As a small-business owner operating two franchise restaurants, I witness firsthand the type of employee dissatisfaction that E.L. Kersten describes in “Why They Call It Work” (The HBR List, February 2006). I agree with Kersten’s assertion that employees need to discard the idea that a job must be meaningful in order for them to find satisfaction with it, but I also believe that employee dissatisfaction arises from three other factors: a lack of self-motivation, a sense of entitlement, and a failure to accept that work is the tool with which one builds a meaningful life