The part of a job that would actually keep you there:

Making something real that did not exist on Monday.Being the reason somebody's week got significantly less awful.Watching a thing you explained finally land on somebody's face.Getting to the bottom of a question nobody had answered.

Pick the meeting you would not resent:

The one where we work out what the story here actually is.The one where we decide, and then immediately go and do it.The one where somebody finally raises what is unfair about this.The one with the numbers in it, because the numbers say what's true.

Free Saturday, and something in the house is slightly broken. You:

Take it apart on the kitchen table. It will go back together. Probably.Write down what went wrong, so it is easier for whoever is next.Decide the broken thing is now a project, and give the project a name.Find out whose job it was to fix it, and make that their problem.

Someone on your team is struggling. Your first instinct:

Ask how they are, and then wait for the second answer.Work out which part of the process put them there.Move the work around them today, fix the cause on Friday.Check what they were actually given, because it probably wasn't enough.

The kind of problem you would happily spend a year on:

Something physical that is badly built and could be built well.Something nobody has ever measured properly.Something true that nobody has yet managed to say well.Something that keeps breaking because nobody owns it.

You are put in charge of the thing. Your first move:

Find out who is closest to burning out, and start there.Get everybody to the same level of understanding first.Say out loud where we are going, and start moving.Ask who this is currently worst for, and why that's been allowed.

The compliment about your work that would mean the most:

"You built that, and the thing still works.""You made the hardest year of my life survivable.""I still think about that thing you made.""None of this existed until you decided that it should."

Pick the afternoon you would honestly call restful:

Explaining something you love to someone who has just got curious.Down a rabbit hole, twelve tabs open, no deadline anywhere near it.Helping someone through a form that was designed to defeat them.Putting a messy system into an order that will actually hold.

What you would want on your first day in a new job:

Something real to work on before lunch.The documents nobody reads, and an hour alone with them.To know what we are trying to win, and by when.To meet the people this affects, not only the people running it.

The thing about work that genuinely upsets you:

Watching somebody get processed instead of helped.Knowing a thing could be explained, and nobody bothering to.A good thing described so badly that people stop caring about it.Everybody stepping over the same broken step for two years.

If the money were handled and you still had to do something, you'd:

Build things in a workshop until it got dark outside.Sit with people who are having their worst week.Teach the thing you wish somebody had taught you.Research something enormous and faintly useless.

Twenty years in, the sentence you would want said about you:

"They made people feel it was worth paying attention.""They started the thing everyone now works at.""They changed a rule that was quietly hurting people.""It all ran, and nobody knew why until they left."