Is Your Work Important?

As 2018 came to an end, we spent time reflecting on the year and planning our future products. Many of our clients tell us they do something similar with their teams — it’s a good practice for everyone to follow. The key is to focus on what matters most: how what you do creates meaning for your life. According to Carl Jung, “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” Unfortunately, too many people fall into The Passion Trap and try to do what they love so they can have meaning. This often results in frustration and disappointment. The better way to satisfy what Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization” or the desire to become everything you are capable of, is to live a life of purpose, not passion. Purpose is behavior-based, while passion is emotion-based. In one study of nearly 8,000 people, 78% said their primary goal was to find a purpose and meaning to their life.Our purpose frames why we exist, where we fit in our world, and why we matter. Our purpose connects us to something bigger than ourselves, and takes us to the peak of human performance: to have a social impact. What does this have to do with ratings or software?
Everything. Doing the work to produce a rating or a superior software solution is what we get paid for. That pay should be enough to satisfy our basic physiological and safety needs. Doing that work for a great company fulfills our need to belong. Doing that work with excellence meets our need to achieve and be respected by others. But have you thought about how your work impacts society? We know a lot of raters who think about how what they do helps homeowners. A few think about the impact they have on their client, the homebuilder. But have you considered the impact you have on what Admiral Samuel Locklear, US Navy (Ret), and Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, USMC (Ret), consider to be the nation’s biggest long-term security threat? Climate change multiplies the threats our country faces. It causes natural and economic disasters. How do we budget for moving bases lost to rising seas, the loss of employment in those cities, or the increased cost of humanitarian efforts? Tens of millions of people are hit with more intense, more frequent, and longer lasting droughts, floods, and storms every year, and not all of those are in foreign lands. From wildfires to floods, we experience these events in the US and the cost is tremendous. The work you do may not seem to matter to this, but it does. As an individual, you may not have a significant impact, but collectively we do. Over the past two years, our customers have helped reduce CO2 emissions by more than 230,000 tons per year, CO2 emissions by more than 260,000 pounds per year, and NO emissions by more than 400,000 pounds per year. That’s like taking more than 44,000 cars off the road every year, or reducing oil consumption by more than 483,000 barrels, or the impact more than 244,000 acres of US forests has on carbon sequestration in a year. Here at Ekotrope, we know our work has purpose and meaning  We get to help our customers build better businesses and document their impact on society using our unique software solutions.