pick up on each of these musical elements in a song, you can regulate your brain and your gut to calibrate your work life against these principles. If the rhythm of a song feels funky in a bad way, you may turn it off and listen to something else. If your work doesn’t align closely enough with your natural interests or what gives you energy, you may explore ways to adjust your scope or spend more time on an area that lights you up. And you can leverage each meaningful work principle’s musical equivalent if you’re unsure in your calibration; for example, if it feels like the autonomy you’re granted is suboptimal (not enough or too much) but it’s tough to frame it up for yourself or in conversation with your leader, it could help to anchor to the nature of music dynamics—your ability to control your sphere of work day-to-day has the volume turned up too high or too low.

The beauty of both music and career is that there are infinite versions of impactful execution. There’s no perfect combination of texture and timbre, or engagement and competence. And that balance may change depending on the season of your life. It’s up to your personal taste to determine what the optimal mix is at any given point.

Have a great week,

Allison