How much has the way you work changed over the course of your career? Has your relationship with work deepened or disengaged as your career has continued?  

And if you’re new to the world of career work, how much thought have you given to the way you want to work for the next 35 years?

Here are three excellent books that answer those questions and more!

Barry Schwartz is a Swarthmore College psychologist with a gift for distilling data from complex experiments into readable social science.   

In “Why We Work” he submits that work – from low income hourly wages  to highly rewarded professional salaries – must be infused with meaning to be fulfilling.  

He points out that Gallup polling around the world frequently finds almost 90 percent of workers reporting they are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” with their work.  

And that too much work is routine, monotonous and disconnected from meaning.

The answer? Schwartz writes: “We need to emphasize the ways in which an employee’s work makes other people’s lives at least a little bit better.”

Gill Whitty-Collins is a former brand manager at Procter & Gamble and a determined advocate for equality in the workplace.  

Her book, “Why Men Win at Work,” blends anecdotes from the world of work with undeniable, peer-researched studies about why gender equality in the workplaces has been so difficult to solve.

Plain-spoken and not afraid to court controversy, Whitty-Collins writes: “This is not another book written only for people who read feminist books and are passionate experts on gender diversity. It is also for the skeptics, for people who think they don’t want or need to read a book on gender equality.”

And my third must-read book about how and why we labor is Bruce Feiler’s excellent “The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.”   

Chock-full of inspiring introductions to people who zig-zagged their way to fulfilling work, the book is also replete with excellent advice.

Feiler leads the reader toward writing our own work narrative by understanding where we’ve been and I love how he phrases it!:  “We have a roiling assortment of homilies, parables, truisms and beliefs, some imprinted on us by our families and inscribed on us by our surroundings, but more chosen by us from our role models and forged by us from our wounds."

"The best way to understand these stories is as a kind of scripture, a sacred treasure that each of us tries to live up to even as we try to break free from it.”

— Kerri Miller | MPR News