You're right that a lot of it is up to the individual.

My point was that people already want to do work that is good—whatever that means to you. Yes, it can be sophistic bull to call it all those lofty things, but in the end I think everyone wants a good job, doing something they consider valuable, that makes them feel like their time isn't being thrown away in exchange for a wage. Whether everyone can achieve this or not is more of an economic question, but it's something almost everyone strives for. Work that is real.

And jobs, companies, and organizations start out this way too. Of course they want to get things done and achieve common goals, and most importantly make a lot of money, but I promise you they also don't want to throw their time away. Even executives want their time and their lives to be meaningful, and they usually want that for their employees, too.

And most people realize—and it has been proven—that organizations that do this right, and find meaning and value in their work, whatever it may be—are also more successful, make more profit, are more competitive in the market, and have all kinds of other positive results. So it appears to be a no-brainer.

Problem is, things get complicated in complex organizations, and no one knows how to handle it. All of that stuff about work being meaningful and worth a damn goes out the window, and people just start doing their jobs for a paycheck. That's when big-C Culture gets destroyed.

It's not that people don't want that fluffy stuff about their work being worthwhile, it's that they can't see any path for achieving it. All of the structures of organizations are put in the way. My advice was to leaders: work on stripping the company of the barriers to people finding joy and worth in the work itself. You can't give people that stuff, but it sure is easy to take away—so start by not doing that.

There's a lot that's the individual worker's responsibility to self-motivate and find meaning in their own work, if they need it—but there's a ton of stuff in modern companies that also destroys their ability to do that. You need to tackle it from both sides, both the environment (and not just at the surface, but deep, deep down) and the individual.

And my personal opinion (and you might disagree with this) is that 90% of the potential for motivated, real, meaningful work has nothing to do with individual responsibility, but is the responsibility of managers and leaders. Individuals are always going to try their hardest to self-motivate and do their best—that's the easy part. Building an organizational environment that enables them to do that is the hard part, so it's where we (leaders, managers, executives) need to put in the work.

This reminds me of a story—a consultant tried to implement some of these organizational improvement ideas at a chick hatching farm. When he was interviewing one of the workers about how the workplace could be improved, the man said "Sir, we throw all the male baby chicks into grinders. I think that says everything." So, you're right. Regardless, that consultant was still able to improve even that dismal work so that the employees could do their jobs as well as possible and not be demeaned by both poor management as well as the nature of the work.

So my response is, even supposedly horrible work can be meaningful, and it's almost always the unconscious organizational structures that get in the way, not how individual workers feel about their own job. The individual is such a small problem in comparison to the organization.