The Inherent Value of Work

Some lessons from...competitive Excel?

Maybe the most bizarre sport I’ve ever seen is competitive Excel. Yes, the spreadsheet program. Financial analysts and accountants at the top of their fields compete to create the best models and solutions as fast as possible. It’s just about the exact antithesis of everything I associate with sports—for that reason, I find it pretty compelling.

Probably the most compelling part of it is the notion that people enjoy this. Accounting has become the sort of go-to example of a boring job for most people. I don’t think there’s anything the average person dreads more than the idea of staring as a spreadsheet for hours.

But for some, it’s a fun challenge. It’s something that tests you and lets you show your skills. To an outside observer, it might seem like soul-sucking work. But to the people who actually do it, it’s a way to test their skills and go up against the best in their field, just the same as football is a test of different physical and mental skills.

Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai, multi-time Excel world champion (And yes, that is his real nickname)

Underneath all this, I think there’s an important lesson about the value of work. There’s something to be learned about what makes work dignified and worthwhile beyond just the pay.

A Story About Motivation

I was never much of a math student. As young as nine or ten, I realized that I was more suited to things like history and writing. For as long as I can remember, I felt passionate about those things for their own sake. Algebra just never registered with me the same way.

But I still did my best to be a decent math student. In the end, my grades were enough of a motivator to keep pushing on with something I didn’t quite feel suited for. I pushed through in spite of how boring it felt or how unnatural it seemed. I had a reason to do it, even if it wasn’t one that made me happy to do the work.

Funnily enough, after high school, I started to find myself interested in math. Once I was away from trying to grind away for my grades and keep up with the basics of trig and calc, I started to recognize just how interesting it could get. Fields like logic or number theory seemed to me to be full of interesting things to learn. Far from abandoning math once I finished with it in school, I found myself more interested in it than I ever had been.

What happened here? Before, math was only valuable to me for what it could get me. It was a path to good grades and the benefits those brought. There was nothing about the subject itself that made me interested.

But later, I started recognizing something inherently good in it. I found a reason to enjoy math for its own sake, not just for what made it useful to me.

Internal and External Goods

Here, we can see an interesting difference: There is a divide between external goods and internal goods. The Scottish philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre drew this comparison to explain what motivates us to pursue an activity. We can be motivated by reasons with a practice—the internal goods—or by something outside of it—the external goods.

With the math example, it’s clear how this would apply. The things like good grades were external goods. They weren’t things that were part of the study itself. Instead, they were rewards that were disconnected from the study. In contrast, the joy of studying is something innate. It’s a reward that comes from the study itself.

MacIntyre offers the example of learning chess to explain this. A boy learning chess might be bribed by a parent with promises of candy or quarters for playing. In the end, the boy doesn’t really care about the merits of chess. It doesn’t occur to him whether a certain move is impressive or whether a certain game is beautiful. Instead, it’s just a path to get these little gifts.

But what will happen if that boy keeps playing chess? Soon, he might recognize that the game is fun. Someday, he might start to invest himself in learning the different aspects of strategy and dive deeper into the mechanics of the game. And, with enough time, he’ll likely come to see the game as beautiful in many ways.

A Hard-to-See Elegance

In the end, this sort of beauty can only be seen if you’re familiar with the practice. Someone with no knowledge of math would struggle to see what could make a proof “elegant.” Someone who’s never played chess couldn’t understand what makes Bobby Fischer’s best moves so jaw-dropping. You need to dive deeply into these things to see what gives them their worth.

For MacIntyre, these internal goods are sorts of virtues. A mathematician recognizing that a proof is elegant is seeing it fulfill a certain virtue: Maybe it works very efficiently or takes an unconventional path. A chess player recognizing a beautiful game is appreciating the virtues of chess: Maybe we could look at a particularly bold player taking risks and sacrificing pieces or admire how a player thinks ten moves ahead to plan for a victory.

The Internal Goods of Work

Now, it should be apparent that every activity has these sorts of internal goods. Carpentry has its virtues, virtues that are hard to appreciate if you aren’t a carpenter. Law has its virtues. Landscaping has its virtues. And yes, Excel has its virtues.

In all these cases, someone with a deep investment in the field could come to appreciate the beauty of their work, no matter how unconventional it is. There are people who can appreciate the skill required to mop the floors or repair an IT problem. There is something worthwhile to these practices at their core.

Ultimately, it’s these internal goods that really let you take pride in your work. An artist wouldn’t say that she values her works based on how much money they sold for or how many people saw them at a show. Instead, she’d take pride in the labor behind it: In the delicate brushstrokes, in the mixing of colors, and in the symbolism behind it.

Though we might not think of it the same way, it’s just the same for an accountant who’s deeply invested in competitive Excel. It’s not the fact that Excel is a path to stable work or a lot of money that makes it worth competing in. It’s that there is virtue to it, skill worth developing. There is something to take pride in, even if it’s something that nobody outside the world of Excel can understand.

It should be clear, then, that there is something worthwhile to all work. From art to Excel, from landscaping to writing, there is always virtue to be developed and skill to be appreciated. Only time and practice can lead us to understand these things—you can’t understanding everything on your first day on the job.