“Worry more about what you want to do rather than what you want to be.” Barack Obama on the power of good jobs

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to explore their journeys, achievements, and setbacks to gain insights in how to succeed — and how to avoid painful mistakes.

My guest this week is the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama .

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There’s a part in the new Netflix series, Working: What We Do All Day, where former President Barack Obama is talking with one of the subjects of the series about what worried him while he was in the White House: “One of the running themes I had to deal with during my presidency was: How do I makes sure there are enough good jobs."

That emphasis on “good” immediately jumped out at me. When the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report comes out, economists, pundits and politicians cheer or fret over the headline number. But they rarely discuss what percent are good jobs — or even what that would mean. But for most of us, we know exactly what it means. And it’s often something personal. We ask ourselves: Is this a job where I’m getting rewarded for my effort? Do I like the people around me? Am I being challenged? Is it worth the commute or the time away from my family? Am I counting down the minutes until I can leave or wishing I had more time?

For this week’s This is Working, I sat down with President Obama to talk about why this question about good jobs has been steering his post-White House energy and how forces like AI and our increasing demand to get meaning from work are impacting careers. 

We met in a hotel in Washington, D.C., not far from his foundation. His team had planned everything down to the minute: What time he walks into the room, where to stand, exactly how long we’d have together. But as soon as we started talking, anything prescribed faded away. President Obama was tuned in, thoughtful, and open with his answers. One takeaway: Micromanaging a former U.S. president can’t be easy.

So why focus on the meaning of jobs? It’s pretty simple, says President Obama: “This is how we spend our lives.”

President Obama hosts and narrates the four-part Netflix series, drawing inspiration from legendary oral historian Studs Terkel’s 1974 non-fiction masterpiece, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” I reread the book before the interview and the themes Americans were dealing with in the 1970s were existential, but in a different way than today: People were concerned with being cogs in the system, with not being trusted or appreciated, with losing their jobs without warning. But they could afford homes; commutes weren’t stealing their time; the divide between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society wasn’t ever present; and automation was a worry mostly to laborers not to those in the executive suite.

The precipice we’re standing on today is different, says President Obama.

“I don't think that we've seen what I think AI could do very quickly, which is make obsolete or redundant big swaths of what we used to think of as higher order knowledge work,” he says.  “And I think that will be surprising…We're not yet ready for that conversation, but it's coming at us, I think, faster than [anything] else.”

Here are a few takeaways from our talk:

Why focus on jobs vs the broader economy?

The former president immerses himself in the documentary in three sectors (home care, tech and hospitality) and three cities (NYC, Pittsburgh, and Jackson, Miss.). From the maintenance entrance to the executive suite, President Obama tries to give us a view from the top of the ladder to the bottom rung. It’s out of these stories, President Obama told me, that tangible policy can be extracted and structured. 

“Giving a window into people's lives — the housekeeper at a hotel, the person who's delivering your food, the person who's taking care of your elderly relative —  that informs some of these broader policy debates,” he says.” How should we think about wages and benefits? How can we organize our society so that if you're working full-time, you can support a family? How should we think about structuring our education system so that people have a better opportunity?”

“To be able to revisit what work actually means to people on a day-to-day basis, how they think about it, what kind of work is considered good work versus bad work, and focusing on the human element of it would be a useful part of that conversation, which so often ends up being this 40,000-foot macroeconomic, microeconomic discussion.”

Why he worries about a search for “meaning” in jobs

Today’s workers are increasingly looking for companies whose values more closely align with their own, according to LinkedIn data and a recent LinkedIn survey. Job postings that mention values like culture, flexibility and well-being are getting nearly three times the views and twice as many applications as they did two years ago. And nearly 90% of Gen Z and Millennials workers say cultural compatibility with the company they work for is essential.

President Obama, however, cautions “that so much of what's important in life may not come through your work.” 

“Michelle and I always tell our daughters, ‘Look, some of work is just a grind,” he says. “Some of the work is something that is useful to your employer, the person who is paying you, and it may not be fun. And that's okay because that's what it means to be a grownup.”

What career advice he gives — and why it applies no matter what happens in the economy

My favorite part of our talk was when Pres. Obama got personal about the career advice he gives people. In the White House, he was surrounded by people who had made it to the top of the public and, often, private sectors. But what he really valued wasn’t the talkers. It was the doers.

“Learn how to get stuff done,” President Obama told me. “What I'm always looking for is, no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘let me take care of that’...the best way to get attention is whatever is assigned to you, you are just nailing — you're killing it because people will notice, ‘oh, that's somebody who can get something done.’” 

President Obama also had some critical advice for the Gen Z crowd: chase your passion, not a paycheck. If you’re “absorbed” by your work, the rewards will come.   

“Worry more about what you want to do rather than what you want to be,” he says. “I think so often, people have in their mind…I wanna make ‘X’ amount of money by this age. And the people I find that are most successful are the people who say, ‘Man, I'm really interested in computers and figuring this stuff out,’ and then they end up being the Bill Gates…If you are absorbed by what you're doing, one of two things is going to happen: You're going to get really good at it and … you get the positions that you want. Or not. [But] the journey will have been a good one.”

What do you think makes for a good job? Let me know in the comments, or send me an email at thisisworking@linkedin.com. You can also follow me and LinkedIn on Instagram. Subscribe to the This is Working podcast on Spotify or Apple. 

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