Grinding At Work

I had an interesting idea this morning whilst commuting to work by bus.

I was listening to This Week In Startups podcast episode 11. At one point in the podcast Lon Harris mentioned how Jason Calacanis is sometimes unreasonable as the CEO of Mahalo.com by suddenly demanding something new and expecting it to happen instantly.

Lon mentioned that it gets a bit crazy sometimes at work at Mahalo and that he'd wish Jason would give people more time to adjust so that the company would feel more stable as an environment and not like a mad house.

Jason took the open critique, which he specifically asked for earlier, maturely as something constructive and then began to analyze the situation. He conceded that he can be difficult at times and also revealed that he sometimes flips out and yells at people at work. That's not something he's proud of but he reckons some of it might actually be useful, like somewhere around 10-15% of the cases.

Jason then commented that with growing companies the situation tends to be such that if the CEO is not constantly expecting more from the company and trying to come up with something new, the company might as well go out of business. It's these kinds passionate people who make the companies what they are with their unrelenting urge to constantly reach new levels of awesome.

That means the companies that are growing can be hectic to work at from time to time.

Lon then commented that the reason why he likes to work at the company is that he feels he is growing personally as the company is growing. It does not feel like grinding at a boring desk job where each day is similar to the other but you can actually see the progress taking place.

Now the thought that came to me at the moment was that that very notion is quite similar to how the term grinding is understood in computer games. You do some boring menial thing repeatedly ad infinitum which you don't care about at all to get to some far looming goal.

Does it make sense to be grinding at work day after day, or would you rather do something that you care about and make a real difference?