Tim Cook on the podcast "Table Manners with Jessie & Lennie Ware":

"… My upbringing was… a lot of it was centered on work. And the belief that hard work was essential for everybody, regardless of your age. And so I started working when I was probably 11 or 12 on the paper route.”

• Apple Podcasts episode link

This is the first time I've known Tim Cook to appear on a podcast. It seems like a good choice for him: it's just two ladies leisurely chit-chatting about life and good food. And rather than properly individually micing everyone, which has become so fortunately possible that it's also become unfortunately mundane, this format sounds like the product of a Blue Yeti plonked on a kitchen table with the participants convened around it. Normally that would strike me as a production short cut with a cost to quality, but in this case – particularly since the opening suggests they're "arriving" at the hosts' house and sitting down together – it really gave me a sense of being the fourth person in the room, just hanging out and listening.

Anyway, something struck me about that remark about work. I know I have feelings about "work" that I'd acquired from someplace. I was originally offered the notion that we "grow up," that what we're going to "be" when we grow up is some kind of blank to fill in by selecting from a number of predetermined choices, and then we do that. The degree to which we enjoy doing it is a largely, but not wholly, independent variable: perhaps 0 being hatred and 100 being bliss, and it's practically never 100. The selction can involve tradeoffs: one might choose a "30" or "50" job over a "75" job in order to make more money, or to have to spend less time doing it, so they can spend more time at home doing whatever actually can be "100."

In short, I took "work" to mean approximately "something involving effort which, to at least some degree, is not enjoyable."

Oxford's second definition of work reflects this way of thinking:

a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do

(Emphasis on "has to.")

So when I was eventually hired by my high school to lead the choral music program for a year – something which I did deeply enjoy – I didn't refer to it, or think of it, as work. I was paid for it, but I let that be incidental and didn't think much about it. And that's the kind of situation I've continuously tried to seek: always to do what I like, and at least sometimes to happen to be paid as well. No "work" involved.

So, hearing the remark from Tim was akin to hearing Lexie remark, unexpectedly, that I was a hard worker. ("What? I feel like I barely work at all.") Lexie is also an educator – she enjoys it too, and deliberately does call it work.

Even when I'm not earning money, I try to spend… well, as much time as possible programming, organizing, thinking about whatever creative project I haven't yet completed with eyes to progress on it. This site – nowadays much more than a few short pages of HTML – I've evolved, written and re-written entirely during whatever time I've had in between.

And so, this morning, I found myself wondering about an alternate definition of work: one that includes even the blissfully enjoyable. I came up with "effort that results in the creation or improvement of something." That certainly applies to most traditionally to-some-degree-not-enjoyable work, but it would also include the enjoyable stuff: directing choirs, writing programs and novels on one's own, et cetera.

It wasn't until after I'd begun writing this post that I finally thought to check Oxford, whose second definition I quoted earlier. It turns out their first definition is:

activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result

Pretty close to what I'd come up with; perhaps even slightly more abstract. The clear inclusion of mental effort implies that even the act of purposely untangling a problem in your head, even before subsequently laying a brick or putting pen to paper, counts as work. And I think that's fair – something has been accomplished. And if you're assigned to spend an hour on a task, and that solely mental act is a step toward completing it, then it's an appropriate use of part of that hour. Even people like dancers or actors describe largely invisible changes, such as a development in their approach to their performance through practice or discussion, as "doing the work."

Why am I thinking about this so much today? Because, with my future choices more than ever in my own hands, I've found myself momentarily doubting my longtime approach to all this. I've apparently enshrined what I love doing almost nonstop, placing it above the typically prime directive of making a good living. Has this been unwise; a mistake?

I've heard this category of activity traditionally labelled "hobbies." And I've usually heard "hobbies" regarded as perhaps healthy and balancing, but not of primary importance. (Even the word has a diminutive sound.)

There's also an attitude – I'm not sure where it comes from, but it seems recognizable today – that even a constant flow of purely enjoyable mental effort is somehow disdainable or pitiable. That the ideal life, the one to strive for, is one where one needn't make any mental or physical effort, nor feel the pull to. And I think I've found myself actually taking that into consideration. Perhaps the deep feeling of ominousness, the feeling of dangerousness in entertaining that, is what spurred this post most sharply.

That's why Cook struck me. It's possible to have a conviction, as Tim Cook does, that even hard work is not merely a healthy, desirable and important thing, but "essential for everybody."

And it's possible, and fair, to regard all effort directed towards a result – even if you deeply enjoy it, and even if it's not your living – as work. All put together, that ominous "no effort is ideal" attitude is readily dispelled. It's that attitude which is unwise.

Even something as seemingly perennial as the need to make a living from an income, at the scale of humanity's past and future history, is not necessarily fundamental. There may always be value, but there may not always be money. So, when it comes to gauging the importance of what you do with your time? Well, money is currently a need, and abandoning it completely comes with its own consequences. But we'd be short-sighted to believe it's the only way to measure what deserves the sense of importance and respect with which the word "work" is associated.

You either don't make effort when you're dead and don't make effort while you're briefly alive, or you don't make effort while you're dead and do make effort while you're briefly alive. And we have one life each. If you're going to choose "do make effort," I dare say you're entitled to choose how and why.