Speaker 1: The biggest problem in work is not what you don't
Speaker 1: know about work, it's what you don't know about yourself.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: Bruce Filer, the author of seven New York Times bestsellers,
Speaker 3: including Life Is in the Transitions, The Secret of Happy Families,
Speaker 3: and Counsel of Dads. His three TED talks have been
Speaker 3: viewed more than four million times, and Bruce has written
Speaker 3: for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker,
Speaker 3: Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Gourmet. Today, Eric
Speaker 3: and Bruce discuss his new book, The Search, Finding Meaningful
Speaker 3: Work in a Post Career World.
Speaker 4: Hi, Bruce, Welcome back to the show. Eric.
Speaker 1: It's such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm really happy to have you on. We're going
Speaker 5: to be discussing your book called The Search, Finding Meaningful
Speaker 5: Work in a Post Career World. But before we do that,
Speaker 5: we'll start, like we always do, with the parable. In
Speaker 5: the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
Speaker 5: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 5: of us that are always at battle. What is a
Speaker 5: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 5: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 5: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 5: and they think about it for a second, and they
Speaker 5: look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins?
Speaker 5: And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 5: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 5: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 5: that you do.
Speaker 1: Well, What I appreciate about this question, and in reflecting
Speaker 1: on it in advance of this conversation, and I think,
Speaker 1: of course, this is the wisdom that you found by
Speaker 1: asking this over and over again. And that's one thing
Speaker 1: that you and I share, is this interest in asking
Speaker 1: people the same question because the answers tend to surface
Speaker 1: very interesting patterns. But in reflecting on it, Eric, in
Speaker 1: advance of this conversation, I realized how much my answer
Speaker 1: is shaped by what I have been thinking about and
Speaker 1: the work I have been doing, and that the answer
Speaker 1: I'm about to give you today is going to be
Speaker 1: different than the answer I gave you when we spoke
Speaker 1: a few years back. And my answer is this. I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated that in the parable as it's written, that you
Speaker 1: have a grandparent and a grandchild talking, because, as you know,
Speaker 1: I've spent the last few years collecting and analyzing stories
Speaker 1: about work, and one of the things that I learned,
Speaker 1: maybe the central thing that I learned, is that we
Speaker 1: all have these stories that we tell ourselves about work,
Speaker 1: and they are shaped not just by our own experience,
Speaker 1: by all the people around us, both the people now
Speaker 1: our spouse is, our children, our bosses, our lovers, whomever
Speaker 1: they might be, but also by our ancestors, by our parents,
Speaker 1: and our teachers, and perhaps religious figures or coaches that
Speaker 1: we grew up with, and even by our ancestors. And
Speaker 1: so what strikes me about this today is that our
Speaker 1: stories are shaped by all of these people, and that
Speaker 1: there's a tension between the stories that we want to
Speaker 1: tell and the stories that other people want us to tell.
Speaker 1: And so my answer to this question today, Eric, is
Speaker 1: that we're not the only ones feeding the wolf. So
Speaker 1: we might feed the wolf that's about bravery and courage
Speaker 1: and the values that we want, but other people around
Speaker 1: us are feeding the wolves that are also nipping at
Speaker 1: our toes. And while there may not be greed and
Speaker 1: being self serving and some of these negative qualities, they
Speaker 1: have different wishes for our lives than we have. So
Speaker 1: the wolves are not zero sum. By feeding one, you
Speaker 1: don't starve the other, And in effect both are being
Speaker 1: fed at old times by us and by other people.
Speaker 1: And therefore our challenge is to make sure that the
Speaker 1: wolf that we want to listen to is being fed
Speaker 1: a little more and that we're listening a little more
Speaker 1: closely to that wolf than to the other wolf, which
Speaker 1: is also managing to survive no matter what we do.
Speaker 5: That's a great way of looking at it and really
Speaker 5: thinking about the things that we want and we desire,
Speaker 5: and all of that comes from within, but it also
Speaker 5: comes from without.
Speaker 1: Bingo, and that can be both.
Speaker 5: Our ancestors, parents and all that, but the culture as
Speaker 5: a whole and all of that. And as you were talking,
Speaker 5: I had a moment. It's funny how we can be
Speaker 5: blind on things with ourselves up to a certain point,
Speaker 5: because I was thinking about the grandparent when you said
Speaker 5: grandparent and grandchild. I thought about it in terms of
Speaker 5: your book work, and I was like, you know, the
Speaker 5: last thing in the world it would work today would
Speaker 5: be for a grandparent to try and teach their grandchild
Speaker 5: today about the nature of work and how to succeed
Speaker 5: in our time. A grandparent is so far out of
Speaker 5: touch at this point. And I remember thinking that a
Speaker 5: little bit with my parents, like they still think that
Speaker 5: I'm safer with a corporate job than I'm a consulting career, right,
Speaker 5: And yet I somehow was fool enough to think that
Speaker 5: perhaps I wasn't out of touch when it would come
Speaker 5: to my son. And I just had a moment where
Speaker 5: I was like, of course you are to some degree
Speaker 5: of course you are like, yeah, I've been playing with
Speaker 5: chat GPT. Yeah, I'm pretty down with it. But of
Speaker 5: course I am.
Speaker 1: You know, I love that. I love everything about that,
Speaker 1: and I love the vulnerability, and I love the truth
Speaker 1: telling here right, you know, as you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: my book opens really with a story of me. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Savannah, Georgia and a family business, and
Speaker 1: every Saturday morning I had to get up and you know,
Speaker 1: put my work clothes on. I mean, it wasn't coat
Speaker 1: and tie, but I had to get dressed up, go
Speaker 1: to my grandparents' house, which was immediately behind the house
Speaker 1: where I grew up in. You know, we used to
Speaker 1: joke it was like out of Faulkner. And my grandmother
Speaker 1: would make breakfast and I would drive in my grandfather's fort.
Speaker 1: He drove seven miles an hour down Haberstrom Street and Savannah, Georgia,
Speaker 1: and I would go and sit behind a desk and
Speaker 1: in this case take rent payments from people who lived
Speaker 1: in the apartments and homes that my family built, like
Speaker 1: eighteen dollars, twenty two dollars, twenty six dollars, and I'd
Speaker 1: have to record these in a ledger, and my grandfather
Speaker 1: in his Oxford's and you know, you know, nineteen thirties clothes,
Speaker 1: would be sitting there with his hand on my shoulder, like,
Speaker 1: you know, bragging about my grades and penmanship. And that
Speaker 1: was the world that I grew up in. And the
Speaker 1: message was very clear. The most important thing in life
Speaker 1: is work, right, Not family, not love, not self expression,
Speaker 1: not giving back, not service. It was work, but in
Speaker 1: a very specific kind of linear, industrial, hair tonic and
Speaker 1: kind of masculine way. And I think a lot of
Speaker 1: what's going on in work today is the fact that
Speaker 1: that is the story that we've told in this country
Speaker 1: ever since Benjamin Franklin. And you know, this is a
Speaker 1: huge theme of these conversations that I had, the you know,
Speaker 1: five hundred hours of interviews that I collected and the
Speaker 1: now fifteen thousand pages that I have of life stories,
Speaker 1: is that we've told one story of success since the
Speaker 1: very beginning, and it's all about up right, rags to riches,
Speaker 1: up by your bootstraps, higher floor, bigger salary, greater benefits,
Speaker 1: better view. And it turns out that the people who
Speaker 1: are happiest, who are the most fulfilled, who get the
Speaker 1: most meaning out of work, they don't climb, they dig.
Speaker 1: They do this what I call personal archaeology, which is
Speaker 1: to excavate these parables and homilies and wisdom and expectations
Speaker 1: that they inherited from their parents, that they took in
Speaker 1: from their surroundings, maybe that they listened to in their
Speaker 1: religious institutions, or learned on the ball field or the
Speaker 1: ballet theater, wherever it might be. And the real challenge
Speaker 1: is to make sure you're not chasing someone else's dream,
Speaker 1: You're chasing your own dream. But the challenge is learning
Speaker 1: to identify what is it that brings you meaning, which
Speaker 1: is why the essence of this book is a set
Speaker 1: of tools I call them twenty one questions to find
Speaker 1: work you love that will help you figure out what
Speaker 1: is the story you want to tell, Because the story
Speaker 1: that people of our generation have been telling is the
Speaker 1: story that we were expected to tell, and invariably it's different.
Speaker 1: And almost everyone I know, and absolutely everyone I interviewed,
Speaker 1: hit a moment in their life where they realized that
Speaker 1: they were at crossroads. Do they want to tell someone
Speaker 1: else's story or do they want to tell their own?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's interesting, I'm reflecting on my own work life
Speaker 5: and I sort of was pursuing my own life up
Speaker 5: until I was twenty four and a homeless heroin addict, right,
Speaker 5: and I thought I wanted to be a musician. I
Speaker 5: wanted to be this free spirit and that.
Speaker 4: Crashed and burned.
Speaker 5: And it just occurred to me that what happened is
Speaker 5: when that crashed and burned, what stepped in almost immediately was.
Speaker 4: All these default stories.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 5: The minute that I walked into a professional setting and
Speaker 5: saw a path ahead of me, that dominant paradigm, Yes, wow,
Speaker 5: get this, get that, go this way, learn more, get
Speaker 5: a raised, get promoted. That that just slid right in
Speaker 5: and took over for a long time until I was
Speaker 5: able to ask better questions about what do I really want?
Speaker 5: And it's just amazing how it was kind of just
Speaker 5: waiting for me.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, again, I just appreciate the way
Speaker 1: you communicate, and you're this to be vulnerable and to
Speaker 1: tell that story. So let me just pause a little
Speaker 1: and acknowledge this. You and I haven't planned this conversation,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you what I hear. Having you know,
Speaker 1: collected life stories, now four hundred of them in the
Speaker 1: last six years, is you know, number one the idea
Speaker 1: that we are sold, certainly those of us, you know
Speaker 1: forty plus, which was the dominant idea, which is that
Speaker 1: there is a linear life right where the biggest transformations
Speaker 1: in our lives happen on birthdays that end in zero.
Speaker 1: That is not a reflection of how we actually live. Okay,
Speaker 1: These events did not necessarily happened on round birthdays. They
Speaker 1: happened when they happened. Maybe in your case, when you
Speaker 1: hit rock bottom as an addict, then you got onto
Speaker 1: a traditional linear path and then you realize you don't
Speaker 1: have to stay on this path forever. And that's completely consistent.
Speaker 1: So I'll put it in the language of the search
Speaker 1: that I sort of tried to sort of put some
Speaker 1: structure to this. And the way I would say it is,
Speaker 1: you know, there are three lives about work that we
Speaker 1: are sold. Lie number one, that you have a career. Okay.
Speaker 1: The career was an idea. It never existed in human history.
Speaker 1: Most people lived where they worked, and worked where they lived,
Speaker 1: and they were farmers and they made their candles and
Speaker 1: they made their food and they raised their animals like
Speaker 1: that's how it was. The idea of career was born
Speaker 1: actually in nineteen oh nine by a guy named Frank
Speaker 1: Parsons who invented career counseling as a way to accommodate
Speaker 1: people who left the farms and moved to cities, or
Speaker 1: people who emigrated from abroad and immigrated into this country
Speaker 1: and found themselves in the cities and they needed jobs.
Speaker 1: So you had a bunch of new jobs in the
Speaker 1: industrial world and a bunch of new people looking for jobs.
Speaker 1: And so they invented the career, and then fifty years
Speaker 1: later they invented an idea to manifest that linear career,
Speaker 1: which was their resume, something that also never existed essentially
Speaker 1: before the nineteen fifties. Okay, So now what's going on
Speaker 1: is that that doesn't capture how it is today because
Speaker 1: the career is built on the idea, as you use
Speaker 1: the language in this conversation, a path or a ladder. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's bunk. Okay. The average person goes to what I
Speaker 1: call a workquake. Okay, a work quake is a moment
Speaker 1: of reconsideration or reevaluation or change, or some inflection point
Speaker 1: through twenty in the course of our lives, that's one
Speaker 1: every two point eight five years, every two years and
Speaker 1: ten months and by the way, xers go through that
Speaker 1: more than boomers, millennials more than exers, Zers more than millennials,
Speaker 1: women more than men, diverse workers more than non diverse workers,
Speaker 1: which means the number is only going higher. So if
Speaker 1: the average person in general goes through twenty the average
Speaker 1: millennial goes through twenty five. Okay. And here I think
Speaker 1: is the signature piece of data that your story is captured,
Speaker 1: and that is the majority of all workwaks. Fifty five
Speaker 1: percent occur outside begin initiate. The energy behind them begins
Speaker 1: outside the workplace. So it's not something is wrong with
Speaker 1: a company, or you get downsized, or you don't like
Speaker 1: your boss or whatever. It's something happens in your personal life,
Speaker 1: or something happens with a loved one okay, Or you
Speaker 1: have a change of mind, or you have a mental
Speaker 1: health challenge, or you decide to turn towards sobriety. So
Speaker 1: in this battle between life and work that we always
Speaker 1: talk about balancing, that's just the wrong metaphor, because it
Speaker 1: turns out today people choose life over work, and life
Speaker 1: is a bigger influence on our work. So you can't
Speaker 1: leave your life out that people are happiness learn to integrate.
Speaker 1: And I think your story is a perfect example. Two
Speaker 1: mindset changes are what produced the big work changes. It's
Speaker 1: not the other way around. The biggest problem in work
Speaker 1: is not what you don't know about work, it's what
Speaker 1: you don't know about yourself.
Speaker 5: I want to jump ahead to a different point in
Speaker 5: the book. There's so many great places we could go here,
Speaker 5: but I want to jump to an idea that you
Speaker 5: talk about and you talk about that people have jobs,
Speaker 5: and that one of your other lies is you have
Speaker 5: a job, right and you say, no, you don't. You
Speaker 5: have a lot of jobs. And we could talk about
Speaker 5: the different types of jobs. There's the job that we
Speaker 5: get paid for, there's the job that we wish we
Speaker 5: could have. There's all these different things, and we'll get
Speaker 5: into that. But I want to ask a question this
Speaker 5: work in life not being a balance but being blended
Speaker 5: together and starting to look at things like dealing with
Speaker 5: personal challenge as a job, dealing with taking care of
Speaker 5: our parents as a job. What is not a job
Speaker 5: under that rubric?
Speaker 1: That's a fascinating question. Let me work my way toward
Speaker 1: that by sort of setting the frame. Okay, okay, you
Speaker 1: just summarized it, but I'll just sharpen the point. Okay,
Speaker 1: So they're three lives, right. You have a career, you
Speaker 1: don't have a career. Some people do. Some people pick
Speaker 1: something at twenty one and do it for forty years.
Speaker 1: But for the vast majority of us, that's no longer
Speaker 1: a relevant and helpful way of looking at it. You
Speaker 1: have a path, you don't have a path. You can
Speaker 1: get on the path, you can get off the path,
Speaker 1: especially helpful for women, right, because it used to be
Speaker 1: I'm going to get off the path and spend time
Speaker 1: raising my children or caring for an aging relative, and
Speaker 1: I accept that I'll never get back on the path.
Speaker 1: That was an absurd choice we asked people to make, because,
Speaker 1: especially if someone's about to be an empty nester, you
Speaker 1: can get back on the path whenever you want. When
Speaker 1: there's no path, there's no penalty for getting off the path.
Speaker 1: And the third is that you have a job. Right.
Speaker 1: And so again, this paradigm was never used throughout human history. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the word job wasn't even popularized, didn't even enter
Speaker 1: the language, frankly until the early modern era. And then
Speaker 1: it meant a task. Okay, if we jump ahead, that's
Speaker 1: how it's used now. But the idea of a job
Speaker 1: as something that you do during the day for which
Speaker 1: you get paid, which is sort of what the economists
Speaker 1: call it, that basically doesn't enter human consciousness or the
Speaker 1: lexicon again until the industrial era, where you sort of
Speaker 1: had something you did during the day and then went home.
Speaker 4: But can I ask a question about that real quick?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Sure, So you're.
Speaker 5: Sort of saying that this idea of career job entered
Speaker 5: the lexicon around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and
Speaker 5: before that it didn't really exist. What was someone who
Speaker 5: is like a blacksmith? There were trades before then throughout
Speaker 5: human history now not before ten thousand years ago, more
Speaker 5: or less. But how do those compare? I'm just kind
Speaker 5: of curious.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so how the word was originally used for
Speaker 1: a blacksmith, which was this was a task or a
Speaker 1: set of skills or ways that you spent your time.
Speaker 1: That is still in the dictionary today, and that's essentially
Speaker 1: how we've come to use it today. So the implication
Speaker 1: with a job was that you went and you did
Speaker 1: this one thing for which you got paid, and then
Speaker 1: you went home and did nothing, or then you went
Speaker 1: home and you did work for which you were not paid. Right,
Speaker 1: So what this does is it devalues. And this was
Speaker 1: sort of an idea that post feminist scholar is introduced
Speaker 1: in the seventies and the eighties, which is, it's a
Speaker 1: job to clean your bathroom, it's a job to clean
Speaker 1: up after the kids. Right, it's a job to make dinner,
Speaker 1: except that just happens to be unpaid labor. Right. And
Speaker 1: so this is an idea that's been building and now
Speaker 1: I think it just goes a lot further. Okay, which
Speaker 1: gets to the heart of your question. So you know
Speaker 1: the words, you could be a blacksmith during the day,
Speaker 1: but then you're a parent at night age, right, But
Speaker 1: now that usage and I'll get to the core of
Speaker 1: question about what's not a job, because I think that's
Speaker 1: a very interesting question. I'm going to have to reflect
Speaker 1: on that. But so now the way we use it,
Speaker 1: the way that I think that we should use it,
Speaker 1: is that we have to acknowledge that in the balance
Speaker 1: between you know, life and work. And so somebody's life
Speaker 1: has won, as I said, but one of the things
Speaker 1: we've done is we've jobified life. Okay, so job becomes
Speaker 1: what we do. So anybody who's a parent of a
Speaker 1: kid in travel soccer knows that their job is to
Speaker 1: be that parent, right, and maybe they have to bring
Speaker 1: the snacks on Saturday, right, or you know, get the
Speaker 1: hotel rooms for the boys, right. Serving on the co
Speaker 1: op board, okay, working on your social media, that's a
Speaker 1: job for a lot of people. Anybody who's a parent
Speaker 1: who has two working parents, as I did when my
Speaker 1: kids were young, knows, Okay, your job is bathtime and
Speaker 1: my job is bedtime. This is how people use it today,
Speaker 1: So we don't have one. So what are the five jobs?
Speaker 1: The five jobs are main job, and by the way,
Speaker 1: half of us even have a main job anymore. Two
Speaker 1: thirds of us have a care job that's caring for
Speaker 1: an aging relative or a neighbor or a child. Three
Speaker 1: quarters of us have a side job, which we talk
Speaker 1: about a lot. But there are these two other categories
Speaker 1: that you mentioned that I've come to name because I
Speaker 1: kept hearing about them. Eighty six percent of us have
Speaker 1: a hope job, which is something that we're doing that
Speaker 1: we hope becomes something else, right, like writing a screenplay
Speaker 1: or starting a book. I know you're starting a book, right,
Speaker 1: or you know, selling jewelry on Etsy or pickles at
Speaker 1: the farmer's market, or like that's a hope job. But
Speaker 1: it then turns out there's another job, which is an
Speaker 1: invisible time suck that feels like a job, like battling
Speaker 1: sobriety or discrimination or imposter syndrome, or you know, learning
Speaker 1: money management skills that you're anxious that you don't have.
Speaker 1: I call that a ghost job. That's ninety three percent
Speaker 1: of us, and that takes up to twelve hours a week.
Speaker 1: So one way of looking at this is, oh, my god,
Speaker 1: everything is work, which is sort of the implication of
Speaker 1: your question, and like, we work too hard. But I
Speaker 1: don't think that's the right way to look at That's
Speaker 1: sort not the people I talk to look at The
Speaker 1: way the people I talk to look at it is
Speaker 1: what's non negotiable is this sort of basic frame that
Speaker 1: I have. And maybe like the primary takeaway here, right,
Speaker 1: which is fewer people are searching merely for work anymore. More,
Speaker 1: people are searching for work with meaning. Right, we are
Speaker 1: transitioning from a means based economy to a meaning based economy.
Speaker 1: The thing that's non negotiable is the meaning. Now for
Speaker 1: some people that meaning may be money and hallelujah, I'm
Speaker 1: sending two kids to college. You know, I get it right,
Speaker 1: That meaning maybe freedom or responsibility or taking care of
Speaker 1: your family or self confidence or whatever. And for some
Speaker 1: people that's their sense of meaning. But for very few
Speaker 1: people is that their sense of meaning all the time. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe when they're younger it's more adventure and experience or
Speaker 1: self expression. Maybe when they're older it's giving back. So
Speaker 1: people are oscillating and how they allot the meaning, and
Speaker 1: that's really what's going on here. So maybe we have
Speaker 1: our main job because we need a salary and the
Speaker 1: benefit to whatever, and maybe we do our side job
Speaker 1: or a hope job for meaning, and so that's what's
Speaker 1: not negotiable. So on the one hand, I get the
Speaker 1: spirit of this. What's not your job? Recreation? You know,
Speaker 1: gardening may not be your job. You know, watching Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones may not be your job. But you know,
Speaker 1: you and I were talking before we came on the
Speaker 1: air about exercise. Right, for some people that's a release
Speaker 1: and something when they're off, But for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: that's a job, you know, like self care is a
Speaker 1: ghost job for people, right, you know, managing their weight
Speaker 1: or you know, a physical ailment of some kind. So
Speaker 1: I think that the spirit of your question is is
Speaker 1: everything work? I get it. I would push back a
Speaker 1: little bit, and I would say, by raising these things
Speaker 1: of our lives to jobs, we downplay the weight of
Speaker 1: meaning we have only to take from our main job.
Speaker 5: That makes sense. Yeah, and I think you intuited some
Speaker 5: of kind of where I was going with that, which
Speaker 5: is the word job for a lot of us is
Speaker 5: a pejorative term, right.
Speaker 1: The garden of eden, you know, like the penalty for
Speaker 1: getting kicked out of the garden eeden is work, you know,
Speaker 1: like the job, you know work. These come from the
Speaker 1: you know, Greek and Latin words for torture and misery.
Speaker 1: So yeah, every story we've ever told, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of work is a penalty.
Speaker 5: The way we talk to ourselves about things matters. And
Speaker 5: if I'm heading into waters that aren't alt lining with
Speaker 5: the core ideas you're trying to get here, we can
Speaker 5: steer back on. But the way we talk to ourselves
Speaker 5: about things matter. So, for example, you've got two kids
Speaker 5: you just mentioned who were going off to college. Right,
Speaker 5: There are times that being a parent feels like this
Speaker 5: amazing wonderful, deeply meaningful thing, and there are times that
Speaker 5: it feels like a.
Speaker 1: Job and of the word yes. Yeah.
Speaker 5: What I know for myself, though, is the more that
Speaker 5: I reflected on the former, the meaning elements of it,
Speaker 5: the choice elements of it, and the less I thought
Speaker 5: of it in the latter as a job, the more
Speaker 5: I felt like it contributed and gave meaning to my life,
Speaker 5: and the less it felt like something I had to do.
Speaker 5: So in that framework, talk to me a little bit
Speaker 5: about how we can use this framework of seeing more
Speaker 5: of these things as jobs, which I think to your point,
Speaker 5: the important lesson is that we don't only think about
Speaker 5: our main job as our job and everything else is second.
Speaker 5: Everything else has to fall in behind. That you're saying
Speaker 5: that doesn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 4: I just want to.
Speaker 5: Also think about how do we not use that way
Speaker 5: of thinking to turn all these other things in our
Speaker 5: lives into something we quote unquote have to do because
Speaker 5: we are making choices about what we do do.
Speaker 1: I like the word do a lot. Actually it's not
Speaker 1: a great word, a writerly word or talkerly word, or
Speaker 1: whatever the word you want to say is. But when
Speaker 1: I realize that these are the three lines about work. Right,
Speaker 1: you have a career, you have a path, you have
Speaker 1: a job. I actually set out to write a book
Speaker 1: without using the words career or path or job, and
Speaker 1: it's actually challenging. And so I came back to this
Speaker 1: issue of what it is that we do, Okay, and
Speaker 1: so if those are the three lies, what is the
Speaker 1: one truth? Right? So, then the one truth is that
Speaker 1: only you can decide what story of work you want
Speaker 1: to tell, what makes you a success? You know. The
Speaker 1: sort of next level of this one truth is that
Speaker 1: the answer is already inside you, and you can't find
Speaker 1: it by asking somebody else. You can't find it by
Speaker 1: going to a counselor. I talked to the guy who
Speaker 1: invented the cutting edge of modern career counseling, which is
Speaker 1: called narrative career construction, the idea you have to construct
Speaker 1: the story. And he says, when I meet somebody, I
Speaker 1: know within five minutes what the answer is, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to tell them. I want them to discover
Speaker 1: it inside themselves. So that's what we're doing. And then
Speaker 1: this is in a sense, the first book that I
Speaker 1: know of that's written with the idea of helping you
Speaker 1: excavate and tell the story that you want to tell.
Speaker 1: And so I'm perfectly happy not using the word job, okay,
Speaker 1: and say, how is it that you want to spend
Speaker 1: your time to get what it is that you want? Okay?
Speaker 1: And then, as you know, the second half of my
Speaker 1: book is essentially I call it twenty one questions to
Speaker 1: find work that you love. And the first one and
Speaker 1: you heard me flipping the pages perhaps when you were talking.
Speaker 1: I was looking to the book this morning, writing an
Speaker 1: excerpt that's going to appear in the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: in the next two weeks as we tape this conversation.
Speaker 1: And the first question that I asked when I started
Speaker 1: these interviews was oscars, Eric, tell me the upsides of work,
Speaker 1: the values of work that you learned from your parents.
Speaker 1: While you're thinking, these are a series of questions to
Speaker 1: understand what are the hidden legacies of work that you're
Speaker 1: carrying around that we don't spend enough time talking about.
Speaker 1: So what would the upsides are values of work you
Speaker 1: learned from your parents.
Speaker 5: It's a great question because I would say, and I
Speaker 5: did say this recently, my father passed recently and we
Speaker 5: didn't have the best relationship. We were very different people.
Speaker 5: But upon reflecting what did I learn from my father?
Speaker 5: One of the things I said I learned from my
Speaker 5: father was that I got a really good work ethic.
Speaker 5: But now that you ask me what the upside is, ah,
Speaker 5: I'm suddenly a little bit more. You know, like, this
Speaker 5: is not what I'm going to say at the funeral, perhaps,
Speaker 5: but you.
Speaker 1: Know what's the downside?
Speaker 4: Exactly? It's both, right, It's absolutely both.
Speaker 1: Okay, sore just listening to us in this podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: raising my arms in the air because this is the
Speaker 1: point that I wanted to make. I'm cutting off a
Speaker 1: little bit because I'm so moved by your answer. And
Speaker 1: I also lost my father recently, so my heart goes
Speaker 1: out to you. So I started asking people at the
Speaker 1: outset of this thing, tell me the upsides you learned
Speaker 1: about your work or you know, values you were uned
Speaker 1: for your parents, and basically everybody we've got a code
Speaker 1: of cutified. So here it is on page one sixty
Speaker 1: four of the search. It's two thirds of people said
Speaker 1: hard work. And you know, without being demeaning to you,
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, this is really boring. Everyone's telling me
Speaker 1: the same answer. It's not Therefore, not telling me anything.
Speaker 1: And then I started asking what are the downsides? Of
Speaker 1: course you intuited it because you're good at this, and
Speaker 1: guess what The number one answer was overwork? Okay, So
Speaker 1: the upsides sixty seven percent hard work, seventeen percent love
Speaker 1: what you do. In other words, I sold my soul
Speaker 1: to a corporation, right, or you know, you better love
Speaker 1: what you do, and then sixteen percent be true to yourself. Okay.
Speaker 1: The downsides maction, more tightly bunch thirty one percent, overwork
Speaker 1: twenty five percent, the strain on the family. Right, they
Speaker 1: were working so hard they didn't pay attention to me. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is something that we all know or know people
Speaker 1: who experience. And then another quarter said they were unhappy.
Speaker 1: They worked all the time, but they run happy and
Speaker 1: they didn't value happiness. So I think that this is
Speaker 1: what's interesting. Okay. So we all have this ambivalent feeling
Speaker 1: toward work that we're carrying around within us that we
Speaker 1: never articulate. That gets to what we were just talking about,
Speaker 1: which is why job is a loaded pejorative term. Because
Speaker 1: we looked at our parents and they were unhappy, either
Speaker 1: because they had a job or often the case of
Speaker 1: moms because maybe they didn't have a job. So as
Speaker 1: you know, what are we trying to accomplish her. We're
Speaker 1: trying to write a work story. I mean. One of
Speaker 1: the interesting things to me is that storytelling as of
Speaker 1: value is kind of all over cotemporary culture. Like it's
Speaker 1: gone from like nowhere to like your life is a story.
Speaker 1: My last book, Life Is, and the Transitions is all
Speaker 1: about it became a bestseller, a Ted talk with two
Speaker 1: million views. You know, I teach a Ted course on
Speaker 1: managing transitions. I get that it resonates, But for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: we haven't carried this into work. Like the idea of
Speaker 1: a work story is not a phrase I would say,
Speaker 1: that's just sort of a breast in the world right
Speaker 1: or popular in the cultures. But if you want to
Speaker 1: tell a story what we're talking about here, what are
Speaker 1: the ways to do it? Well, the number one way
Speaker 1: to do it the teacher and journalism school is what
Speaker 1: I call the Kipling questions because of Rodyard Kipling, Who, what, when, where, why?
Speaker 1: And how? Okay? Those are the six questions. The problem
Speaker 1: in work is that we only ask one question, how okay.
Speaker 1: I've just had a work quake. I'm looking for a job,
Speaker 1: How do I do it? And what do they tell you?
Speaker 1: Beef up your resume, call your contacts, you know, your
Speaker 1: close contacts and you're distant contacts. You know, go on
Speaker 1: the internet. Here's the problem with that. You'll succeed, you'll
Speaker 1: find a job, and in two point eight five years
Speaker 1: you'll be unhappy again because you're not getting to the thing.
Speaker 1: How is the last question you asked? The first question
Speaker 1: should be who you know? Who are your who's who
Speaker 1: are the influential voices in your head? And then the
Speaker 1: second question is what what is your what? Okay? And
Speaker 1: then that gets to me one of the best questions
Speaker 1: in this whole process, which is who were your role
Speaker 1: models as a child and what did you admire about them?
Speaker 1: So I'm going to ask you to do this again.
Speaker 1: So Eric, you're then family. Who were your role models
Speaker 1: as a child?
Speaker 4: Define child years?
Speaker 1: I mean, I like early, but I'll take them at
Speaker 1: any time you mentioned that, all right.
Speaker 5: Because I was going to say it like age eight, nine, ten,
Speaker 5: I probably would have said Pete Rose.
Speaker 1: Ah, Okay, there we go, George Brett. These are baseball
Speaker 1: players for those of you who are of a certain age.
Speaker 5: One of which was convicted for gambling, but that was
Speaker 5: not known at the time.
Speaker 1: We didn't know that about Pete Rose when you were young.
Speaker 1: He was the Cincinnati Red and.
Speaker 4: That's right, Charlie Hustle.
Speaker 1: And then George Brett was a Kansas City royal. We're
Speaker 1: the same age.
Speaker 4: I met George Brett once I went to.
Speaker 1: Avan Pete Rose. Hang on, Oh really, oh wow.
Speaker 5: Every spring we would go to Florida, where my grandmother
Speaker 5: lived for spring break and.
Speaker 1: From where I don't know where you grew up, Ohio. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, you must be in the
Speaker 1: Midwest if you're picking Pete Rose and George Brett.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and down there you could go to the spring
Speaker 5: training games. And so I was at a spring training
Speaker 5: game and I looked over and sitting just across the
Speaker 5: road and down the way was George Brett. And I
Speaker 5: was like crazy about him as a kid. I bet
Speaker 5: I was eight at the most at this age, but
Speaker 5: I loved him. I mean, I just thought he was it.
Speaker 5: So I went over to him to say, like, mister Brad,
Speaker 5: I really admire you. I don't to this day know
Speaker 5: exactly what he said, but he was basically, my parents
Speaker 5: will tell you like he was an asshole to like
Speaker 5: an eight year old kid. So sorry, George, I hope
Speaker 5: I don't get sued for libel on this anyway.
Speaker 1: You're telling the truth. They can't be served forlibele.
Speaker 5: I flipped from Pete Rose and George Brett to at
Speaker 5: about fifteen, Johnny Rotten from the sex Pistol. So what
Speaker 5: would you deduce from those two?
Speaker 1: Well, the question, Dan is what did you admire about them?
Speaker 1: Would you admire about Johnny Rotten? I'm looking at your
Speaker 1: spiky hair and a guitar on either side of him.
Speaker 1: The electric guitar that's one wolf and the acoustic guitar
Speaker 1: that's another wolf.
Speaker 5: I think Johnny Rotten I just admired his willingness to
Speaker 5: look below the values that our society gave us and
Speaker 5: look to your own values and look for a deeper
Speaker 5: story of meaning.
Speaker 1: So there we go. So what did you learn from
Speaker 1: your parents? Is what I call a who question? It
Speaker 1: falls under the who is your who? Category? Because we
Speaker 1: can't pick our parents, right, it's just how do we
Speaker 1: interpret the influence that they had on us, positive and negative?
Speaker 1: Who is your role models is actually a what question
Speaker 1: because it's not who the role model is it's what
Speaker 1: did you admire about them? Okay, so I just asked
Speaker 1: you what did you admire about them? And you said
Speaker 1: the willingness to look below or around or above my
Speaker 1: question below, but look outside the story that society imposes
Speaker 1: on us and be willing to be a bit rebellious
Speaker 1: and follow the story that you want to tell. That,
Speaker 1: of course, echoes exactly the story that you shared earlier,
Speaker 1: about the nonlinear life that you followed. And so what
Speaker 1: are we talking about here? We're talking about You're in
Speaker 1: a workwake. Eighty million Americans are in a workquake right now.
Speaker 1: You are someone you know or someone you lived with,
Speaker 1: or someone that you love is in a crisis about work.
Speaker 1: Right now. Seventy percent of Americans are unhappy with what
Speaker 1: they're doing. Three quarters of Americans are saying they will
Speaker 1: look for a new job in the next year. This
Speaker 1: is research that came out within the last week. Okay,
Speaker 1: a million Americans quit a job every week. That's fifty
Speaker 1: million people a year. That's a third of the workforce.
Speaker 1: Two thirds of the word force is now bowing with
Speaker 1: their employer about working remotely or working from home. So
Speaker 1: we're at a moment that's unprecedented when everybody is saying,
Speaker 1: I want to write my own story. And so what
Speaker 1: I'm offering here is a set of questions to ask.
Speaker 1: I got twenty one of these. But the first we
Speaker 1: went through here is what goes to be carrying around
Speaker 1: with my parents, And the second is, if you want
Speaker 1: to know what you should be doing right now, ask
Speaker 1: yourself what your role models were doing when you were younger,
Speaker 1: because the values that you admired them. In effect, that's
Speaker 1: the first choice you made about work. These are the
Speaker 1: first people that you chose to associate yourself with, as
Speaker 1: opposed to your parents, whom you had to associate yourself with.
Speaker 1: So all of these questions are designed to get at
Speaker 1: this story that you have been telling all along. Now
Speaker 1: you know why I can't tell you what to do.
Speaker 1: I can help you figure out if we just jump
Speaker 1: to another one of the questions. So I asked people
Speaker 1: in these conversations what I'm doing is I'm picking a workquake,
Speaker 1: a super workquake. I call it one of the biggest
Speaker 1: definances in your case. It would have been maybe when
Speaker 1: you were younger, but more likely I would have if
Speaker 1: I was collecting your life story right now, I would
Speaker 1: have taken the moment that you got off the career
Speaker 1: track right, and I would dig down into that, and
Speaker 1: one of the questions that I would ask you is
Speaker 1: did you get advice from someone at that time? In fact,
Speaker 1: I could ask you that quite did you get advice
Speaker 1: from someone? And if so, who was it and what
Speaker 1: did they say?
Speaker 5: I'm sure I did get advice. I'm a memory challenged person.
Speaker 5: I'm sure I got advice from a variety of people.
Speaker 5: And if I had to sum it up, I think
Speaker 5: that probably what I pulled out of that at the
Speaker 5: very least was and this was my transition from my
Speaker 5: sort of software career into doing the podcast full time, yep.
Speaker 5: And it was if you don't try this, you'll always
Speaker 5: wonder yes. And I think I'd been getting advice along
Speaker 5: the way for years about it. And you know, I
Speaker 5: think another piece of advice that felt really relevant to
Speaker 5: me was there's a way to do this without taking
Speaker 5: an exorbitant amount of risk, right, And that was basically
Speaker 5: my creating the podcast over years while I had another job,
Speaker 5: was in order to get to a point where I
Speaker 5: didn't find myself into the binary of do what you
Speaker 5: love or go broke right, and so there was actually
Speaker 5: a different way to get there.
Speaker 4: What are the people I know that helped.
Speaker 5: Me was a guy named Jonathan Fields from Good Life Project.
Speaker 1: I'm actually taping an interview with Jonathan coming up and
Speaker 1: I will share that with him. And this echoes exactly
Speaker 1: what I heard over and over again Eric. Okay, and
Speaker 1: that first of all, getting advice when someone is valuable.
Speaker 1: There's a whole chapter in life is in the transitions.
Speaker 1: As you may remember that one of the tools is
Speaker 1: share your story with others because you can get advice.
Speaker 1: But when I dug down into what was the advice
Speaker 1: and what people found most helpful, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people I just look for the number. I don't have
Speaker 1: the number off the top of my head, but it's
Speaker 1: like three quarters of people said that the best advice
Speaker 1: that they got reconfirmed advice they already giving to themselves. Funny, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So what we want from these people is not a
Speaker 1: kick in the butt or a slap in the face. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's a pat on the back. And this is the
Speaker 1: theme that comes up over and over again. Trust yourself,
Speaker 1: listen to what your inner voice is telling you. The
Speaker 1: inner voice knows because the inner voice is much less
Speaker 1: shaped by all of these external pressures. Okay, those other
Speaker 1: people who are feeding the other wolves, Okay, all around
Speaker 1: us is accessing that inner voice. Now, there are practical
Speaker 1: things in my book as a whole chapter on how,
Speaker 1: and one of them is, you know things that came
Speaker 1: up over and over again, or I give yourself a
Speaker 1: buffer time. Okay, I'll try this for eighteen months and
Speaker 1: if it doesn't work right, or maybe you keep your
Speaker 1: main job for salary and benefits and you start this
Speaker 1: side job or hope job in the evenings or the
Speaker 1: weekends to get it going. Or then maybe in your case,
Speaker 1: you leave the main job for the side job or
Speaker 1: the hope job, and then it's gonna work, but it's
Speaker 1: gonna take a while. And so maybe the bulk of
Speaker 1: your time time now goes to the meaning job, okay,
Speaker 1: which is the podcast, but it's not fully paying the
Speaker 1: bills yet, so you have to do take a few
Speaker 1: side jobs, you know, to pay for it. Here now
Speaker 1: you begin to see the value in the multiple jobs
Speaker 1: is that you can a lot meaning to this, and
Speaker 1: money to that, and time to this, and the hours
Speaker 1: of the day. Now that it doesn't matter that you're working.
Speaker 1: You know, what do people do all day? It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter that you're you know, doing one job from nine
Speaker 1: to five and then going home and having personal time.
Speaker 1: This is not the frame that's helpful today because it
Speaker 1: doesn't characterize all the choices that we have the opportunity
Speaker 1: to make today.
Speaker 5: I think that is so spot on and so absolutely
Speaker 5: true in my experience, because I had this career in
Speaker 5: the software business.
Speaker 4: It started out being very.
Speaker 5: Meaningful to me because I was just actually picking myself
Speaker 5: up from nowhere.
Speaker 1: You were paying your bills, you were responsible, you were
Speaker 1: contributing to society. You're now getting meaning that you know,
Speaker 1: you're not a loser, you're not an addict, right, You're
Speaker 1: not as appointment. You know, you're getting external validation and
Speaker 1: like all these things have great value. That's the meaning
Speaker 1: that you needed at that.
Speaker 4: Time, precisely.
Speaker 5: And then as that went on, it wasn't that I
Speaker 5: didn't like that work, because I always liked it. I
Speaker 5: always found it interesting, I always found it challenging, I
Speaker 5: always found that people interesting. I found it intellectually demanding.
Speaker 5: But it began to have less and less meaning, and
Speaker 5: so at one juncture I decided I was going to
Speaker 5: start a solar energy company to get more meaning, and
Speaker 5: I kept the consulting work and I worked on the
Speaker 5: solar energy thing, and solar energy company failed after about
Speaker 5: five years, and then I started up the podcast.
Speaker 4: But the thing I think about.
Speaker 5: All that that I'm saying is that at the time,
Speaker 5: you know, these two instances are ten and fifteen years ago, right,
Speaker 5: there was not a lot of discussion about what you're saying,
Speaker 5: the different ways to patch it together. I kept feeling
Speaker 5: like I was presented with these binaries. Either work your
Speaker 5: full time job and give yourself to it and abandon
Speaker 5: these silly me or you.
Speaker 4: Got to quit and go for it. Man, you got
Speaker 4: to like be all in a false choice, right.
Speaker 5: And it was a false choice, But for a long time,
Speaker 5: that was the false choice that was at least in
Speaker 5: the entrepreneurial narrative I was seeing, you know, and I
Speaker 5: think that's changed so much, but I kind of had
Speaker 5: to figure that out on my own. And I love
Speaker 5: what you're saying is that that's becoming more and more.
Speaker 4: The norm these.
Speaker 5: Days is that people are starting to understand I can
Speaker 5: cobble these various different things together into sort of my
Speaker 5: own mosaic of meaning.
Speaker 1: I appreciate this. You know, this is exactly what emerged
Speaker 1: from these conversations Eric. Person after person had a similar story,
Speaker 1: and oddly, what they all have in common is that
Speaker 1: at one point or another, somebody makes a decision that
Speaker 1: disappoints somebody else. It disappoints a colleague, it disappoints a boss,
Speaker 1: that disappoints a spouse, that disappoints a childhoo, disappoints a parent.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny because for about five minutes, this
Speaker 1: book is now called The Search, as you have been
Speaker 1: kind to say, but at one point I was thinking
Speaker 1: about calling it how Not to have a career, because
Speaker 1: in fact, the key skill today is not how to
Speaker 1: have a career, is how not to have a career
Speaker 1: and give yourself a permission. You said, for while you
Speaker 1: had a career, Well, what you mean by that is
Speaker 1: for a period of time, maybe it was fifteen twenty years,
Speaker 1: you did something that was a conventional career path, but
Speaker 1: then eventually it changed, and of course initially you also
Speaker 1: didn't have that. That's what goes on. So it's why
Speaker 1: my book ends, I mean, it's I just opened it
Speaker 1: up to look at this again as we're talking, because
Speaker 1: this is one of the first interviews I've done. I
Speaker 1: read the audio last week and I was talking to
Speaker 1: a woman named Leah Smart actually who works at LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: And she grew up in a middle class back family
Speaker 1: in the California and ended up in a conventional career
Speaker 1: at LinkedIn, but she was frustrated. She left for a startup.
Speaker 1: She came back, and then she made an internal switch.
Speaker 1: Like in some of these work quakes, the change may
Speaker 1: not be leaving your job. It may be staying in
Speaker 1: the company but doing something different. And she said to me,
Speaker 1: I'm one of the one and onlies. And I realized
Speaker 1: everybody that I was talking to, and everybody I know,
Speaker 1: is a one and only. And that's the thing. We
Speaker 1: need a way of talking about work that doesn't generalize it,
Speaker 1: but individualizes it and empowers us to believe that we
Speaker 1: can tell an individual story that's different, that's similar to
Speaker 1: other stories for a time or always, but different at
Speaker 1: other times and other always is, and that we're all
Speaker 1: one and only, and that at one time or another
Speaker 1: we're going to make a choice that some people think
Speaker 1: is the wrong choice because it doesn't adhere to the
Speaker 1: existing structure, but it's still the right choice for us.
Speaker 1: And I think I wrote a line in my book
Speaker 1: and that's what I was going to look for, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I can find it in the quick
Speaker 1: moment that we have. But basically every search for meaningful
Speaker 1: work seems to contain at least one uncustomary twist. The
Speaker 1: tragedy in these stories is that our unconventional decisions often
Speaker 1: cause pain to someone in our lives, a loved one,
Speaker 1: a colleague, a boss. The glory in these stories is
Speaker 1: that our unnormal choices are becoming so common that they're
Speaker 1: fast becoming the norm. That's what it is. The abnorm
Speaker 1: is now the norm, and that's the great moment that
Speaker 1: we're in. So the question to ask yourself is not
Speaker 1: am I adhering to what other people want? It's am
Speaker 1: I hearing to what I want? And the only way
Speaker 1: to do that is to identify what you want? And that,
Speaker 1: I think is what's missing in this conversation is a
Speaker 1: set of tools, in this case, a set of questions
Speaker 1: to ask yourself so that you can figure out who
Speaker 1: is it that you are, what's the story that you
Speaker 1: want to be telling? So you can right now today
Speaker 1: start going and telling it.
Speaker 5: I've started sending a couple of text messages after each
Speaker 5: podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations
Speaker 5: to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and
Speaker 5: listeners have told me that these texts really help to
Speaker 5: pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.
Speaker 5: When you get a text for me during your day
Speaker 5: to day life, it's one more thing that helps you
Speaker 5: further bridge that gap between what you know and what
Speaker 5: you do. Positive messages when you need them for me
Speaker 5: to you. So if you'd like to hear from me
Speaker 5: a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed
Speaker 5: dot net slash text and sign up for free. I
Speaker 5: want to go a little deeper on this idea of
Speaker 5: work quake because you said that the average of us
Speaker 5: will have what twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Well, the average person will have twenty workquakes in the
Speaker 1: course of their lives. That's every two point eight five years.
Speaker 1: But as we discussed, the numbers are higher among women
Speaker 1: and younger workers and diverse workers. So like a young
Speaker 1: female person of color in her twenties, she on average,
Speaker 1: we'll have twenty five. So the number's growing over time, Okay,
Speaker 1: And I think that it's one of the things I
Speaker 1: learned and working on transitions, is that this number is growing.
Speaker 1: It means younger people are actually more comfortable with leaving
Speaker 1: and making transitions. And there's often tension. We've talked a
Speaker 1: few times in this conversation about being parents of adulting children,
Speaker 1: and there's often tension between those of US fifty plus
Speaker 1: and those of US fifty minus. Like the fifty plus
Speaker 1: among us are saying, wait a minute, wait, wait, Like
Speaker 1: you're having a baby without getting married, Like you're leaving
Speaker 1: one job without knowing what you're going to do. You're
Speaker 1: moving to a new place and you have no idea
Speaker 1: what you're gonna do when you're gonna get there. Like
Speaker 1: that's a comfortable thing for people, you know under thirty five,
Speaker 1: and it often makes their parents really uncomfortable. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was going to say the other thing that makes
Speaker 5: for more work quakes. You know, if you're younger, if
Speaker 5: you're diverse, drug addicts have more.
Speaker 1: Thank you for bringing your personal experience to the table.
Speaker 1: I will say this, by the way, just Eric, I've
Speaker 1: gone four hundred life stories in six years. A quarter
Speaker 1: of them involve addiction. Yeah, either the person is addicted
Speaker 1: or a parent was addicted, or a partner or a
Speaker 1: child like this is something that is under discussed. So
Speaker 1: bravo to you for being open about it and normalizing
Speaker 1: that this is something that the shame associated with it
Speaker 1: is makes something that's difficult even harder. By the way,
Speaker 1: that is the definition of a ghost job, which is
Speaker 1: a shame, a difficulty that you bear quietly without sharing
Speaker 1: it with others. It haunts you and you don't tell
Speaker 1: other people about. That's the definition of a ghost job.
Speaker 5: So I want to go deeper into ghost jobs. But
Speaker 5: I want to ask another question about work quakes. So
Speaker 5: we've talked about that they're happening more frequently, and they've
Speaker 5: talked about who they happen to more frequently. What specifically
Speaker 5: is a work quake? So obviously maybe changing jobs is
Speaker 5: that a workquake.
Speaker 1: Let me take a step back. Yeah, why this term workquake,
Speaker 1: which is a term that they use here. And to
Speaker 1: answer that, we've got to go half a step back
Speaker 1: to when I started this project, the life story project
Speaker 1: of gathering these stories. I kept encountering these moments of
Speaker 1: disruption in our lives and the problem that I had
Speaker 1: with the way they're most often talked about, right crisis,
Speaker 1: you know, challenge, and you know, even curveball. All of
Speaker 1: the terms used for these moments of inflection or change
Speaker 1: in our lives were negative, but that doesn't actually fully
Speaker 1: capture what it's like to go through one of these changes.
Speaker 1: We've been talking off and on here that I'm the
Speaker 1: parent of identical twin daughters. As we speak, they just
Speaker 1: turned eighteen. I'm going to be an empty nester. That's
Speaker 1: a life quake, and that may also be a workquake.
Speaker 1: Right when they were born, Trust me, it was like
Speaker 1: it was joyful, it was happy, but it was a
Speaker 1: life quake, right, everything got turned upside down. So I
Speaker 1: ended up with this term lifequake specifically because it's value neutral.
Speaker 1: It can encompass, you know, voluntary and involuntary changes a
Speaker 1: personal and collective Like a personal life quake would be
Speaker 1: an illness you lose a job, you have a car accident,
Speaker 1: your house burns down, But a collective life quake it
Speaker 1: would be a natural disaster, right, or a recession or
Speaker 1: a war. And it's interesting like in that book, you
Speaker 1: may recall that the voluntary involunteer was like almost a
Speaker 1: fifty to fifty split, but the personal collective it was
Speaker 1: many more personal. But that predated the pandemic, which was
Speaker 1: the first collective involuntary life quake that we've had in
Speaker 1: one hundred years. Okay. So I was like originally like
Speaker 1: upset with this designation, but it turned out, I think
Speaker 1: to be quite helpful when we went through the pandemic. Okay.
Speaker 1: So I bring that up because when I use the
Speaker 1: term workquake, I was interested in the same thing is
Speaker 1: that some are involuntary and for you know, for lack
Speaker 1: of a better word, to be reductive unhappy you know,
Speaker 1: like you know, your startup fails, right, or you've been
Speaker 1: laid off, okay, or you lose your legs in a
Speaker 1: biking accident and you can't do your job at the
Speaker 1: Costco warehouse, like someone that I talked to. So some
Speaker 1: of them are involuntary, you know, negative in air quotes
Speaker 1: or unhappy, but some of them are not. Some of
Speaker 1: them are voluntary, like you decide to go back and
Speaker 1: get a second degree, right, or you get married and
Speaker 1: your spouse you know, has a job in a different place, right,
Speaker 1: or you know, you want to start something new, or
Speaker 1: you say I no longer want to value money above everything.
Speaker 1: I want to give back. You know, you have to
Speaker 1: spend less time at work because you need to care
Speaker 1: for an aging parent. So the essence of the term
Speaker 1: workquake is that it's value neutral, and the essence of
Speaker 1: it at its core is that it's a moment of
Speaker 1: change in your work. Okay, And so it's a moment
Speaker 1: of change, redirection, reevaluation. And as I said, you know,
Speaker 1: to kind of deepen the point that we were making
Speaker 1: when we first started talking about this, the headline here
Speaker 1: is that most of them begin outside of work. If
Speaker 1: you have a whole shelf of books here to my
Speaker 1: right on like the History of Work, and in ninety
Speaker 1: eight percent of them, it talks about work for work's
Speaker 1: sake entirely through economic terms. Right. So this construct that
Speaker 1: I use over and over again in the search is
Speaker 1: that what is work? Okay? If you look up at
Speaker 1: the dictionary, it says work is you know, labor perform
Speaker 1: for money. We've already debunked that because starting a podcast
Speaker 1: selling pickles at the farmer's market like this is not
Speaker 1: writing three novels. I met someone recently he was on
Speaker 1: his third novel, he as I made a dime. It's work,
Speaker 1: but any' doing it for money. So we already discussed
Speaker 1: broadening that. But the way to think about work is
Speaker 1: that work is a formula. Work equals numbers plus words, okay,
Speaker 1: And we spend two thirds of our time talking about
Speaker 1: the numbers. Okay, that's ours, that's salary, that's benefits, that's profits,
Speaker 1: that's loss, that's efficiency. You know, that's what the economists do.
Speaker 1: But when I ask people what's the first word that
Speaker 1: comes to your mind? I'll ask people listening to this,
Speaker 1: what's the first word that comes to your mind when
Speaker 1: I say work? A third of the answers are what
Speaker 1: you do, right, manager, architect, carpenter, union, a school for
Speaker 1: a school teacher. Two thirds of the words that people
Speaker 1: do are what they think about their work, happiness, meaning purpose, service,
Speaker 1: you know, of a family, whatever it might be. So
Speaker 1: we need less math and more literature when it comes
Speaker 1: to talking about work. And so I think that's the
Speaker 1: thing about these work quicks is for a lot of them,
Speaker 1: for the majority of them, they are moments of reorientation,
Speaker 1: and that allow us to say, there's a change in
Speaker 1: my story, and you know, it's like the old line
Speaker 1: and the breakup. It's not you, it's me. That's what
Speaker 1: it is. For most people. It is not the job
Speaker 1: that they're unhappy with. It's that they're themselves. What they
Speaker 1: wanted out of the work is what's changing.
Speaker 5: Earlier, you were discussing the number of people who want
Speaker 5: a new job, who are going to get a new job,
Speaker 5: the number of people who are quitting it huge numbers.
Speaker 5: I don't remember the exact statistics, but they're staggering.
Speaker 1: Seventy percent of people unhappy, three quarters of people are
Speaker 1: looking for a new job. A million people that we
Speaker 1: quit a job.
Speaker 5: So seventy percent of the people that are unhappy. Yes,
Speaker 5: Based on what you just said, would be that a
Speaker 5: lot of that unhappiness might be coming from their personal life,
Speaker 5: making what they do no longer relevant. Would you say
Speaker 5: that's a lot of it because a lot of it
Speaker 5: is people have jobs that kind of suck, right, I mean?
Speaker 5: Or is that an old way of thinking about it?
Speaker 1: Well, I think a lot of people do have jobs
Speaker 1: that they suck. The question to how did you end
Speaker 1: up in a job that sucks? And how do you
Speaker 1: get a job that doesn't suck. I mean, that's of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Here's how I think about it. I think about it
Speaker 1: is a lot of the people are unhappy with the
Speaker 1: job they're doing in the career that they have, and
Speaker 1: they think the problem is then, but the problem actually
Speaker 1: is the idea of the job and the idea of
Speaker 1: the career. Right. Sort of my frame for this is
Speaker 1: that we are haunted by the unfed wolf, right that
Speaker 1: we think that that wolf is not threatening because we're
Speaker 1: not feeding it, but we're forgetting the fact that lots
Speaker 1: of other people around us are feeding that wolf. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's the powerful way to go into the language
Speaker 1: that I live under. Now. We have linear expectations and
Speaker 1: nonlinear lives, So we are constantly comparing ourselves to a
Speaker 1: standard that no longer exists because we inherited those standards,
Speaker 1: because we were force fed those standards, because we chose
Speaker 1: those standards at a different time in our life. Those
Speaker 1: standards were written essentially for a different era of work,
Speaker 1: when the only people working were basically straight white men,
Speaker 1: And as the workforce has become more diverse, we have
Speaker 1: diversified the standards of success. So we are using only
Speaker 1: one metric of achievement, okay, which is money or salary
Speaker 1: or status or whatever. And the truth is, we need
Speaker 1: to broaden those metrics of achievement, and we need to
Speaker 1: have multiple kinds of heroes. My book opens the search
Speaker 1: opens by looking analyzing all the stories told in the
Speaker 1: top five success books of the last century. That's how
Speaker 1: to win friends and influence people write twenty million copies. Right,
Speaker 1: What Color is Your Parachute? A bestseller for fifty years. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The stories
Speaker 1: in those books are ninety three percent straight white men,
Speaker 1: only seven percent women, and the minority number is point
Speaker 1: nine percent. We've been telling one type of story, with
Speaker 1: one type of hero and only one metric of achievement.
Speaker 1: And those people may still exist, and that's you, hallelujah.
Speaker 1: But for many more people, they want a different kind
Speaker 1: of story, with a different metric of achievement for different
Speaker 1: times in their lives, and different work that gives them
Speaker 1: the meaning they want, no matter how often they change
Speaker 1: that meaning.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 5: I love Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and it
Speaker 5: is extraordinarily a straight white man's perspective.
Speaker 4: All I always think it's not.
Speaker 5: Really a business book so much as it's anyway. We
Speaker 5: don't need to go down that rabbit hole because we've
Speaker 5: got a lot to cover in a few more minutes.
Speaker 5: Here can people get stuck in a work quake? And
Speaker 5: what I mean by that is I'm dissatisfied with work.
Speaker 5: We all know people who have been dissatisfied. They have
Speaker 5: said they hate their job for five years a decade,
Speaker 5: you know. So it sounds like they're in a work quake.
Speaker 5: But that work quake is not resolving.
Speaker 1: Here's where the two books they are twins. And maybe
Speaker 1: because I'm a parent of multiples, I think in terms
Speaker 1: of twins. Right. The idea of life is in the transitions.
Speaker 1: They involve three phases, right, you'll remember that from our
Speaker 1: last conversation, right, the long goodbye, where you're saying goodbye
Speaker 1: to the old expectations and the old life, and that
Speaker 1: involves off in morning and sadness, and then there's the
Speaker 1: new beginning, the turn toward renewal, which many of these include.
Speaker 1: But in between is the messy middle, you know, And
Speaker 1: the average length of a life quake is five years.
Speaker 1: That means the messy middle is often very long and
Speaker 1: so yes, it definitely involve two steps forward and one
Speaker 1: step back. And the same applies you know in many
Speaker 1: cases to some workwakes, right, which is that they can
Speaker 1: become prolonged. I mean the essence of my life's work
Speaker 1: at this point we have been doing this for six
Speaker 1: years now, is we spend half of our lives in
Speaker 1: a life transition, and as we've just said, we spend
Speaker 1: two thirds of our lives in a workquake. So my
Speaker 1: goal is to get people the tools to navigate them
Speaker 1: more effectively, because you're going to go through them. You're
Speaker 1: going to have good days and bad days. You're going
Speaker 1: to feel stuck, and you're going to feel frustrated. But
Speaker 1: part of it is to make you feel better, like
Speaker 1: maybe you are voluntarily having a main job that may
Speaker 1: not bring you as much, meaning because you have two
Speaker 1: kids going to college, or because you want to buy
Speaker 1: a new home, but because your spouse needs to go
Speaker 1: back to graduate school and get a degree right, or
Speaker 1: because you're just in a period and you don't want
Speaker 1: to leave this job in a lurch. The good news
Speaker 1: there is even if you have to make the choice
Speaker 1: that makes you less happy, now, you don't have to
Speaker 1: make it forever. You can feel better to know that
Speaker 1: everything is a phase and you're going to have another
Speaker 1: chance two and a half years from now to change that,
Speaker 1: and that will make you feel a lot better. Maybe
Speaker 1: if you do that, maybe you take a side job,
Speaker 1: or maybe you start that podcast at night, or you
Speaker 1: start making jewelry to sell on Etsy, right, or maybe
Speaker 1: now is the time that you want to start your screenplay.
Speaker 1: Do this other work that will bring you meaning. And
Speaker 1: by the way, by every metric, if it's different from
Speaker 1: your main job, it will actually make you better at
Speaker 1: your main job because you won't resent it as much.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that's a really interesting point about that, is
Speaker 5: that as I was trying to get out of my
Speaker 5: main job, I found it really important to learn to
Speaker 5: love my main job more. It was sort of this
Speaker 5: ironic sort of thing where I actually felt like, you
Speaker 5: know what, I've got to invest in this even though
Speaker 5: I plan to leave, because if I don't, I resent it,
Speaker 5: and that resentment drags me down, which gives me less
Speaker 5: energy for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: Ingo, And a lot of it is identifying what is
Speaker 1: the value in it? How is it contributing to your
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty degrees of meaning that you're trying
Speaker 1: to take. And here it's clearly serving a purpose. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's providing stability. It got you out of a bigger
Speaker 1: work quake early in your life. Life, right, it's giving
Speaker 1: you the ability to sock some money away so that
Speaker 1: when you do step away, you don't have to be
Speaker 1: live in hand to mouth. So understanding that it's serving
Speaker 1: a purpose and that it's not forever can actually reduce
Speaker 1: your resentment toward it. And then it just is a
Speaker 1: matter of when is your when? Right? So then you
Speaker 1: get that's another one of my six questions. Right, the
Speaker 1: when is your when? Is then all about Okay, when
Speaker 1: is the right time to jump? And when is the
Speaker 1: right time to stay?
Speaker 5: Near the end of the book, you've got another line.
Speaker 5: You say, if there's a universal message in these stories,
Speaker 5: it's that there is no universal story anymore, with no
Speaker 5: single job that will make you happy or free to
Speaker 5: accept whatever job you want, with no single path that
Speaker 5: will lead to your dreams, You're free to follow whatever
Speaker 5: dream you wish. There's a couple more lines in there,
Speaker 5: and then you say the lesson of the work story
Speaker 5: project is there is power in the unright choice. And
Speaker 5: I love that because I think there's two ways we
Speaker 5: could take that to mean. One, we could say it's
Speaker 5: okay to make a choice that isn't right by somebody
Speaker 5: else's standards, It's okay to make a mistake. And I
Speaker 5: think this is what you're aiming at is there isn't
Speaker 5: a right choice. There are right choices because all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, once the path is gone the path, it
Speaker 5: becomes paths. And that for me has always been a
Speaker 5: freeing thing. Is that like, Okay, I'm going to go inside.
Speaker 5: I'm going to do my best digging to kind of
Speaker 5: find out, you know, what feels right and what feels relevant,
Speaker 5: and there isn't like only one answer. Your kids are
Speaker 5: going off to school. I used to talk with my
Speaker 5: son about this. I was like, you know, we can't
Speaker 5: look for the right school because that doesn't exist, right.
Speaker 5: There's just a variety of schools that would be a
Speaker 5: good fit for you that are all going to have
Speaker 5: different trade offs and pros and cons. We just want
Speaker 5: to make the best decision that we can, knowing that
Speaker 5: it's reversible.
Speaker 1: It's changeable, right, you may reverse it or you may
Speaker 1: move in a different direction. Right but I think that
Speaker 1: it's funny because we're having this conversation in this moment
Speaker 1: of transition. You know that we've all been in for
Speaker 1: months now in the British monarchy, right, and so what
Speaker 1: was the old lie? You know, the king is dead?
Speaker 1: Long live the King? And I think I bring that
Speaker 1: up because you know, I'm not sure if this line
Speaker 1: survived in the search, but it's a line that informs it,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, the American dream is dead, Long
Speaker 1: live the American dreams. Right. There is not one story
Speaker 1: to tell. There are unlimited number of stories to tell.
Speaker 1: And the challenge I think, you know, having now been
Speaker 1: in this space, I've been doing this for six years,
Speaker 1: collecting these stories. This is my second book, you know,
Speaker 1: in this general space. The first one, Life Is in
Speaker 1: the Transitions, is generally about all of these life quakes,
Speaker 1: and this is specifically about work and the sort of
Speaker 1: essence of what I've learned is that there's a blessing
Speaker 1: that we can write whatever story we want to write.
Speaker 1: But it's also a curse, right, because we get writer's
Speaker 1: block trying to write the story of our lives. But
Speaker 1: if there's one thing I learned is that you want
Speaker 1: to make sure you're the hero of your own story.
Speaker 1: And there's only one way, you know, in the fairy tales,
Speaker 1: you got to get through the woods. You know, you
Speaker 1: got to encounter the wolf, right, you got to have
Speaker 1: the scary music, you know, in the clouds and that moment.
Speaker 1: And we would like to banish the hero, but you
Speaker 1: can't banish the hero. You can't banish the wolf. You
Speaker 1: can't banish because you've banished the wolf, you banish the hero.
Speaker 1: And it is essential that we figure out who the
Speaker 1: hero is, What is the superpower of the hero, What
Speaker 1: is it that makes your story special? That is the challenge.
Speaker 1: But there's a reason that we tell fairy tales at
Speaker 1: night because they help turn our nightmares into dreams. And
Speaker 1: so my message to you, to anybody listening to us,
Speaker 1: is you're not alone. Tens of millions of us are
Speaker 1: feeling stuck and confused and in pain and unsure. Okay,
Speaker 1: three quarters of us, we talked about this earlier, want
Speaker 1: to find a new work. If you come on this
Speaker 1: journey with me, if you meet these people I think of.
Speaker 1: This book is the largest collection of informational interviews ever.
Speaker 1: Did you know it's going to help you understand the
Speaker 1: options before you and ultimately understand the choices that you
Speaker 1: want to make. You can get the work you want,
Speaker 1: You can find the happiness you crave, You can find
Speaker 1: the meaning you deserve.
Speaker 5: Well, I think we have come to the end of
Speaker 5: our time, while I have about fifteen more questions. But
Speaker 5: I guess that's a sign of a good book, or
Speaker 5: at least I usually think it's a sign of a
Speaker 5: good book when I'm like, there's too much here to cover,
Speaker 5: and you're always such a pleasure to talk to, Bruce,
Speaker 5: So thank you so much again. The book is called
Speaker 5: The Search Finding Meaningful Work in a post career world.
Speaker 5: Will have links to you the book, all that stuff
Speaker 5: in our show notes, and such a pleasure to see
Speaker 5: you again.
Speaker 1: My pleasure.
Speaker 5: Eric.
Speaker 1: What a delightful conversation. And we'll get through this everyone.
Speaker 1: You'll find what you're looking for and I'll look forward
Speaker 1: to our next conversation. Thank you very much.
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