Good Work: Introduction
Overview
You do a great job introducing yourself to the reader, defining “good work,” and teasing the value and benefits of finding good work for you (the reader). By the end of it, I feel empowered and eager to achieve this for myself, and that’s a great outcome for an introduction.
I left many line-edits for clarity and concision, and there is one main structural change I suggest. The material on the first page would be better placed if it were spliced into the latter parts of the intro. Instead of hooking with your love for writing, start with the pain of doing work you don’t like. That’s where your reader is right now.
One main thing: As you revise the intro, focus on making the narrative arc click into place. Here are the main beats of your story, as I see them:
- Stuck living the lie of the “dream job,” tolerating work you’d rather not be doing
- Discover “good work” and become disillusioned and radicalized
- Slowly transition from outraged to curious
- Find what good work means for you and build your life around it, leading to deep joy and satisfaction in your days, working on what you enjoy
High-Level Feedback
- This is the hook, but it’s on page 2! It gives more context (with less assumed context) and immediately starts to unpack the title: “Good Work.”
- Compare this: “Too many people spend their days doing things they would rather not do.”
- To the current opening line: “It took me 33 years to realize that work doesn’t have to suck.”
- This has real life and voice. Look to emulate this excerpt. Here are the components: personal confession, inner monologue, credibility earned from your experience, an elucidating metaphor.
- Make sure you’re not making a stand-alone point in a secondary part of a sentence, like a part that’s set off in commas. Give each point room to breathe, by adding independent clauses or splitting it into multiple sentences.
Too many people spend their days doing things they would rather not do. This breaks my heart. Finding good work has been transformative in my life. It gave me a solid foundation which helped me feel stability while also reimagining the possibilities of my life. It helped me shift from someone who thought I had “wasted” my career, throwing it away, to someone who has learned to embrace my natural ambition in a more powerful way.
I quit my job not as an act of defiance but as an act of surrender. I had been vanquished by work, a brutal master that I had foolishly spent years trying to tame. I wasn’t happy about this and after quitting I channeled my frustration into essays taking down the modern world of work. Work is broken! The organizations are rigged! All the leaders are psychopaths! The “default path,” as I called it, became my enemy and I was determined to convince the world that work was stealing our souls. I saw myself as a rebel, aiming to craft an alternative kind of life, one that relied on minimal paid employment. But as I leaned away from paid work, I found myself writing and the more I wrote, the more my life started to make sense. I became less outraged and more curious about what was happening.
This is a hard thing to explain to people, especially because building a life around good work is a radical act in a world that is filled with sexy playbooks showing people how to aim at dream jobs, seven-figure businesses, and billion-dollar exits.
EDIT
: “This is a hard thing to explain to people, because we have been taught to aim at seven-figure businesses and billion-dollar exits. In a world filled with sexy playbooks for success, it’s a radical act to build your life around good work.”
Praise
- You do a great job weaving personal details/story in with insights. All of your claims carry with them an innate credibility because it’s clear that you are truly living this life.
- The intro is dense and economical. I learn about your story, the concept of “good work,” and you sell me on why I should keep reading.
- I really enjoy the inner-monologue bits and your confessions about being outraged and radical before course-correcting. I was drawn in by those details, especially the one about feeling like you wasted time during your twenties.
Notes
- Add sentence variety. Look out for repeated sentence constructions and overused introductory phrases. And try to vary your sentence lengths. (This goes for paragraphs too.) It keeps everything fresh for your reader and helps each new idea stand out.
- This is not a hard rule, just something to be aware of: make the subject clear, and keep it close to the verb. The exception is when you want to subvert the rule for some specific effect.
- See also “Ordering words for emphasis,” which I’ve linked on your portal. The words that start and end sentences are the most emphatic. So, structure sentences (and paragraphs) so that the most important information is at the beginning and end.