Bruce Feiler on Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World

0:00Thanks for pressing play. If you love the serendipitous magic that can only occur in a real conversation, you're in the right place. This is Christopher Lochhead, Follow Your Different, the number one real dialogue oddcast for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and category designers with a different mind. I'm producer Jason DeFilippo, and all of us here are glad you're here. The people who are happiest don't chase someone else's dreams. They chase their own. says our guest, one of our favorite authors, thinkers, and people, Bruce Feiler. He's the author of the landmark book, Life is in the Transitions.

0:36And now he's back to address one of the seminal questions of our time. How do we find or create meaningful work? A subject he's lived over and over again. His new book is out, and it's called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. And we go deep. No matter what stage of life or work you're in, this conversation will open the aperture of your mind. Bruce Feiler is one of America's most thoughtful voices on contemporary life. He's a seven-time New York Times bestselling author. He's lived many lives, from circus clown to preeminent spirituality author, to winning three James Beard Awards and being the subject of a Jeopardy question.

1:22Bruce is an American treasure who you're going to love hanging out with. Now, most CEOs have a tough time answering the most important question in business. Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue? And according to research from our friends at Clary, the average company has 14.9 % revenue leak, which is revenue that they earn but that falls through the cracks. In good times and in bad, every drop of revenue matters. Go to clary.com and calculate your potential revenue leak. That's clary.com, C-L-A-R-I dot com. Now, hey-ho, let's go.

2:18Well, Bruce, I'm so excited to see you. Look, this is going to sound corny and maybe a dumb way to start, but I fucking love you and your work.

2:25Bruce Feiler: we got put together by the wonders of the universe in a crazy time in the middle of the pandemic you've been incredibly generous to me on air in public off air in private you know sort of welcomed me into your family and it means a lot to me personally so thank you well god bless you and and your book life is in the transitions not only is it an extraordinary insight you know the thing that i remember the most is that a lot of us in our minds i'll tell you my experience is we sort of our our life is all about getting to some next place oh well and we talked about this right oh well you're in school and when i graduate then it'll be my life right and then we graduate we say oh we got to get a career going and oh then then once i maybe once i have a spot maybe once i start or whatever the milestones are that we're driving towards and am i remembering this, right, Bruce, that you, the research that you did said essentially almost half of our lives are spent in one transition or another.

3:32Is that, am I remembering that correctly?

3:34Bruce Feiler: You are remembering correctly. Just to comment on the, on the intro you just made. I mean, I, when I, I'm looking at my 40th high school reunion as we speak and also my children's high school graduation, my daughters will graduate from high school next week as we taped this conversation. And so I, in the course of the next 10 weeks, I have just published a book. My children are about to, my identical twin daughters are about to graduate from high school. I will celebrate 15 years of cancer, 20 years of marriage, and I will become an empty nester six weeks after that. So I'm in a life transition and I'm looking for someone who knows anything about life transition.

4:17Bruce Feiler: So do we get anybody I can call on the phone here? But yes, when I - I'm happy to teach you what you taught us, my family, in your book, if you like. Well, that's the thing, you know, the doctors make bad patients and the lawyers make bad clients, and maybe the writers make bad readers. But yes, I think the way I say it is I actually think that the signature piece of data from that experience, right? So to reset the stage, right? I had had a linear life. I had figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married. I had children. And I had that fantasy linear life.

4:56Bruce Feiler: And entrepreneur circles, as you know, that's the hockey stick, right? I was on the stick part, not the blade. I was on the stick part of life, right? And then my life blew up in my 40s. First, I got cancer as the father of three-year-old daughters. I had financial troubles. My dad got depressed with Parkinson's and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So suddenly I had the opposite of a fantasy life. And worse, I think I didn't, as a storyteller, I didn't know how to tell that story. And so what I did, as you know, and we've discussed and is outlined in life, is in the transitions I set out with the simple idea of, let me talk to other people about their lives, right?

5:39Bruce Feiler: And in the intervening six years, I have traveled across this country collecting life stories of Americans of all ages, all backgrounds, all income levels, all 50 states. And in this field of like narrative psychology, you know, maybe a paper will have 8, 10, 12 stories. I've done 400 now in six years. And I think the signature piece of data from the first half of it that led to the transitions was that we go through one of these lifequakes, as I call them, three to five times in our lives. That's a massive disruption. And that their average length is five years. So when you do the math, three, four, five of these, four, five, six years, that's 25 years.

6:20That's half of our adult lives we spend in transition.

6:24Bruce Feiler: And the way we've been talking about it for years now is grit, grind, resilience, your way through them. And we kind of stigmatize them and talk about them as periods that - You're just not hustling enough. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we have normalized the stable periods and we've stigmatized the unsettled periods. And if there is sort of a mission in my work, it's to flip that and normalize the unstable periods. And yeah, there's going to be pain and shame and sadness, but there also can be growth and renewal. And let's talk about how we can actually flip those moments. And as I don't have to tell you, you know, as I've come to understand, this happened to arrive in your life.

7:09Bruce Feiler: Not only did it happen in the planet when the entire planet was in a life transition, but of course it came into your life when you and your family were facing some of those yourself. And you've been very open about that. And so, you know, I would say the technical reaction to that book, I sometimes joke, this is a scientific term, but the technical reaction to my work has been, phew. Yeah. Like you put a name to these things that I'm feeling that I had never been able to name before. Yes. And to acknowledge you, of course, we talked at the time, but I want to make sure I acknowledge you. Your book and our conversation about your book the first time you joined me was so impactful for me.

7:56I shared your work with my family. And when my wife Carrie read your book, first of all, it was on the nightstand. And I must tell you, let me get beans butt out of my face. I must tell you, life is in the transitions right now is on her bedside table. And that book, I think you came on in the fall, if my memory is right. and she said, I want to give Bruce's book to everybody in our family. And then she asked me the question that I dreaded, which is, do you think you could reach out to Bruce and get him to sign these books? And I'm like, I'm an author. I know signing analog books is an honor and a pain in the ass.

8:47She really was very important for her. And do you remember what you did?

8:52Bruce Feiler: You sent a case of books to my house in Brooklyn. We've still, it feels strange to say this, but we've still never been in person in the same place together. And I don't remember what happened other than I must have signed them and sent them back. Well, not only did you sign them and send them back, you personalized them. Nice. You said, dear, um, Flippin' Susan. And then whatever wonderful thing you wrote, and then you signed it. And all the people in our lives. And that's what they got for Christmas that year was a personally signed from the legendary Bruce Feiler himself. Copy of Life is in the Transition.

9:29And our entire family has been going through horrible transition. Was at the time. And, you know, we found what I would describe as a new place. Right. People say, oh, you'll get over it in the first two years. And all that.

9:46Bruce Feiler: Time cures all wounds. I hate that. Go fuck yourself. It does not. But in our case, anyway, all I have is my experience and our experience. What has changed over the last couple of years with help from you is we've learned to make room for the loss and for the pain. And we learned something simple yet powerful, something I knew, we all knew, everybody knows. But it's, of course, different when you experience it, which is extraordinary suffering, extraordinary transition, is going to change you. And it's pretty binary. It's going to make you a worse person or a better person. And your book, fuck, you're going to make me cry.

10:39Your book helped our family take some of the most horrible conditions you could possibly imagine for a family and move through that transition with a little bit of extra grace and now have made room for it so that we can continue in a powerful and positive way. and that's why i say bruce you're an extraordinary man and i i deeply deeply appreciate your

11:11Bruce Feiler: contributions well that's beautiful and thank you for sharing and i know you to be a person of of conviction and a person of integrity and authenticity i know you're a person of strong opinions and occasional bluster. So to hear you talk about it in such a raw and vulnerable way, it's moving, you know? I feel, and in the last three years as I've gone off, you know, in my own new path and a whole new set of work, it's people like you and interactions that we've had and hearing the reaction of the work, in your case, in a wife and a family in need that sustains people like me. So thank you for sharing.

12:05Bruce Feiler: It is why I go through this incredibly painstaking, laborious, sometimes-it-seems-foolish line of work that I have chosen on the one-in-a-million chance that it can reach people in need. And thank you for sharing that. You're very welcome. And thank you. So now you've written this book and it's a great, I mean, in one way, maybe it's not a follow-up, but in another way it is. I don't know. You'll maybe tell me what you think. But first off, let me say thank you for writing The Search. thank you yeah i think that you know so it's i'll address the follow-up question because i think i've gone through lots of feelings about this so so go back in the story right so 2017 i start this process of collecting and analyzing life stories i don't know that i'm looking for life quakes i don't know that i'm looking for transitions and and yet that and listening to people day in and day out is very clearly what I heard.

13:09Bruce Feiler: And in fact, if you go back to 2019, 20, and even in the early weeks of 2020, when I was preparing to publish this book in what was supposed to be May of 2020, I kept thinking, why hasn't there been a major book on life transitions in 40 years? Like, we're all in transition. And everyone looked at me like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, that's interesting. Like, can we talk about the football game or whatever it might be? And then suddenly the pandemic and the entire planet is in a life transition. And so I happened to be sitting there with the right book at uncomfortably, but also blessedly in a way, sort of the right time.

13:42Bruce Feiler: And a week after it was published, I was having a drink with my editor here in Brooklyn. And we were still like social distancing, right? It was still bad in New York at that time. I remember we took our masks off warily, like, can we trust each other? And I said, work is going to be the next domino to fall, that this is going to change everything about work. And yet again, I didn't know what I was going to find or learn, but I just felt like I'm confused about work, like the mix of technology and public health crisis and social justice movement and political upheaval and work from anywhere. It just felt like everybody, that this was going to happen.

14:25Bruce Feiler: This is long before the great resignation or quiet quitting, all these things that have come. And what I decided, and this is what was similar about it, was that this methodology of finding these people and persuading them to tell me the worst things that have ever happened to them, right? And then coding these stories and looking, that it's ridiculously labor-intensive, but it also surfaces in real-time insights that I don't think you can find elsewhere. And so what I now think of it as is the same methodology, but what turned out to be on an entirely different set of questions. So let's dig into it.

15:00So one of the five most important books in my life is written by a man you know named Victor Frankel. And of course, his book is called A Man's Search for Meaning. And so why The Search?

15:18Bruce Feiler: The story of that book is actually quite fascinating, right? Because he had been writing that book before he went into the concentration camp, and they took it from him. And one of the ways that he stayed alive in the concentration camp was repeating it to himself over and over and over again at night. And when he finally got out, and he lost his father, he lost in his own arms, actually. And then his mother and wife were in a different camp, and they died. And he got out, and he wrote that book quite quickly. And it's called something different in German. um which i can't remember off the top of my head and they called it man's search for meaning like i i have been interested in the idea of searching for a very long time as you know i wrote five books about the bible and and there was a large part of my life and i think where that was the sort of the dominant thing that i thought about back and forth to the middle east and writing these books and i think that what's what connects those two things is that as organized religion has sort of withered and, you know, reduced in importance in contemporary life.

16:24Bruce Feiler: Searching has become more important, right? Because, you know, because the answer machine is gone, right? You know, the idea that there was, that there are these closed books from thousands of years ago and mostly men who would get up, right? You know, what I like to think about organized religion, the idea of you go to a building at the time of the building's choosing and you sit on the ground and someone stands up on a mountaintop and then preaches to you from a closed book. Like everything about that is gone. People, the action is moved from effectively from the pulpit to the pews and people are searching.

16:59Bruce Feiler: And so I think that that, I think that searching has only grown even as organized religion has faded because what happens is people break away from the answer machine and they think that they're going to have all the answers and they're not. And then they want to go back on the search. And so I think that that's what's interesting. And I think, you know, this book has been out, whatever it is now, seven days as we have this conversation. And one of the things that I keep getting asked is, why are we making this turn toward meaning? Like, what is going on? And I think that there's a lot of answers to that question as we kind of get into it and wherever this conversation is going to lead us.

17:39Bruce Feiler: And a lot of it has to do with sort of the big idea that emerged in these conversations is that fewer people are searching merely for work and more people are searching for work with meaning. Well, a lot of that has to do with a frustration, frankly, that goes back to the Bible, that work is supposed to be miserable. Right. What's the most important story of a work ever told? The answer is Adam and Eve. It's in Genesis 1. Because what happens is when Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, what's their punishment? Their punishment is work. So right there at sort of the dawn of Western civilization, the idea is that work is the opposite of paradise.

18:21Bruce Feiler: And if you look at the Greek word and the Roman, they're misery. It's torture. It's unpleasantness, right? It's labor. Like these are all negative words. And I think that for a bunch of reasons having to do with the change in the workforce, it's now predominantly women, predominantly younger, increasingly diverse, all of these reasons. But I think that the core idea of searching for meaning, the Bible of which is the Frankel book, is a very contemporary idea. And people are no longer prepared to keep meaning out of the thing that's most important in the biggest chunk of their day, which is what they do all day.

19:04Amen. Hallelujah, brother.

19:10it's such a disservice to the power of work this concept work-life balance go fuck yourself nobody legendary i know is balanced let's talk let's make that clear you didn't become one of the most powerful potent uh writers with such a diverse career everything from writing about the bible to to tv shows huge hit shows and everything in between. I mean, you don't fit any mold that I can think of. No, really. And this is a side note, but, and the fact that you're not an asshole is incredible because I know many, you know, I've been a creator writer guy now for seven years and I met lots of other creator writer folks.

19:56And I met a lot of people. There are people who came on this podcast with their first book and they were very humble and grateful and excited and enthusiastic. And five years later, they're complete assholes who would never get back on this podcast. And so it's not only have you had this radically diverse, untrackable course, but along the way you've had insane success and you could have kept doing TV shows. You could have written 10 more ever increasingly stupid sitcoms or you could have milked whichever book your publisher said you know you could have written life is in the transitions 47 right or life in the transitions for left-handed realtors or whatever the fuck right but you didn't do any of those things um and so your commitment to the work and the fact that you are as big as you are and you are, best I can tell, the same as you've been.

20:59Now, before I shut up, have we talked about this? Do you know we have a good friend in common?

21:06Bruce Feiler: I'm not sure I do. Gina Bianchini. Oh, Gina, yeah. God bless her. And when Gina and I serendipitously found out of our connection to you, of course, hers for much longer than mine, when I told her about you and your book and what you did, she went off about what a legendary person you are and so and this is a divergent i want to get back to the book first but how is it that with all the success and the fame and the praise and all the hollywood and all that stuff you unlike many have not become a fame-induced asshole I don't know that I can answer that question. I feel like I can answer almost any question in my life.

21:55Bruce Feiler: But the thing that you said here that resonates the most with me is that it's all about the work. I stumbled early on in my life into a way of living my life that did bring me joy and passion that I had some aptitude at. And my deepest wish at any moment is to get back to doing the work. and I actually think that, you know, in this world where everybody's on output all the time, that the best work comes from what I call the sitting down and shutting up part of it, you know, and the stepping away and being and doing the work. I mean, I sort of feel like there's like two things about myself. Number one, I'm an experientialist.

22:40Bruce Feiler: I like the idea of going into the world, becoming part of something. And I'm lucky to have grown up in the age of discount airfare where travel became possible. So whether it's going to Japan or spending a year in the circus or climbing Mount Ararat three times looking for Noah's Ark, I like the experientialist. I thought Noah's Ark was, I thought how you found the Ark was you joined the circus.

23:08Bruce Feiler: Don't start me on circus stories, Chris. We'll be here all day. Listen. Don't start me on the seven circus sins. Murder, rape, arson, bigamy, bestiality, group sex, organized crime. We had it all in the year that I was in the circus, right? But we also, by the way, had Tupperware parties and births and deaths. And it was a very familiar world, too. So it's both extremes. And I'm also an explainaholic, right? I like not only going into that room, I like going out of that room and then explaining to people what. And that's really kind of fundamentally the only thing that I know how to do.

23:39Bruce Feiler: So it's all about the work. So let's get to the work. First of all, when I look at new books, almost always the first thing I do is look at the table of contents. That's interesting. Well, I have four or five learning differences, dyslexia and dyscalculia and ADHD and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so for me... Be nice. Well, I call it dysfoclia, which is a superpower, but that's a whole other conversation. But anyway, for me, and I think it's true for a lot of dysfucklicks, when consuming a large amount of information, which is what a book is, being able to look at the table of contents and get a flavor for what's so, what's in the book matters.

24:23And the other thing is, and I don't know how true this is for other people with learning differences, but for me, I probably half the time don't read the book sequentially. You know, so I'll look in here and go, oh, well, the second section is called The One Truth About Work. We all need another hero. Hmm. Well, that speaks to me. So I'll go to that, etc. Right. So first of all, the table of contents and the fact that you've bucketed things in different sections for the chapters is very, very powerful. So you start off with three lies. Yes, yes. And I love the lies. I love anybody who calls bullshit on the convention and thinking.

25:05Bruce Feiler: Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so let's go to them. You have a career, lie one. You have a path, lie two. And you have a job, lie three. Can you pop the hood on those for me? Yeah, I'm happy to do that. But let me just geek out on writing for a second. You know, 80 % is structure. So 80 % is structure. Okay, you need three things. Anybody out there wants to write a book, you need three things to write a book. Okay, you need a big question, preferably one that people are already asking. That's number one. Number three, you need unimpeachable authority. Like you can disagree with what I have to say about the circus, or you can disagree with what I have to say about the Bible.

25:40Bruce Feiler: Plenty of people have, but I trekked through three continents, five countries, four war zones. Like I've earned my opinion. but number two is a narrative crucible to answer that question. So 80 % is structure. And for a long time, I said 80 % is structure, and that's the only thing that matters in a book. Like you, I try to read 100 books a year, and most of them fall apart in the second half. Almost all of them fall apart in the second half. It has to have good bones. But I don't know the structure going in. So all I know is I'm going to go talk to people about work, and then what's going to emerge?

26:09Bruce Feiler: And I actually sort of remember one after the other, and I was like, all right, there's a bunch of lies out there. So lie number one, you have a career.

26:18Bruce Feiler: this story is not told chris i mean you're in this workspace you got two podcasts you're you have a big voice you you think very um you're not bound by conventional thinking why isn't this story told the career was invented a hundred years ago for most of human history there was no idea for a career people lived where they worked and worked where they lived i was on a major i've been on both actually i won't say which one but i was on cnbc and fox business in the last three days. And in one of them, they asked me, they said, 4 ,000 people lost their job to AI last month, right? Is AI going to, you know, change everything about work?

26:56Bruce Feiler: I'm like, 4 ,000 people? You know how many people lost their job with the birth of the car and electricity in the end of the 19th century? Answer, a third of the country. A third of the country relocated from rural areas to urban areas, and then tens of millions of more people came from overseas. So you had all these people in cities with nothing to do. And you have all of these new businesses that are setting up and no way to get employees. So this guy named Frank Parsons, who's like an engineer, he's a writer, he's himself had 10 different jobs. In 1908, he opened the first career counseling center.

27:27Bruce Feiler: And within two years, every school and college in America has one. And what was the idea? The idea was once in your life at 21, as long as you're a boy, and that's the term in his book, we're going to match you with an occupation and you're going to do it the rest of your life. And women weren't allowed to do it. And if, by the way, if you change jobs, then you were deviant. If you weren't sure what you want to do, you were a problem. And every way that we have talked about work in the intervening century has been on this linear construct, right? A career path, a career track, a corporate ladder, right the resume is invented in the 1950s okay and what is a resume it's a linear progression each job is supposed to be bigger than the last and so what does it stigmatize if you're a woman spending time with your family if you're a dad spending time with your family right starting a venture that may fail and coming back something that's been normalized in the last you know 10 years doing public service running for political office serving in the military any deviation from this linear path meant you were a problem and you could not get to work.

28:40Bruce Feiler: So, line number one, you have a career. We have nonlinear lives, but we don't have a nonlinear way of talking about work. And I would go even further. I think one of the most quoted lines to me about life is in the transition is that we have linear expectations and nonlinear lives. And that gap creates a lot of the anxiety, right? And that happens in work. We have linear expectations for our work lives, and we have nonlinear work lives and that tension. So people say, oh, I'm unhappy in my career. Something must be wrong with me. No, it's the idea of the career. So that's lie number one. Lie number two is you have a path.

29:15Bruce Feiler: This is unimaginably problematic. I mean, you were talking about the bullshit of, I can't remember what the example you said of what was bullshit. To me, the biggest piece of bullshit advice is follow your passion, okay? The idea, first of all, just flat out, when I ask people, hundreds of people, did you follow your passion, make your passion, or discover your passion? Only one in 10 said follow your passion. I have two 18-year-olds who are leaving my house in 60 days to go to college. The idea that they know their passion, I mean, they have what they think that they might be interested in, but it's going to change.

29:54Bruce Feiler: My life has changed multiple times. Your life has changed multiple times. And by the way, I'm looking at you behind a very fancy microphone that you're very proud of, okay, with a skull behind you and a guitar behind you and a mic, a soft mic cover covered in cat hair and headphones on your head doing something that didn't exist 10 years ago. It wasn't an option. It wasn't an option. This was not an option. By some measures, a third of us will be doing something in 10 years that isn't even invented now. So there is no path. Well, listen, prompt engineer is a huge new job. Yeah. Well, that's exactly right.

30:33Bruce Feiler: And what's interesting about the prompt engineer is that the answers are easy. It's the questions that are hard. Well, isn't that the magic of what we're learning in this very early days, right? Because I assume, maybe you'll tell me, but most people had a somewhat similar experience, I think, which is you go on to ChatGPT for the first time and you do what you did on Google. Google yourself, yes. Well, not so much that, but you asked me. The editor of a very prominent magazine called me last week and she said, we had to change our rules. Like you cannot write an article about how ChatGPTing yourself produced bad information because every single serious academic was publishing these articles and we just got sick of them.

31:18but my point is you ask it a question like oh how many home runs did babe ruth hit and it gives you an answer it doesn't give you a series of links and you're like oh that's interesting it just actually gives me an answer i don't have to hunt and peck okay that's cool you do that a few times okay well that's interesting i'll use that as an adjacent thing to search but then you start asking more and more elaborate questions and things change pretty radically, right?

31:49Bruce Feiler: Oh shit, I was trying to call up. I had never really used it, but a couple of weeks ago, I decided I really got to try. So I logged in and I, because I was writing an article, I can't remember, like my kids are graduating from high school soon. So I want to write a letter in my newsletter. I want to write a piece in my newsletter, which is, I should probably plug it, the nonlinear life. So it's brucefeiler.substack.com. Subscribe now, limited space. Operators are standing by and you'll get these Ginsu knives. Unlimited space, actually. I love it. You get a new knife every week. Anyway, so I type in - Just use it for cooking, not for anything nefarious.

32:25Bruce Feiler: So I, the, yeah, anyway, yeah, we won't go out there. So, right, so I type in like, okay, I want to write an article on why we cry at graduations because I'm anticipating crying at my daughter's graduation. And it turns out there's not a lot of research on why we cry at happy events. And I say cite sources, right? Because this is one thing I've learned, right? And it says, sorry, I am a program thing and I am not capable of citing sources, right? So yeah, ChatGPT is like my mother used to say about me when I was a kid, right? Positive even when wrong.

32:59Bruce Feiler: So, right. So the point is ChatGPT, right? There is no path. There is no path. You know, you're going to change your passions. Your passions are going to evolve and that's perfectly fine. How much? Okay. So my data show that we're going to go through 20 of what I call workquakes in the course of your lives, right? That's one every two and a half years on average. So what is a workquake? A workquake is a jolt. It's a disruption, right? It's occasion when you are forced to or choose to rethink or reimagine what you do. In effect, when you ask, am I doing what I want to be doing? And let's just pause to underscore the stakes.

33:39Bruce Feiler: I think we all hear them a lot, but let's just put them in a row here. 70 % of Americans are unhappy with what they do. Three quarters of Americans in a survey out just three weeks ago said they plan to look for new work this year. One third of us are working part-time at home at least some time. You add all those numbers up, Chris, that means 100 million Americans. will look someone in the eye that they love tonight, tomorrow, this summer, this year, and say, I'm not happy with what I'm doing, and I want to do work that makes me happy. This is an astonishing, epical change. I think it's the fourth biggest change in the history of work.

34:21Bruce Feiler: Number one, go back to the ancient world, was when we went from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Number two was 11 ,800 years later when we went from agriculture to industrial. The third was in the second half in the post-war years when we went from industrial to economy, I mean, to knowledge. And now this change essentially from knowledge to a network world in which change is the norm. 50 million Americans quit a job in the last year. That's twice the number 10 years ago. What? That's a third of the work. 50 million? 50 million Americans quit a job in the last year. That's a third of the workforce.

35:02Bruce Feiler: So we're in a period of astonishing change. And the atom of this atomized work life, as I call it, is the work quake, okay? But here's the thing about it. I think that's interesting. Women go through work quakes more frequently than men. Xers go through them more frequently than boomers. Millennials more than Xers. And it's early hours yet, but Zers will go through them more. Diverse workers go through them more than non-diverse workers, which means their numbers are only going to grow. As of 2019, for the first time, the majority of hires in this country are black and brown women. So we are seeing, and this gets back to the why are people so unhappy and why are they now finally prepared to do something about it, is this generational change in the workforce.

35:45Bruce Feiler: And Pete, you know, I'm 50 plus. Okay, I'm probably older than you are. I just turned 55. Okay, so I'm older than you are. But people our age are complaining. You're way better looking. People are complaining about this, right? These young kids today, you know, they got no work ethic. That's not true. They just have a different standard. And I told you at the outset of this conversation that I think the signature piece of data, and I'm fascinated and touched, grateful, that the number one thing you remembered from Life is in the Transitions is that we spend half of our life in transitions. That's what I've been calling the signature piece of data from that book.

36:25Bruce Feiler: The signature piece of data from the search is the following. 45 % of these workquakes, not a small number, begin at the workplace, right? A conflict with your boss, the company shuts down, right? The industry changes, right? Or you get laid off. That's a workquake that begins in the workplace. But that means the majority. 55 % begin outside of the workplace. So something happens in our personal life, with our family, with our health. We have a mindset change. We have a meaning change. We have a passion shift or whatever it might be. And this is the way to think about it. In the battle between life and work, life is playing a greater and greater role.

37:11That's the consequence that we, and if you run an organization, you know, when you talk to those people in another part of your life, okay?

37:18Bruce Feiler: and any organization in this country five years ago, the employee well-being office was in the basement in a windowless room next to the incinerator five years ago. That ain't going to stand anymore. The employee well-being question needs to be in every office, on every floor, in every conference room, in every Zoom call. And if you're not, now your employees can leave because there's no career anymore. There's no consequence to getting off the escalator. There's no path. You can get on off the path as often as you want. And that's the big change. Thank you for that. To underscore the last sort of segment there that I find fascinating, if you go all the way back to the resume and then to what you just said, your resume is almost irrelevant in a native digital world.

38:11Right. And here's my proof. one of my favorite native digital creators goes by the handle coffeezilla and i could look it up to find out what his real name is but i don't remember and people shorten it to coffee they just call him coffee and he's created a new category for himself he is the internet's scam exposer and he started off he's sort of a that's a full-time job yeah well he started off with crypto scams.

38:45Bruce Feiler: Oh, interesting. And he got so good at it that he exposed Logan Paul, one of the biggest entertainer creators in the world, for a crypto scam. And ultimately, he had to come out and apologize and do all this stuff because it was a fucking scam. And he's exposed Grant Cardone and Tai Lopez and all these hustle porn stars, which I think is an incredibly important service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, he has millions of fucking followers, zillions of views. His videos are very well researched, very well done. Now, guess what? Myself and all of his other fans, the vast majority of them, A, don't know his real name.

39:24B, have no idea where he went to school. Is he a private investigator? Is he an educated journalist who used to work for some lauded public? We have no idea. You know how he's judged? On the basis of his work. And I have a friend who's an entrepreneur. His name's Isaac Morehouse. And he says this really incredible thing, which he says, in the past, we had to buy credentials.

39:51Bruce Feiler: Interesting. And in the digital world, he says, be your own credential. Reminds me of a line I heard when Beyonce released one of her albums a few years ago. And they said, she's doing this without publicity. And they're like, Beyonce doesn't need publicity. Publicity needs Beyonce. say.

40:09Bruce Feiler: What I love about this story, actually, is it will allow us to briefly talk about the third of the three big lies, which is that you have a job. And on the surface, that seems preposterous. Of course, I have a job, right? How else do I pay my bills, right, and survive and get my health insurance? Yet, it's true. And when I first realized this, I was surprised. And the more I dug in, the more I was surprised. So let's review this, right? So the average person has three and a half jobs and up to five jobs. So the first job would seem like the obvious one, right, which is a main job. But by some measures, only half of us even have a main job anymore.

40:44The second is a care job. Hold on, Bruce. I hate to interrupt you, but you just said half of us have a, quote, main job or real job?

40:53Bruce Feiler: Yeah. By some measures, only half of us have a main job. I mean, I talked to a woman, Sonia Gutierrez. In Arkansas, she's got four what would conventionally be called side jobs, right? She teaches digital literacy. She is the first woman elected to city council of Hispanic origin in the entire state of Arkansas. And she sells salsa under her mother's recipe called salsa for change on the side. Okay. So there's a lot of people. I don't know anything about, I don't know who CoffeeZilla is, CoffeeZilla, CZ, whatever you want to call him. But is that his main job now, or his main job, the one he does for salary and benefits?

41:31Bruce Feiler: Or has he changed? I have no idea. I don't know if he's an accountant at Pricewaterhouse, or he's a painter, or he teaches math. I have no clue. Or this is his full-time job, and he's making millions a year. I have no idea. So that gets to the next two jobs. One is a side job, which I feel like we talk about all along. I don't like side hustle because hustle actually has kind of negative connotation from where it emerged. Interestingly, it's an interesting story, which I have in the search about where the word hustle came from. I do want to get to that if we can. I just – I love you for it. Keep going, sir.

42:04Bruce Feiler: But there's two other kind of jobs that I had never heard about that I kept hearing about, which I – because of who I am, I decided to name. The first is what I call a hope job. So a hope job is something that you do that you hope leads to something else, right? Like writing a screenplay or selling pickles at the farmer's market or starting a podcast. 89 % of us have a hope job. And for most of them, we actually pay out of pocket for the privilege of doing them. And even before we get to the last job, on the surface, it seems like, here go Americans again. We work harder than everybody else. And I think that there's obviously a lot of truth to that.

42:46Bruce Feiler: The data certainly should support it. But what is actually going on? What's going on here is that what's non-negotiable anymore. We want meaning from our work. So if we have to do a job for the salary or the benefits, well, then maybe we have a side job or a hope job that brings us meaning. Or like I'm thinking of Sang Kim, a guy who talked to, first-generation Korean-American, right, who grew up sharing a bedroom and a bathroom with multiple sisters. And so he went and he did the immigrant thing, right? He became a lawyer and became a lawyer at Goldman Sachs. But his hope job was he would help friends renovate their bathrooms, right?

43:23Bruce Feiler: Because he spent a lot of time miserable waiting outside the bathroom door. And he wants to do this. So he's got a hope job that becomes a side job interior design. And then ultimately he leaves Goldman Sachs. He's opened his own interior design firm, but he still needs some money. So now he's got a side job doing his former main job to make money while he gets the new entrepreneurial thing up and going. And so that's what we do. We juggle, and we juggle multiple times in our lives. And then the last job, just to mention it because it's one of the things that people seem to be talking about from the search, is that we have this invisible time suck.

44:03Bruce Feiler: that's a burden that feels like a job, like battling self-doubt or imposter syndrome, mental health or sobriety or discrimination or microaggressions or whatever it is. And 93 % of us have a ghost job. I have termed it. And when I ask people, like, how much time does your ghost job take? A lot of people said every minute. But then when I try to quantify 12 hours a week, that's a quarter of a traditional work week. And that's zapping meaning from us, right? So there is this mix of things. The meaning is what's non-negotiable, right? We are in the meaning moment and people want meaning and they use these multiple jobs to ensure themselves that they get it.

44:49It's so powerful. and of course the ultimate i think for many of us is to be able to earn a healthy living that allows us to provide for ourselves and our families doing meaningful work and ideally for some of us our most meaningful work and with that said there's a flip side of this you hear a lot and I've been waiting to ask you this question. Many, many people say, don't take the thing that you love and turn it into a job because you'll wreck it. You love to paint. Oh, now you're getting paid to paint and now it changes everything. You love to podcast. You bring on advertisers. Everything starts to change, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

45:37And so that is a common source of wisdom or a common point of wisdom. What say you, Bruce Weiler?

45:50One of the weird things that happened to me once was that I was the subject of a Jay Leno joke.

45:59Bruce Feiler: It's actually when Walking the Bible came out. I just published this book. For those of you who don't know, I spent a year crisscrossing the Middle East, climbing Mount Ararat, crossing the Red Sea, spending weeks in the desert, tasting manna. And I wrote a book called Walking the Bible in which I went to the places in the biblical stories and read the stories along the way. And there was a huge feature on me in USA, a full-page feature in USA Today back when such things happened. And Jay Leno goes on TV that night and says, hey, you hear about this new book? This guy called Walking the – he actually mentioned the title.

46:31Bruce Feiler: He wrote this book called Walking the Bible. And he spent a weekend in Sodom and Gomorrah and he didn't tell his wife. like maybe the worst Jay Leno joke in history. Not that funny, but you know, I'll take it. So I bring that up because I grew up watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And what did Carson do? I mean, unfortunately, way too much of my personality can be defined by that misspent late nights when I was in high school. uh the um and he would come and he would stand on the star right he'd come out from behind the curtain and he would stand on the star because that's where the cameras were focused right and then he would deliver his monologue we think of of what was the question like if you take your passion you're going to turn into misery but we think of passion as a star that you stand on so in other words your star might have been podcasting and then you're doing this and maybe So I'm going to just reject the idea that there is such a thing as this because I think that what actually happens to you when you get into the podcasting and then you sort of – if you're trying to make a living – yeah, you have to make creative compromises.

47:48Bruce Feiler: That's an interesting dilemma. I've been a professional writer for 34 years. Like I understand that this is a business, but I also understand that creativity is fluid and the audience is fluid and circumstances are fluid and everything. So I don't believe it's just the act of trying to operationalize your passion that is what makes it difficult. I think what makes it difficult is that you change over time as well. And that's what we're going to get to next, which is the one truth about all of this. But the one thing I do want to push back on slightly is I want to just emphasize on this theme of nonlinearity how you make meaning over time changes.

48:32Bruce Feiler: And in effect, that is what we're going to talk about in the second half of this conversation, because that's what the second half of the book. Because what's the one truth? The one truth is only you can decide what gives you meaning and only you can write your own story. And so my book then introduces a set of tools to help you identify what makes meaning. And that is what changes over time. And by the way, that is the chapter called We All Need Another Hero. And it's called We All Need Another Hero because in the first draft, it was called Put Yourself Back in the Narrative. and I have Broadway junkie kids who are singers and dancers and playwrights in the case of one of my daughters and a flutist in the case of the other.

49:10Bruce Feiler: And when somehow they looked at this table of contents and they saw that this chapter was called, put yourself back in the narrative, which of course is the, the, the, uh, the, the line from the end of Hamilton, uh, the, the, the, the Liza, the Liza sings, they're like, dad, no one likes Hamilton anymore. You've got to change that because you're going to look like a loser, which normally they like when I look like a loser, But in this case, they wanted to protect me. And so I said, fine, we all need another hero. And by the way, even though, funnily enough, with Tina Turner recently passing, that's actually not the song.

49:39Bruce Feiler: The song is we don't need another hero, but I'm like, we do need another hero. Right. And of course, that hero is always us. Yes, exactly. And so we need to decide what kind of hero we're going to be for the next chapter. And that's what's been missing. What's been missing after 3 ,000 years of being miserable is we know how to cope and suck it up, but we don't know how to be the hero of our own story. We don't know how to write our own story and we don't know how to decide, you know, what is our superpower and what is our hero going to be able to do best. That's it in a nutshell. Yes. And there's so much in this work that I, that I, you know, there's the, there's the written and the spoken and then there's the unspoken.

50:22And there's a lot of unspoken in your work that speaks really loudly to me. So one of them, let me bounce this off you, Bruce. Part of this linear narrative that we get subscribed to without our unwillingly

50:37Bruce Feiler: subscribed. Exactly. Right, right, right. It comes every month. And by the way, it's a tax. It cost us$29.99 of identity and well-being, and we never signed up for it. It just sucks the money out of our emotional bank account. I love that. Yeah. So we end up subscribing to this thing. And And how I interpret it and triangulate it with your work sort of goes like this. Everything we hear about or much of what we hear about is destination oriented, is outcome oriented. You know, so if you look at the world of nonfiction books, and we studied the world of nonfiction books for our last book, What you first realize is the two top selling nonfiction categories by a galaxy, according to the Nielsen data, are number one, personal growth and development and number two, personal finance.

51:34They're not autobiographies. They are stuff about me that helps me in a practical and tactical way. and the vast majority of these sorts of books are destination oriented. How do I fill in the blank? Now, I'm somebody who grew up relatively poor and when you have nothing, learning to produce something, i.e. destination, is very important. When you have no destination and you're hungry, some destination and some food sounds good. So I understand that at a very basic level. However, I have this conversation with writers and podcasters all the time. So can I tell you a little story about this? Please.

52:22So we just put to bed our most recent book. And we finished it.

52:28Bruce Feiler: Let's pause and celebrate that. Always an achievement, right? Yes. And very, very proud of it. As I'm very fond of saying, A lot of aspiring writers are a lot better at aspiring as they are writing. No, we know you have to hit publish because otherwise you're full of shit. Do the work. Do the work. Anyway, the worst part for me of writing a book is when it's over. And the reason for that is because now I'm not writing this book that I love to be writing. And in my case, I'm in a writing band. I'm not a solo artist. So I'm also, when we stop writing a book, I'm not jamming with my band anymore, which is one of my most favorite things to do.

53:07However, my wife and I were just talking about this. Soon as we put the book to bed, one of my two writing collaborators, her name's Katrina, we call her Kat, sends Eddie and I a note. And she says, OK, we need to get to work on our next newsletter. Here's the first draft of it that she's put together beautifully based on some conversations that we've had in the past. And literally, I shit you not, Bruce, the day after sending the final out, getting ready to do the public, all that stuff, the three of us are now working on this new newsletter that's, you know, 5 ,000. And I'm going through it.

53:47I'm going, fuck, this is so fucking good. I wish we'd had this in our book. And then I had the aha.

53:55Bruce Feiler: Uh-oh. Which is? it's the next book well yeah sure but most importantly as rewarding as it is to hit publish and as rewarding as it is to hit number one and as rewarding as it is to be so popular that jay leno tells terrible jokes about you on tv the most rewarding thing for me and i'm posing this as a question to you is literally in this case the day after publishing a very important piece of work in our lives, we're back at work, working on what's next. And so my point is the real reward for writing or podcasting or being an entrepreneur or being, creating anything is that you get to create.

54:43And it sounds trite and yes, destination matters and yes, results matter. And yes, cruising business results matter because you can't, unless you do, you can't quote George W. Bush, keep food on the family. But at the same time, if we go back to the search and the search for meaning, it's doing the work that provides the meaning. It's not any one particular accomplishment of the work. And then if you're successful, then you might have more success, hopefully. And that's great. It feels great. But the more success you have doing meaningful work, at least it's been my experience, Bruce, that the clearer it gets to you that the reward, the real reward is that you get to do the work and the accolades and the results and the sales and whatever are all wonderful and very, very important.

55:44And we need external affirmation to bolster our internal motivation and intrinsic. We need some extrinsic to help with our all of that. Yes. and the real reward is what you talk about in the search, which is if you engage in the search, the reward is doing the work, is doing the search. So I'm curious what you think about that.

56:08Bruce Feiler: I mean, what you've said resonates with me, and I think it is my story for sure, is that once I do the work, I want to go back and do the work again. The work is the reward for me. as powerful as it is, as we said at the outset of this conversation, to have work land with people, that means a lot. Incredible lot. It's amazing the way that exchange that we had, what I know to be true, in your case and in lots of other readers' cases. The reason I'm somewhat hesitant is that I want to allow that for a lot of people that I have met and talked to, that when they press send on their life project, that they don't necessarily want to do that project again.

57:01Bruce Feiler: I'm thinking of a guy named Wei Tai Kwok, who grew up first-generation Chinese-American, was a debater, mediocre tennis player in high school, and a champion debater, went to the Ivy League, was scolded by a family friend like, China's going to open up in your lifetime. And so he went and learned Chinese, gave tours to early American tourists in the 80s. And he then became an ad tech executive at the leading firm that does work between China and Silicon Valley. And his wife drags him, whatever it was now, 10 years ago, to see An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. and he says, and his life is, he's in a, by the end of the film, he's in a full-on work away.

57:48Bruce Feiler: He doesn't want to see it. And by the end, he's, he, he said, I get up every morning. I look myself in the eye and say, you know, what have I done today to make our climate better? And he walks away from being the CEO of a super successful ad tech company to become a foot soldier in the war to fight climate change and has recently won, run for, and been elected a city councilman in his small town in California. And so there are a lot of people for whom the work is what matters, but they do change after hitting publish. Like they hit publish on that book and they say, now I want to write an opera, right?

58:28Bruce Feiler: Or now I'm thinking of Chris Donovan, who was 29 years, was a telephone operator who had a lifelong passion of sketching women's shoes that his friends all teased him about. And he left to become, in his 50s, to go to school and now runs a company called Chris Donovan Footwear. He's a woman's shoe designer. So for some people, it changes. And so I think that what I've tried to do with this thing that I call 21 questions to find work you love is help you figure out when you press send what is it that you want to do. And so the way I would say it, you talked about the destination. Here's how I would say it.

59:15Bruce Feiler: Since Benjamin Franklin, we have told one story of success in this country, and it's all about climbing. Up by your bootstraps, rags to riches, right? Higher floor, bigger office, greater salary, more benefits. But if there's one thing I learned while working on the search is that the people who are happiest and most successful in their own terms and what they do, they don't just climb. They also dig. They do what I call a meaning audit. They perform personal archaeology going back into their own life story. They do sort of a treasure hunt in their own lives and identify what did they learn from their parents, right?

59:58Bruce Feiler: Who were their earliest role models? What is their toothache, as I call it, this thing that has nagged at them for decades? And they set out to tell the story that they want to do. That's the privilege of being alive today, but that's what's been missing from this conversation about work. Okay, I want to be happy, but everyone's told me how to seek destinations and how to climb. no one's told me how to dig. So this book, in a lot of ways, is a digging guide. And it's a roadmap for how to identify not. I have this disagreement with my wife. You've talked about your wife a few times, right? My wife, Linda, started and runs, as you know, this organization called Endeavor that supports high-impact entrepreneurs in 50 countries around the world.

1:00:42Bruce Feiler: Last year, her entrepreneurs had created 2 million jobs and had$20 billion of revenue. And she's a rock star in the field of entrepreneurship and international development.

1:00:58Bruce Feiler: And I keep saying to her, women in particular said to me that they spent most of their life chasing their parents' dream and then chasing maybe their partner's dream. And it's really hard. And she complains about this. Like, that's not true. I'm like, it is true for a lot of people. To me, in some ways, the big message of this book is don't chase someone else's dream, chase your own. And that turns out to be really hard for people to give themselves permission to do that. Thank you for that. On this topic, Bruce, you're standing on my life's work too, which is we live in a world that teaches us to fit in.

1:01:43we live in a world that teaches us to find our place to become accepted and similarities are important you and i share many similarities and that's a great way for us to connect we both have very similar passions whether it's about writing or about people or about learning or about navigating transitions and reinventing our you and i share a tremendous amount and like all people we want to be loved and valued for what makes us unique what makes us different and so i'm curious to ask you bruce in a lot of ways a lot of your work is about helping us have the courage to follow our different to be different to try different things to say okay well, maybe we were an accountant, but maybe we're a shoe designer or to allow ourselves a lot of different latitude, if you will.

1:02:45And so I'm curious how you react to sort of why people, A, are so drawn to the box, whether it's from our parents or our schools or wherever it comes, our church, wherever it comes from, and why it is so hard for so many of us to even get the radical idea that you can design your life the way you want. And if you were an accountant who wants to design shoes or whatever you are, you could go do that. What's your reaction?

1:03:19Bruce Feiler: The way I think about this is that it's a tension between two things. The short answer to your question is it's easier. Life hands us a script. There's this idea in psychology called script theory, which I talk about in the book briefly. And the idea of script theory is what's the restaurant script? The restaurant script is you go to the restaurant, you wait, you see it at the table. Someone brings you a menu. You decide what you want to eat. You order it. The food is delivered. You eat it. You pay and you leave. That's called the script of what it's like to eat out at a restaurant. No one teaches that script.

1:03:54Bruce Feiler: It's just something that we inherit by being alive in the world today where restaurants are a part of our lives. We all are given – you said it so brilliantly. Now I'm going to – I won't steal it because I'll credit you. But this idea that we – Steal it. I don't give a shit. We inherit this script about work that you climb, right? That you seek outward manifestation, that money is the most important, that it's the only important thing, right? I mean, as we talk, two days ago, this huge excerpt of the search was on the cover of the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, 2 ,500 words. And when I first submitted it, they're like, you can't say this in the Wall Street Journal.

1:04:37Bruce Feiler: Like, you can't say meaning is more important than money these days. I'm like, yeah, but I've been out talking about this and it turns out that's the case. And it makes, you know, sort of 50 plus men uncomfortable, but younger and more diverse people and women, they embracing it. And now, in fact, a bunch of, you know, 50 plus men like you and me are starting to like, hey, if the kids can do it. Like one of my frames is, you know, millennials have saved work because they've said six and 10 millennials say meaningful work is more important to them than their boomer parents. And their boomer parents are starting looking at them and saying, I want some of what they're, you know, what they're eating.

1:05:07Bruce Feiler: They are fucking right. And I said – and they're like, well, but our readers don't want that. Wall Street is the name of this. And there it was. And I have heard from literally scores of people who say thank you for putting this in the Wall Street Journal that it's changing, that the standards of work are changing. And so I think that we inherit this script and we are rewriting the script. But the essence of it, when you turn off the script, right, there's this line – I don't know, like the opening page of this book. We are rejecting the script and replacing with what? Well, we're not sure what, and that's where we are now.

1:05:43Bruce Feiler: And the only thing to replace that script with is what I call your internal scripture. We all have this mix of stories and homilies and parables and lessons and pleasant stories and unpleasant stories. So my book, right, 21 Questions to Find Work You Love. Let's just deal with the first one. I'll ask you, Chris, what were the upsides and downsides of work you inherited from your parents? You want to tell a good story? We got to have the backstory. We're going to start with the backstory. What were the upsides and downsides of work you learned from your parents? I grew up in an environment where a lot of what I heard was, what you want to do is get a good government job.

1:06:20Interesting. Because a good government job meant you were in a union and you were protected and you would have a pension and you would have healthcare, et cetera. And so once you got into that union, you were a made person. And so go get a good union slash government job.

1:06:43Bruce Feiler: So the number one upside that people learn from their parents is the value of hard work. Well, that I saw in spades. I'm the product of a single mother from the time I was five. So I got to see hard work. My grandfather fought in World War II. I got to see his hard work, et cetera, et cetera. So I would listen to this. I was like, to be honest, I was sort of bored by hearing this over and over again. So I started asking what was the biggest downside of work. And that's when it got interesting, right? So number one upside people, 67 % when we crunch the numbers, learn the value of hard work. Like Americans, even millennials, Gen Zers, they want to work hard.

1:07:18Bruce Feiler: But what was the number one downside? Overwork. Followed by strain on the family. Followed by unhappiness. So right there, we are one question into the 21 questions and turns out that we are carrying around in us this tension. Like we want to work, but we are not prepared to overwork and sacrifice our family and be unhappy. That right there, that is the love song of work in America today, right? And we're one question into this, okay? When I ask people, so that's one question to ask yourself. That's what I call a who question. Like, who are you and what's important to you and what did you learn from your parents?

1:07:59Bruce Feiler: Then the next would be a what question, right? Who, I'll ask you, other than family, who were your role models as a child and what did you admire about them? So I've thought about this a lot.

1:08:15And my first real hero outside my family as a little boy was Muhammad Ali. Why? I was so young. I didn't understand intellectually what he was standing for. I couldn't have a basis of understanding that he was, at least in the modern era, the biggest profile, the highest profile athlete in the world, who arguably was the highest profile athlete on planet Earth. When he said, I'm not going to go kill those people in Vietnam for you. and they took everything away from him as a result. I didn't know that when I was a little boy but what I did know was here was a man who was legendary at his work incredibly smart a radical entertainer float like a butterfly and sting like a bee spoke to me as a five-year-old six-year-old boy and as I grew and he grew of course I began to understand that even as a child, at some level, I knew that this was not a boxer and not an entertainer.

1:09:31There was something else going on. And I look back on it a lot, Bruce, and I think, isn't it fascinating that Muhammad Ali, other than my parents and my grandparents, was my first real hero?

1:09:47Bruce Feiler: So what does that tell me as someone who's asked this question to hundreds of people? It doesn't matter who the role model is. It matters what you admire about him. So what do we know about him? Okay. We know about him that he's self-made. We know that he's a pugilist, but also a poet. We know that he's scrappy. Okay. And he's got rope-a-dope and he, but he also has a deep spiritual streak and a kind of a deep humanitarian streak. Like there's a lot there. And what's interesting is, I talked to this guy, Mark Civicus, who was like the Dean of Modern Career Counseling, right? Who sort of invented and It embodies the space that's called narrative career construction, which in effect, my book is popularizing this idea that success is a – that work is a story that you have to construct.

1:10:31Bruce Feiler: And he says this is the number one question because basically it tells you – it's a what question. The first choice you make about work is who you choose to admire. Who they are isn't important. It's what you admire about them. So if you're stuck and you want to find work that makes you happy, ask yourself who was your role model then. Like the sandboxes you want, you know, ask what environments you were drawn to as a child. Like the sandbox you want to play in then becomes a big clue, as the Wall Street Journal wrote in this kind of rave review of my book last week, the sandbox that you should play in now.

1:11:07Bruce Feiler: And so we start with the backstory. Then we want to turn to today, right? A very simple question like this. I'm in a moment in my life when blank, I'm in a moment, answer that question. I'm in a moment in my life when I need to make money, right? I need to pay off my student loans, or in my case, I'm about to send two kids to college. Or I'm in a moment when I need flexibility. I have young children, right? Or my mother has chemo and I want to be able to go with her to the chemo appointments. So I'm not going to take that promotion now, or I'm not going to take a job that will make me travel two days a week and take me away from my kid who's on travel soccer this year, or whatever it might be.

1:11:45Bruce Feiler: Or I'm at a moment when I've been doing the same thing for 20 years, and I want to give back. I want to save the planet. I want to be involved in politics, right? I want to make my community a better place. And the point is we are normalizing in this nonlinear life that you can make these changes. But the challenge is that when you are in it, you have to go back to your scripture and understand where you are now. And so just just one more question of these 21 questions, which of course is the backbone of this book. And that is, and I love this one, the best piece of advice I have for myself right now is blank.

1:12:24Bruce Feiler: When I ask people, what's the best advice you got in a work transition? Who is it from? And what was it? Who was it from? It was interesting, by the way, colleagues, friends, followed by professionals, family was last. Either because they have stakes and they don't give us good advice, which is a little surprising to me, or maybe because we discount them. I don't know. But three quarters of people said the best advice that they got in a work transition was, listen to yourself. Do what you already know you should be doing. People don't want to kick in the pants or slap in the face. They want a pat on the back.

1:12:59Bruce Feiler: And that gets back to what you said at the outset of this question, which is you're going to have everybody makes a decision. I'm going to pull out this book and I'm going to turn to the last page. Everybody makes a decision at one point or another that feels like the unright decision. I crazy love the story in the intro. Miroy Park, first generation Asian American. She's born in the Pacific Northwest. She's told to be a doctor. Her 16th birthday present is a chemistry textbook. Like how subtle is that from dad? Come on, dad. I'm like a big defender of dads, but that was not She wants to save, you know, get involved in saving the world.

1:13:39Bruce Feiler: She comes East. She gets a job on the Soviet desk of the CIA. She says, I went with the name brand. She joins the CIA. She's a spy on the Soviet desk, like the elite job in the CIA. And she says, you know, this isn't really suiting me. Like, I'm kind of an organizer. I think I would be a better bureaucrat. So she leaves the Soviet desk on the CIA to run payroll for the CIA. Like the least sexy job. And her friends all say like you are out of your mind. You know what happens to Maroy Park? She ends up running the entire CIA. The first Asian American woman to have this job. We all make a decision at some point in our lives that feels like the unright decision.

1:14:27Bruce Feiler: that it disappoints someone. And often our parents, or at least we feel like we're going to disappoint our parents, right? Yes. I'm looking for this passage and see if I can find it in this book. Because when you were saying that thing about everybody wants to be unique, I'm reminded here of a story that I tell of someone who said to me, and she's a woman who works at LinkedIn. She left to work at a startup, came back, redesigned her job. And she said, I'm one of the – I'm not representative of anything. I'm one of the one and onlys. Except we're all one and onlys. There's no universal story anymore.

1:15:04But isn't that what makes life and human beings legendary? Or at least one of the big things that does.

1:15:12Bruce Feiler: Yes. So we all make a decision. Here, I'm going to read from the last page of this book. Everyone is a one and only. And we achieve that distinction because at one time or another, each of us does what Leah Smart, in this case, did, what I did, what even my father did. We make a decision that seems on the surface to be wrongheaded. It defies logic. It bucks convention. It upsets the plan. Even worse, each of these decisions disappoints somebody. And then I give a bunch of examples. The banker who disappoints his neighbors by becoming a painter. The lawyer who disappoints her bosses by becoming a trainer.

1:15:50Bruce Feiler: the immigrant who disappoints his parents by becoming a teacher, and on and on and on. Each of these people, at a defining moment in their work lives, makes a choice that seemed by all measures to be the wrong choice. Only it turned out to be the right choice. If there's a universal message in these stories, it's that there is no universal story anymore. With no single job that will make you happy, you are free to accept whatever job you want. With no single path that will lead to your dreams, you are free to follow whatever dreams you wish. With no single career that will define you forever, you are free to create your own un-career.

1:16:29Bruce Feiler: The lesson of the Work Story Project is that there is power in the unright choice. There is pride in the unceased compromise. There is beauty in the unaccepted trade-off. Every search for meaningful work seems to contain at least one such uncustomary twist. The tragedy in these stories is that our unconventional decisions often cause pain to someone in our lives, a loved one, a colleague, a boss. The glory in these stories is that our un-normal choices are becoming so common that they are fast becoming the norm. We are forging new rules for success in America. Write your own damn story. If not you, who?

1:17:11Bruce Feiler: If not now, when Bruce Feiler thank you is there anything else my friend you're everything else thank you so much for creating this space for welcoming me into your professional orbit and into your private pains and helping us all make meaning in our lives thank you Bruce and I have one request please don't wait till your next book comes out to come back let's make that happen yeah yeah and thank you so much for life is in the transitions thank you so much for the search thank you for everything you wrote to get you to this place and um thank you for your courage it takes courage to make that choice and you inspire me and i think you inspire millions of others.

1:18:11Bruce Feiler: I'll end with what I'm telling my children as they go off into their work life. Go get it. Don't wait for it to come to you. Go get it. Thank you, brother. Thank you, brother. That was the legendary Bruce Feiler. The new book is called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. Pick up your copy today. And for more about Bruce, go to brucefeiler.com. And if you know someone who would enjoy this real dialogue, please share it with them now. And we also appreciate your social media shares and word of mouth. WOM is, was, and always will be the greatest form of marketing. We'd like to thank you.

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1:20:14So please, don't be lame, get out of the passing lane. Everything is the way it is because somebody changed the way it was. This episode was produced and edited by me, Jason DeFillippo. Sarah Knox and Jamie J. do technical execution and build Lockhead.com. Show notes by GM Simon. RJ and EX Bobas do our web development. Cedric Piros does our graphic and web design. Our law firm is Weed and Jack. Our accountants are three balance sheets to the wind. We record on Squadcast.fm. Joan Jett was right. Listen to the Tragically Hip. Thanks, Candy Dandy. And to Chris's mom and dad, he loves you. Hey, Colin, this oddcast really ties the room together.

1:20:53And our deepest, deepest apologies go to Elizabeth Holmes. You may be getting out of jail two years early, but we'll never have time for you. Till next time, stay safe, stay legendary, and follow your different.