Journalist Jodi Kantor On Finding Your Life’s Work

0:00This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

0:24We're entering college graduation season, and for many seniors, the best way to kill the excitement about this milestone is to ask, what's your plan for after graduation? That's a particularly fraught question this year with an uncertain economy, high cost of living, and AI poised to remake the workplace. In the midst of all of that, how can young people build fulfilling, empowering careers and establish themselves as authors of their own lives? This morning, I'm bringing you everything I've learned that can help. That's Jodi Kantor, New York Times investigative journalist and author of She Said, about a reporting on Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct that helped launch the Me Too movement.

1:06What you just heard was a moment from a commencement speech she gave last year at Columbia University. She spoke at a moment when the university's funding had been cut by the Trump administration, and the campus had been roiled by tensions over the war in Gaza. Following that speech, Cantor became focused on the question of how students in today's environment can establish themselves in a career and fill their days with vitality and meaning. The result is a new book, How to Start Discovering Your Life's Work. Jodi Cantor sat down with 1A's Nyla Boodoo to share what she learned. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast.

1:41We'll be right back with their conversation. Stay with us.

1:48This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

2:05Jodi Kantor:We flush a lot of things down the toilet. You know, the obvious ones, but drugs like cocaine are also going down the drain and into our waterways. That's changing the animals that live in it. It's definitely present in most ecosystems on earth now, unfortunately. We're only sort of really starting to scratch the surface into understanding the potential consequences of that. Forget cocaine bear. Learn about cocaine salmon on Shortwave, in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Jerry. Are you tired of your car insurance rate going up, even with a clean driving record?

2:38That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash npr today. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. Here's the conversation with Jodi Kantor and 1A's Nyla Boodoo. Let's talk about the genesis of your book. We just played a little of your 2025 commencement speech at your alma mater, Columbia University.

3:18When you first got tapped to begin the talk, you said you didn't know where to begin. Can you just set the scene for us of reminding us what that was like last year? Well, it's a huge honor, of course, to be asked to give a commencement speech at your alma mater. But in this case, to be honest, it was kind of a bad offer because you remember what was going on at Columbia at the time. I mean, the place was just roiled by controversy. It felt totally toxic. And, you know, my friends from college actually tried to stop me. They were like, don't do it. Call in sick. but something in me felt like, give me those kids for 15 minutes.

4:02Like as a mom, as an alum, I'm just upset by all the negativity here and I want my chance to say something to them. But I really initially did not know what to say because the assignment of a commencement speech is that you have to be uplifting. Like if you give a really negative speech, you've completely failed the assignment. And yet things at Columbia had been so, so tough. So the students gave me the gift of a great and really hard question. We got on a Zoom and they said, we don't want to talk about Israel. We don't want to talk about Gaza. We don't want to talk about President Trump. We don't even want to talk about the university administration we're all mad at.

4:42They said, our class, despite its political differences is united in one question, how in this crazy environment do we find and start our life's work? And you write about this, right, that college used to feel like hope and opportunity. We just got this email from one of our listeners, Nolan, who runs an organization in Atlanta that helps prepare kids from underserved communities. And Nolan writes, the real challenge now is that young people are entering a workforce being reshaped by AI, automation, cloud infrastructure. Many are being told to, quote, learn AI, but they're not being taught how systems actually work, how companies hire, how infrastructure supports the digital economy.

5:27The workforce conversation cannot just be about adapting to AI. It has to be about preparing young people to build, manage, secure, and govern the systems AI depends on. Is that what you were trying to set out with this book in terms of just trying to create a little bit more information for people who are out there? I wanted to ask and try to answer the question, what are students supposed to actually do, right? Like my newspaper, your radio network has reported tons of bad news about the entry-level job market. We all know that AI may turn into a real threat to entry-level work, but that doesn't, It's important to be aware of that happening, but young people or anybody trying to change careers right now has a more practical challenge, which is what does a positive and productive response look like in this moment?

6:25And I identify with the writer's question because, you know, part of the reason the Columbia students question gripped me was because I've covered employment for a long time. Megan Toohey and I broke the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017. But I've also been writing for about a decade about the digitization of work, kind of leading us to this AI moment, the idea that machines can do more and more and something human is being lost. Look, we don't know what the workplace is going to look like in five or 10 years. So I don't think that like a kind of glib self-help book would speak to students right now.

7:05I was trying to go for something deeper and say, given the instability right now, I want to reach for really time-tested, durable materials that are going to give you agency and make you feel like you can be the author of your own life and give you some hope that you might actually derive great happiness and success from the workplace. I do want to ask you about your work as a labor reporter. And as you're thinking about this moment, does it feel more pessimistic than you've seen in the past from your long view of the labor market? Yeah, well, I've seen it rising year after year. You know what my real index was?

7:46So after Megan and I broke the Weinstein story, we were invited to tons of campuses to speak. And that's where I saw a change. It corresponded to things I was seeing in my reporting. But year over year from, it's been almost a decade, right? 2017 to now, I could feel a rising sense of disenchantment, apprehension, fear about the workplace. And listen, starting has always been hard. It's always been scary, you know, to try to figure out your life's work. But this was something different. I mean, we usually associate graduation with feelings of excitement and experimentation and opportunity and wonder.

8:33And I felt less and less of that and more a feeling among young people that work was like this dystopian place. It got to the point where I found this vein of students starting at Stanford, but then at other universities too, who had an inside joke where in their text chains, they wouldn't type the word J-O-B. They typed it J asterisk B because the real word was too scary. And it was like, this is Stanford. This is like maybe our nation's most storied generator of wealth and success. I'm speaking to Jodi Cantor. She's a New York Times investigative reporter, and we're talking about her new book, How to Start.

9:18Jodi, I want to ask you about one of the students that you feature in the beginning of the book. Can you tell us a little bit more about her, how you met her, and how her story shaped what you wrote? Yeah, her story really motivated me to write the book. Okay, so Exaria Meekly was a member of that Columbia class of 2025, graduating last year. and Exaria had and has a fierce desire to become a research psychologist. And I mean, I'll be honest, she was one of those students where when you meet her, you're just like blown away by how talented she is. She came from an economically depressed background.

9:58Her mom waited tables and then got a license as a medical technician, but she had a 4.0 GPA and was about to graduate from Columbia and had already faced enormous obstacles because of the tough environment. For instance, if you want to be a research psychologist, you need research experience. It's ferociously competitive to get into these programs and doing research is what distinguishes you. So she had a work-study job doing research at Columbia and halfway through the year, They told her they couldn't pay her because of the budget cuts. She was so devoted that she kept working at the lab for free and bartended at night.

10:41And so her motivation is really very special and very tragic, which is that when she was 11 years old, her older brother, Keith, died of an overdose. And her motivation for getting a psych PhD is that she wants to devote her life to improving addiction treatment. So when I met her just before graduation, I have to tell you, I mean, she was almost ready to give up. She said to me, this was like on a group Zoom with other people, she made an offhand remark to me and she said, maybe I have to accept that Columbia won't really change my life. Maybe I have to accept that I'm just going to go back to this economically depressed town in upstate New York, and this education won't transform me.

11:33She had applied for like job after job and, you know, very typical story in this environment. Not only was she not getting jobs, she wasn't even getting responses or bites. And honestly, hearing her story, like something in me broke. She is so promising. The work she wants to do is so important. Her motivation for wanting to do it is like so sacred and pure. And I just said, I can't, like something in me cannot, you know, I'm a reporter. I'm not used to stepping in the middle of situations. I'm a professional observer who stays on the sidelines, but some combination of mom and citizen and Colombian and writer in me just had a moment where I said, this cannot stand.

12:23We cannot let these kids give up on the workplace. They can't afford it individually. We want them to, you know, prosper and work and thrive and whatnot, but we can't afford it collectively. Work is our engine of progress. Even now at this very difficult time, if we want new addiction therapies or new cancer therapies or new aircraft or new great TV shows, we need people to believe in the workplace. Well, and to that idea that work is our engine of progress, when you talk to people, especially young people, about success in a career, how would you define that then? This book is like a little bit like a lunchbox note.

13:08You put, like my daughter is 20. I have a college kid. And I've put, I've like left notes for her throughout her life. This book is like a 90-page note that I am leaving for every young person I can. And I'm doing it in part because I see a lot of them getting either bad advice or no advice. Because part of the result of the digitization of the workplace that we were just talking about is that hiring has become very cold, very digital, very sterile, and they're just not meeting as many people we did in the course of seeking work. For those of us who have not applied for a job in a while, it's really hard to understand how it's changed.

13:51Like at every book event I do, I try to get somebody who has done an AI interview to stand up and tell the story. And people gasp in the audience because they hear people describe being interviewed for jobs by machines instead of by people. But to get back to your question, what I would say is that there are three goals to a good working life. you want financial stability plus, right? You want to earn, you don't want to be without, maybe you even do better than that, but we don't want anyone to suffer or not be able to pay rent, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. That's number one. Number two is fulfillment.

14:36You know, pop quiz, if we pop in on you at 1030 in the morning on a Thursday, do you feel connected to the task risk before you? No job is all fun, but is work providing you a reasonable amount of satisfaction? Because at the end of the day, work is how we spend our time. And I mean, maybe you have met somebody in life who is miserable at work, but happy overall. I've never met anybody like that. Work determines a lot of our happiness. Number three, you want to contribute something to other people. Like, I don't want to define what that is. It could be through business. It could be through something more altruistic, but your work is a big part of your contribution to the world.

15:25And, you know, you want to make some sort of positive impact. So, and I don't really know why universities don't set that three-part system out as an explicit goal. Like it leaves a lot of young people saying, well, should I do what I love, but then I won't earn any money? And they see it as kind of like a binary division. And I want to push them on saying, well, the aspiration, like not all of us will get there, but let's at least set an aspiration for doing both, right? Making it an and and not having to choose and having some of these values in balance. One of the things you write about is this idea of developing a craft, which I think gets to what you're talking about here.

16:13Can you explain what you mean by that? Yes. So I was looking for something to give these students that would actually help in terms of setting aspirations and knowing what they're even going for. And not just looking for a job because looking for a job is very hard right now, but sort of aiming their sights higher. And what I want to do is challenge all young people to find two things to pair because I think the best careers are built for marrying two things, a craft and a need. By craft, I mean a special skill, an expertise, something you know how to do that other people don't. This is what gives you value in the market, and it can be a lot of different things.

17:02I mean, surgery obviously is one of the classic crafts, but so is writing a great home recipe. Like I look at the recipes in NYT cooking that my colleagues make and they turn out really well, even if you're not an experienced chef. And that's because the recipes are well crafted. Craft is really important right now because too many workers are being treated as disposable or interchangeable, and you want to protect yourself from that as much as possible. Craft is also important, and this is very hard for young people to see, because it feels awesome. Like when you have really worked at something for 20 years and done the repetition and the mistakes and the growth and you have real mastery, it feels incredible to exercise those skills.

17:52Like when Megan and I speak about the Harvey Weinstein story to students, they always say, how did you bear it? How did you deal with the trauma? And we love to shock them with the answer. We say, yeah, it was horrible. We shed tears in private. But the day you get to confront Harvey Weinstein is the best day at the office ever. So craft is really important. And then I think when you pair it with need, that's when you're cooking. After the break, 1A's Nyla Boodoo asks Jodi to take us back to that best day ever at the office. That's coming up. You're listening to 1A.

18:32Jodi Kantor:It can be hard to keep up with all the new movies on streaming services. How do you tell the good ones worth watching from the bad? Or the silly ones you can laugh along with? Or at? On NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're recommending some fun movies you may have missed. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back to our recent conversation between 1A's Nyla Boodoo and New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor about Kantor's new book, How to Start, Discovering Your Life's Work. It's based on a commencement address she gave last year to students at Columbia University. Jodi, just before the break, we were talking about the idea of craft and your work with Harvey Weinstein and the Me Too movement.

19:17Can you take us back to that day? You said the question you often get is people ask about, understandably, the trauma of the work and hearing from survivors. But can you tell us a little bit about how you got to, as you said, the best day at work when you get to confront someone like Harvey Weinstein? So let me say two different things about that story and about the culminating days. First of all, I just want to say that I was kicked off my college paper when I was a senior at Columbia at a column and a spectator. I was fired from it. The story's in the book, if you're interested. But it took me 20 years to get from those early fumblings in journalism to being at the point where I could co-author the Harvey Weinstein story.

20:04And so I think it just speaks to the lack of instant gratification in most really rewarding careers, the sense that you are working overtime to a goal. In terms of that day, I think the other thing I want to talk about is the teamwork. You know, were we a little nervous to confront Weinstein? Sure, but not as nervous as many people would assume we were. Because when you're involved in a really great work situation, you have the pleasure and potency of teamwork. And Megan and I were not alone. All of the New York Times was standing behind us, three top editors, our top lawyer. And more than that, like, I remember on that day, I very much felt like the heir to decades and decades of newspaper tradition.

20:58And that we were protecting our sources and going after the truth, aided by this very long tradition that was supporting us and holding us up. during this really tense moment. So, you know, whatever the ambitions and dreams are of the people who are listening to this, I just want to let them know that that's possible. You know, I think we had another reminder of that with, I don't know if you fell down the rabbit hole than I did of watching the astronaut videos from the recent moon mission. Yes. But it was - Who did not. Yeah, right? Yeah, I mean, it was like the most positive display of the workplace that I've seen in years, right?

21:43Like these people, their technical skill, their mastery, their respect for one another, right? Like their sense of mission and values, their professionalism, right? Because they were like, they were very funny and warm on camera, but ultimately also very professional. And together they accomplished something that still seems impossible. Like, yeah, we intellectually know that we've gotten to the moon before, but it's still, it's a crazy thing to do and they made it happen. Jodi, that I think is a perfect example of what you write about in the book, which is pairing craft with need. And I think the astronauts are maybe like a very high-end example of the far end of the spectrum if you want to super succeed, right?

22:30But can you tell us a little bit about that notion of craft and need and how those two coming together can create success in a career and help you figure out what that might be? Yes. So if craft is authority, need is propulsion. The way I came up with the need concept is that I looked back on my life and I don't know about you, but like, have you noticed that every couple of years, the conventional wisdom changes on the thing you supposedly have to study? When I was in high school, it was Japanese. And we were told, this was the 80s, we were told that if we did not learn to speak Japanese fluently, we were going to be left behind because the Japanese were poised to take over the world economy.

23:17Meanwhile, the Japanese stock market actually slumped for 30 years. And so then it was like genetics, Mandarin, computer coding. And these are all great pursuits. I'm not knocking these things or anybody who studies them. But the idea that they're golden tickets, I think is just like a kind of herd thinking. and especially because the future is so uncertain, I want to challenge young people to answer the following question and it may take years and a lot of exploration to answer. Using your own eyes and ears, what is your independent assessment of what society will need most during your working years?

24:02What kind of products? What kind of services? What kind of information? And do you want a career that in some way answers that need. It could be like a fun need, like my brother makes outdoor pizza ovens. So the need he's fulfilling is like for really good crusts and hanging out outdoors. But it could also be something very serious. A lot of the truly great careers are answers to some sort of bad or wrong in the world. It could be a business need. But the point is that if you pair your craft with a need, the need is going to pull you along. Like instead of a painful, slow paddle against the current, you are going to be carried forward by a kind of rushing river of what other human beings need.

24:54What other specific advice do you have for this year's graduates, especially maybe the ones who are feeling a bit lost as to what they want to do with their lives? Like, how would you suggest they even get started if they're at the end of graduation and still don't know what to do? I love those people. Those are my people. I mean, I was totally like that. I think the confusion is a sign of intelligence. Look, God bless these people who like know they want to be neurologists at age 17 or whatever. I wasn't like that. I find that very hard to identify with. And some of those people are right and just have that compass from the beginning, but other people who leap to an answer too quickly, they are adapting a kind of false certainty that can almost lead to a distortion, I think, because they're trying to bypass struggle and struggle makes you who you are.

25:46And some struggle in this difficult employment time is bad and depressing and degrading, but not all struggle is, right? I mean, struggle can also be self discovery, self-articulation. So I would say a couple of things. I would say, let's talk about what it means for you to have a great struggle. If there's no bypassing struggle, then let's figure out how to make it as fruitful as possible for you because you may be the better for it in the end. I would say, get the most stimulating first job you can. For some people, it's hard to get a job full stop. So like we can't be overly prescriptive or fussy, but generally careers are made from stimulation.

26:30And I'm not crazy about the really quiet first jobs, like being a receptionist in an art gallery where nobody walks in, it may seem kind of prestigious or glamorous because of the art world, but you're just not going to, like, you're not going to have enough action. Like this is why a political campaign is a classic great first job because political campaigns are nuts, right? Like you're confronting ideas and citizens and social problems and fundraising many and events and the outcome really matters and young people are entrusted with a lot of really important work. I would look, you know, in the absence of like some other compass, I would look for a high stimulation job because it's really hard to figure out who you want to be when you're sitting in a university library.

27:21Like libraries are very isolated places and I, you know, very few people have met their destinies sitting in a pretty book lined room and like marinating in their own aspiration and fear. I'm talking to Jodi Cantor. She's a New York Times investigative reporter. We're talking about her new book, How to Start. We got this email from Nathan I wanted to read to you. I'm 21 in Indiana and luckily got a job with the Postal Service right before the job market crash. Unfortunately for me, though, it's hard to see a future for myself. I have other aspirations and carrying mail, but going to college right now seems impossible.

27:58FAFSA support is so low. Student debt sounds like it could destroy me with what degree I want to pursue. So I guess I'm just going to work until Trump is out of office. Thanks for that email, Nathan. Jodi, I guess that leads to my even harder question for you. For the high school seniors out there or for people like Nathan, do you think college is still an important choice? Or why do you think college is still such an important choice when so many are struggling with whether or not they can afford it? Well, first of all, I just, if Nathan's listening, I just really want to say I'm sorry and I hear you and I'm glad you wrote in and I'm glad you said that because other people need to understand that this is the way so many young people are feeling.