Find Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22You want your work to be meaningful. Everyone wants their work to be meaningful. But here's the problem. Nobody can agree on what meaningful work actually is. It's true. Decades of researchers have attempted to figure this out, have attempted to identify exactly what it is that makes work meaningful for people, and they have not been able to do it. We actually ran a whole story about this in Entrepreneur Magazine a few years ago. Decades of researchers. And yet, this is a very, very relevant question right now because people are talking so much about meaningful work, about wanting to find work that is meaningful to them.

1:00And companies want to provide this work because they know, because studies have found this too, that if people find their work meaningful, then they stay longer and they work harder. So there is a lot, a lot riding on trying to figure out what this is. How do you find work that's meaningful? Because the thing is, nobody seems to know. Well, first of all, I agree entirely with this frame. And I think that the most, maybe the most productive way to start this conversation is actually in what is meaning itself. This is Bruce. I'm Bruce Feiler. I'm the author of 15 books, including a new book called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.

1:46And Bruce approaches his work in such an interesting way. He is not just hypothesizing here. He's not just philosophizing. And he's not just telling you what a bunch of academics discovered in a study. What he is doing is digging very deep into many, many people's lives to understand the patterns. I've spent the last six years collecting and analyzing more than 400 life stories of Americans of all ages, all backgrounds, all income levels in all 50 states looking for people who find meaning and purpose in times of change. And no area of human life right now is more rocked with change than work.

2:24So with that as background, let's go back to that question. I had said, we struggle to identify what meaningful work is. And Bruce said, yes. And to understand what meaningful work is, let's just start by understanding what it means for something to be meaningful. The conversation sort of in some ways, the struggle between meaning and happiness goes back to the ancient world, right? Where there was this idea that you could have momentary joy, and then you could have more deep-seated meaning. And I think that that really is the frame that we really should begin this conversation. So what is the difference between meaning and happiness?

3:03The short answer is happiness is a fleeting, momentary emotion. You are happy today. To really kind of sharpen it, animals can be happy, but animals can't have meaning. And so the difference between happiness, which is a momentary, fleeting, today emotion, and meaning is that meaning stitches together past, present, and future. And in fact, meaning is something that you feel and can make when you feel unhappy. So, okay, with that as an understanding, how do you find or create meaning? That is what we're going to be talking about today. Bruce Feiler, author of this great new book, The Search, coming up after the break.

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4:31And round out your meal with an assortment of add-ons like breakfast items, cold press juices, shakes, and smoothies. Head to factormeals.com slash Problem Solvers 50 and use code Problem Solvers 50 to get 50 % off your first box. That's code Problem Solvers 50 at factormeals.com slash Problem Solvers 50 to get 50 % off your first box. All right, we're back. I'm talking with Bruce Feiler, author of The Search. And just before the break, he was explaining that distinction between meaning and happiness. And that's where we're going to pick up. And then the conversation is going to explore this very concept of meaning and how to find it.

5:16And as you'll find, Bruce is a master of frameworks. He has many. One of them is coming up in just a moment. As long as I've been collecting these stories, and we're now talking about 1 ,500 hours of interviews, 10 ,000 pages of transcripts, I have been trying to myself understand what is meaning And the basic framework that I have settled on, which is now the backbone of both this new book, The Search on Work, and my last book, Life is in the Transitions, is what I call the ABCs of meaning. Okay, these are the three building blocks of meaning. If you go back, Jason, a century ago, most people had to live where their parents wanted them to live, believe what their parents wanted them to believe, love what their parents, who their parents wanted them to love, and do what their parents wanted them to do.

6:00Well, a century later, we don't have that. We have the opportunity to live where we want to live, do what we want to do, believe what we want to believe, love whom we want to love. The problem is, is that we get frozen in doing that. OK, we get writer's block trying to write the story of our life. And the basic building blocks of meaning are what I call the ABCs of meaning. So what is the A? The A is agency. That's what you do, you make or create. Right. It's in our autonomy, our sense of impacting the world. For many of us, it is, in fact, our work life. And in narrative terms, that's our me story, I call it.

6:33The B is a sense of belonging. That's our relationships, okay? Our loved ones, our family, our colleagues, our co-religionists, are the people that we on the tennis team with or march in political rallies with. In narrative terms, that's our we story. And then the C is a cause, a calling, a purpose, something higher than ourselves, okay? That, in narrative terms, I call it your the story, right? So you have your me story, your we story, and your the story. And we all have all three of them in our lives. But what happens is, is that we push and we pull, we change, that we go through a life transition.

7:08We sort of in effect shape, shift like, OK, maybe I've been working too hard and I want to spend time with my family. That's a shift from A to B. Or maybe I've been giving back or taking care of an aging relative, as just happened to me. And you know what? Now I want to do something for myself. Right. Or maybe I've been serving the community and I'm just burned out and I want to I want to spend time with my family or write a memoir. So in these moments of transition, we shift from A to B to C. That is, in a sense, what meaning is. And when you turn to work, I think the reason that it's so been so traditionally, shall we say, kind of mushy is that this is not how we've talked about work.

7:45Right. If you go back in the world that you think about every day, right, how entrepreneurs build, conceive and build and scale companies. If you go back five years ago in any office, almost in the planet, the employee well-being office was in the basement next to the incinerator in a windowless room. Well, now we know is that in the pandemic sort of sort of fast forwarded this, whether it's inclusivity, whether it's flexibility, whether it's meaning, right, whether it's mental health. This now needs to be in every office. So we are in what I call the meaning moment when there needs to be a reckoning, both on the organizational level, but especially then in the individual level.

8:26I love that framework because it just gives you a way to start to identify and categorize your own experiences and your needs, which feels like one of the hardest problems when you dive down to an individual level about this subject, because it can shift on you. So Bruce, I'm reminded as you were talking of an email that I got recently from an entrepreneur who had read something that I had written about how to find purpose in something that doesn't maybe feel purposeful. And she had written that she runs a vanilla company. She makes vanilla. And at the start, the purpose felt like, well, building this company, you have a dream, you aspire to create something in the world.

9:11But now she has a vanilla company. And she spends a lot of time wondering, am I doing something meaningful in the world? I'm just making vanilla. And that's an interesting, hard thing for someone to do because to grapple with, because you have an entrepreneur who set out to make something, something shifted. They don't know how to identify what meaning is and where to find it. What is someone like that to do? So I think that I tell the story in the search, as you know, of my father. My father was a builder. and in Savannah, Georgia, and pivoted from building, you know, single family residence to multifamily residence, had ups and downs in the, in kind of the real estate boom and bust economic climate of the 1970s.

9:55And I was like, well, why can't, you know, then he also lobbied and he was involved in the home builders organization. I remember saying like, why can't you have one job? You know, like all my friends, dads have, and like, what do you do? And he looked at me and he said, I'm in the shelter business. And 50 years later, I can remember the shock and awe and just stunning beauty of that, right? So someone in the vanilla business, she might be in the comfort business. You know, she might be in the nutrition business. She might be in the happiness business because a little dose of vanilla can make you bring a smile to your face.

10:28But I think this gets at the larger challenge that I quickly encountered when I was gathering and collecting these interviews, which is that going back to Adam and Eve, right? When Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, what is the punishment? The punishment is work. Like we have talked about work for thousands of years as a burden, as torture, as misery. That's what you're supposed to be unhappy in what you do. And the big change is people are no longer prepared to put up with that. And so what you're getting at is the fact that we have not offered clear definitions of meaning or in the case of what I'm trying to do in this in the search, a roadmap for identifying your meaning.

11:11Okay. And a lot of this has to do with what I call the three lies about work. Lie number one, you have a career. Okay. The whole idea of the career was an accidental invention a hundred years ago when a third of Americans fled from rural areas to the cities at the turn of the 20th century, and then tens of millions of more joined them from overseas through immigration and they didn't have anything to do. So you had a bunch of new businesses and then a bunch of people without work. And so a guy named Frank Parsons in Boston invents the idea of the career. And the idea was only men once in your life at 21, you pick an occupation and then you do it for the rest of your life.

11:47Okay. And how have we talked about career? The career track, that's a linear construct, right? The resume, which was invented in the 1950s is a linear track of successively better jobs. The corporate ladder, I don't have to tell you a linear upward idea. And so the way we've talked about work is that it's all about climbing, right? Up by your bootstraps, rags to riches, bigger office, higher floor, better view, more benefits. The number one thing I learned, Jason, is that the people who are happiest and most fulfilled in what they do, they don't just climb, they also dig. They do what I call a meaning audit.

12:25And multiple times in the course of your life, you will have these opportunities. As you know, I call them workquakes, right? And a workquake is a jolt. It's like a disruption where you're either forced to or you choose to rethink Think or reimagine what you do every two and a half years on average, 20 times. And in that moment, and by the way, 100 million Americans are in a workquake right now. That's what the data show. 50 million Americans have quit a job in the last year, twice the number 10 years ago. 70 % of Americans are unhappy with what they're doing. So when you are in a workquake like this, ironically, the worst thing you could do is start with the how of how to find your job because you're going to succeed.

13:02But you're going to be just as unhappy two and a half years from now. So the thing to do is to stop, do what I call this personal archaeology, this treasure hunt in your own life to identify what is it that makes you happy now? Not 21, in Boston in a career counseling center today. And then, because I'll tell you, I talk to a lot of people, my wife included, who go through these workquakes. My wife is going through one in a way right now where the thing that gives her meaning, which in her case is freelance journalism, is increasingly challenging to do because the market is so, so difficult. And she doesn't know where else to find meaning.

13:45And it's hard to go searching for something that feels abstract. It's also hard to separate meaning in an abstract from task, which is clearer. How do you advise people to even identify the thing that they're looking for before they go looking for how to do it? So my book, as you know, literally offers a toolkit for doing this. I call it 21 Questions to Find Work You Love. And so let's just start with three questions that you and your wife can do tonight, maybe over dinner or in your case, after the kids go down. So let's just start with the first of the 21 questions, right? Tell me the upsides and downsides of work that you learn from your parents.

14:25So I'm an interviewer. Okay. So here I am. I'm interviewing hundreds of people, all 50 states, like spies, botanists, plant, TikTok plant fluencers, like welding instructors, body workers, CEOs, mom and pops, you name it. I'm talking to people. And I, the first question I asked them is, what are the upsides about work you learned from your parents? Everybody, actually, when we ran the numbers, it was two thirds of people said the value of hard work. And I was like, okay, that's interesting, but I'm bored and I'm not. And one of my rules of asking questions is the only metric of a good question is the quality of the answer.

15:01And the answer wasn't interesting enough. So then I started asking people, what are the biggest downsides you learned from your parents? Then it got interesting. Number one downside, overwork. Number two, strain on the family. Number three, unhappiness. Okay? So if the first one was two thirds, those were all bunched around a third. So right now we're one question into these 21 questions. And we have this sense of haunting ideas that are affecting you that are not in the conversation about buff up your resume and call your friend. Like that's how we talk about work. And it's just so banal. So now we understand is that people want to work hard.

15:39Your wife wants to work hard, but she's not prepared to sacrifice her happiness. She's not prepared to like take a job where she's going to have to travel three weeks and be away from your kids. She's not prepared to overwork. And so we have the beginnings of a shape of a conversation. That's a simple question. Another question. Tell me a role model you had as a child other than family and what did you admire about them? This gets to the what. We don't pick our parents. We sort of, we inherit those perceptions we have about work. But who is your role model is actually the first work decision you make because who you choose to identify with and what you admire about them will tell you the first conscious decision that you made about work.

16:21So that's some questions about the past, right? What did I say? What did we say at the outset? What is meaning? Past, present, and future. Now let's turn to the present. I would ask, I would encourage you to ask your wife a very simple question. I'm at a moment in my life when blank. Fill in that blank. I'm in a moment in my life when I need to prioritize money because I'm paying off my student loans or in my case about to send two kids to college or in your case about to have travel soccer or whatever is going to come up in your family. or I'm in a moment in my life when I want to spend more time with my children and therefore I want flexibility.

16:54And so therefore I'm prepared to take a job that may not be up the ladder, but allows me to go to more soccer games and pick up the kids from school at the end of the day. Or I'm in a moment in my life when I've been doing something for a really long time and I want to make a change. Maybe I want to give back. Maybe I want to fight climate change. Maybe I want to be a political protester. Maybe I finally want to start that company. The point is, when you're doing this 20 times, there used to be a stigma for getting off the ladder or the escalator, but there isn't. So you string these questions together.

17:25And then one more for your wife, I would say, my purpose right now is blank. This is who I want to be today. Maybe it's different from two or 20 years ago, but it's where I am right now. Bruce, let me make an observation about what it is that you just said, and then you can reply to it as the form of concluding this conversation, which is what was so interesting about where you just went there is that none of those questions that you asked or that you presented to people to ask for themselves, none of those questions were specifically about work. They all are in a way. They all lead you to that conversation, but they are not questions about work.

18:02They are not, what do you want to do next? They are not, what kind of job do you like? What do you like to do in the morning? They're questions about you and questions about the things around you and the things that you've absorbed and the things that you need. And I suppose what you're doing here, and this is what I want to pose to you as a theory, I suppose that what you're doing here is that you're getting people to engage with the idea that work is one part of meaning for them. and it may be the thing that you're going to spend most of your day doing. And where for people who are truly motivated by their work and love their work, they're going to find a lot of meaning, but it cannot be in isolate.

18:43It can't be a unique set aside thing in their lives that to find meaning in work is to think about everything around it as well. I think that's beautiful, Jason. My wife likes to say of me that I have hard knowledge about soft things. And one of the challenges, I was actually in the CNBC green room two days before we were taping this conversation. And the Fed reporter was in the green room with me. And I said, don't you? I said, I have this thing that I've been thinking about, which is that the Fed missed this turn to meaning. And the fact that people are willing to quit a job now and the fact that six out of 10 millennials say meaning is more important to them than their boomer parents.

19:25The fact that nine out of 10 people in a study out of Harvard said they're willing to give up a quarter of their lifetime earnings for work they find meaningful. I said the Fed has missed this because we've been told for a year that the recession was going to come, but the quitting hasn't stopped. And he said, well, the problem is the Fed can't quantify this. So there's no way for them to bring it into their financial macroeconomic decisions. And I think that that's the frustration here. But I would say to give you some hard knowledge about a soft thing is that the signature piece of data in the search that of the workquakes that we've been talking about and that we go through 20 times in our lives, more than half of them, Jason, 55 % occur outside of the workplace.

20:08So 45 % are a conflict with your boss, right? A recession, right? You get laid off from a job. But 55 % occur in our personal lives. Something happens in our family, right? There's an illness. There's just a change of heart that we go through. What that means is, is in the battle between life and work, life is playing a greater role. And so I think that the challenge that we've had is that we put life, what are we talking about here? We're talking about the story of your life and specifically the story of your work. And this is not a new idea that we have a life story, but for whatever reason, we've kept it out of work.

20:42So I think we have to we have to get work out of the silo where it's been as this thing which is applies only to macroeconomic rules where we're supposed to be miserable and bring it into the larger conversation that we're having in the world these days, which is how do we find meaning, purpose and and find fulfillment for ourselves? And by the way, we have women and younger workers and diverse workers to thank for this. So in effect, my invitation is if you have this vague feeling you want to be happier, you come meet the people that I talk to who are happy. You're going to be inspired by them.

21:14I'm almost prepared to guarantee it. But you're also going to be motivated to use a little rigor, use a little self-expression and go through, ask yourself these questions and you can find the happiness you seek, the meaning you crave and the success you deserve on your own terms. Bruce, always great talking to you. Remind us one more time what the name of the book is. The book is called The Search. finding meaningful work in a post-career world. I'm Bruce Feiler. Thanks, Bruce. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonfeifer.com.

21:49J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonpfeiffer.bulletin.com. Also check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shah for production.

22:26My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.