I recently started working a casual job. It’s pretty simple. I work at a cinema, and sell popcorn, tickets, snacks, clean stuff and move boxes of stuff. It’s not really a career kind of job, but it’s fun, and I get a bit of extra money.

Recently, I asked myself the question in the title, and there are several possible answers. Here are some I came up with.

You could be working for your boss.

You could be working for your bank account.

You could be working for the customer.

Maybe there’s more, but here’s a few thoughts about these ones:

If you work for your boss, then you’re trying to please your boss, and giving her power or you. Your effort might go towards reducing the fear of being fired, or increasing the chances of a promotion, but the effort is directed towards the manager or whoever is in charge. You’re serving the customer in order to do a good job so that your boss will notice. You’re doing a good job so that your boss will be happy. For me that’s not a great motivator and a source of anxiety instead.

If you work for your bank account, then you’re working to gather money for yourself. Maybe that’s from necessity- you need to be able to buy food, pay for shelter, right? Or it’s from a desire to buy something, like a house, or a car. Or it’s just for the sake of gathering wealth. The issue with this is that money isn’t an end in itself, and if it becomes one then it’s an idol. Money is only a means to an end, and that end could be anything from a house or a car, to a sense of stability, power over others, status, the ability to give to charity, whatever. So the end has to be really clear and good to make this strategy function. But for me, that’s fine as a motivation to begin working, but it doesn’t give me satisfaction or meaning while I’m working. It was definitely the reason I applied for the job, but it isn’t very motivating to actually do the job.

I started working for the customer. Let me explain why.

Any organisation is there for some kind of purpose. It has some kind of net effect on society. That’s the product or service that the organisation is there to provide. So a doctor might be there to help people get well and stay well, or a car factory is there to make cars for people to drive in. A cinema is there to provide the experience of seeing movies in cinemas to people.

Whatever you’re doing right now, you could figure out what’s the service or product that your employment boils down to.

And then companies take on a cancerous life of their own, that has nothing to do with society at large. HR departments and Admin, or other internal structures become self-serving, a lot of work goes into doing things that don’t serve the actual product or service the company is there to provide. That’s why startups have had such success, they did the same thing as bigger companies but way more efficiently, by cutting out the huge waste of time and effort that was misdirected. For example, Elon Musk once commented on how amusing he found it that large Auto manufacturers boasted about how many employees they have – and at Tesla aims to do the same job with maximum efficiency (which also means fewer employees).

Employing people isn’t always a good thing. It really depends on what those people are actually doing. Sometimes not doing something is of more value to the world than doing it. A lot of effort is just that- in the end what was actually created with that effort matters, not how hard it was to make it.

Well, I personally love going to the movies, and I think it’s a great service that exists in society. If we didn’t have it, that’d be a loss. So focusing on providing a great cinema-going experience to the people that come in is actually really motivating to me. By working for the customer, I’m focusing on the part of the job that benefits society. Of course some customers are bad eggs, but for the most part people are there to see a good movie with friends or loved ones. Seeing people come in eager for a great cinema experience, helping them to make it even better, that is actually really motivating and their happiness becomes infectious and I get happy too.

Plus, I get paid regardless, so when the humble amounts of money come in, of course I’m happy about that too and try to put it to good use.

“Don’t be concerned for your own good but for the good of others.”

It says that in 1 Corinthians 10:24 in the Bible (NLT). I’m starting to see how by focusing on how I can do something for the benefit of others, I actually benefit in ways I couldn’t if I focused on how I can benefit myself. By working for others, doing good things for others, a whole bunch of other good stuff happens in me. And it’s not what I expected- for example, I started the job planning to get money, which is fine, but waiting outside the scope of what I knew then were happiness, confidence, freedom from fear of judgment by managers, satisfaction in doing a good job for a good purpose, and things of far greater value than the dollar value of my wage alone.

I’m looking for other ways of applying that principle in practice.