Jobs to be Done

We all used to have the same job: hunt and gather. Walk around, see what you can find to eat and bring it back home. You might have to run, climb, squat down or throw something to accomplish this, but you’re definitely lifting, carrying and walking over all sorts of terrain.

Then we developed agriculture and pastoralism; favoring some plants and animals to the point that we purposely cultivated them for our use. We separated the stuff that we really liked from the rest of Nature to have a steady supply of it and to keep mice or wolves from eating it before we did. Even today, any farmer will tell you that there’s still a good amount of lifting, carrying and walking in the fields and pastures. (Pro tip: watch where you step) The terrain tends to be a bit easier, though.

Pretty soon we had butchers, bakers and candlestick makers as well as hunter/gatherers and farmers. And the butcher doesn’t need to walk quite as much because the farmers bring her the animals: the farmers need to get back home to feed the cattle and besides, the butcher has this great setup for storing meat. The baker doesn’t need to walk as far, either, because the farmers are definitely either delivering the grains or he’s picking them up curbside—no need for the baker to actually go out and harvest grain from the fields himself. I don’t know where candle wax comes from so I’ll stop there, but you get the point. The butcher spends a lot of time using a knife. The baker spends a lot of time using an oven and pans. (Oh, and there’s probably a miller to make the flour and a blacksmith to make the oven and pans.) The candlestick maker spends a lot of time making candles with the candlestick molds. All three of them spend very little time hunting and gathering. And curiously, a lot of the lifting, carrying and walking the do is indoors.

Now we all have different jobs, very few of us are farmers, much less professional hunter/gatherers, and nearly all of us do our lifting, carrying and walking indoors when we do it at all. Specialization in our jobs gives us the opportunity to buy bacon, doughnuts and candles—pretty cool when you consider that we might not have the time or the tools to make those things ourselves. But the opportunity cost of that specialization is that a lot of our lifting, carrying and walking is done by someone else or something else. Which means that we’re no longer really accustomed to doing something as basic as lifting and carrying a load over terrain.