We spend more time at work than we spend anywhere else in our lives. For at least five days out of seven, we go to a place where we do something for which we are paid. Many of us then take this money and do something else that we call living: buy things, take trips, plan holidays, pay bills, spend time with people we enjoy – this list is as varied as we are as people. But few of us ever consider the possibility that work isn't something that we do, or a place that we go to. It's an experience that we create and oftentimes the experience is not a pleasant one. Given that we spend more waking time at work than anywhere else, imagine the profound results on the quality of our lives if we were to make a significant change in the way we experience work. The potential is life-altering.

Here's a simple truth about work: you can take all the people at your place of work and move them somewhere else, and work will still exist. You can put those people in different jobs, or different offices and work will still exist. You can take away technology or upgrade technology, and work will still exist. But if you send everyone home, and you don't hire anyone else, work will cease to exist. You may have a document that says you have an incorporated company, but what you have is a piece of paper with words on it. There is no life.

The fundamental operating unit of any organization is the individual human being. Without individual human beings (not resources, or groups, or teams) interacting with other individual human beings – one on one or in groups – face-to-face or via paper or technology – the organization ceases to exist. Work is nothing more than a collective of individuals, coming together with the intention to produce a particular product or service. As each of these individual living systems come together with other individual living systems, we create larger living systems that are a reflection of the individuals who created it. What we have come to call a corporate culture is not a thing on its own; it is a reflection of something else, with that something else being the internal states of the human beings who go there.

Work is very, very personal. And yet, we continue to kid ourselves into thinking that work is 'out there'; that it requires us to be objective and detached and 'professional'. Truth is, there is nothing more subjective and personal than the day-to-day operations of any living system.

Someone once said: "If you want to change your life, you must first change the way that you perceive life." With a small shift in perception comes tremendous power and leverage – to change your thoughts, to change your life and to change the world in which you live. Think of the discovery and the power that came with a shift in perception from a flat world to one that is round: from the certainty of Newtonian physics to a quantum world. Change perception and everything else changes all by itself: the things we are willing to do and those we are not willing to do; the places we go; the people we spend time with; the words that come out of our mouths; the systems we support; the very world in which we live and call, with such great certainty, "reality".