Finding Purpose: How to give your work meaning (w/ the New York Times Jodi Kantor) | from Fixable

0:00Hi listeners, it's Madhupeh, the host of TED Business. On this show, we talk about the business of business and the why of it all. A sense of purpose is often at the heart of successful, impactful work. And these are the big questions that we're constantly asking on TED Business. How do you seek out meaningful work? How do you locate meaning in your work? What does the word purpose even mean? Well, I'm not the only one in the extended TED family asking these questions. Over on the podcast Fixable, leadership coaches Frances Fry and Ann Morris have done a four-part series on finding purpose, and I'm sharing each part of it with you today.

0:43I just know you guys are going to love it. So without further ado, Frances and Ann are going to take it from here.

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1:39To learn more, go to mod.com. Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider, and if approved, ModAlert ships straight to your door. Go to mod.com to get started. That's M-O-D dot com.

2:21people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Hey guys, it's Drew Afualo from the comment section. Listen, it's time to stop settling for hair products that just don't work. With all the prestige brands at Sephora, upgrading your routine is easy. If your hair needs repair, they've got the K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask. If you're trying to level up your wash day, the Kerastase Elixir old-time hair oil leaves your hair looking ridiculously shiny without feeling heavy. And if you're into that glossy, healthy hair vibe, the Gisu Honey-infused hair oil is a must-have.

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3:14This is an environment in which everybody is seeking stability because it's a chaotic, intimidating environment. And I get that. I mean, of course I understand why everybody just wants security right now. But the problem is that you don't really get anywhere in your career without risk. Like it's just, it's just the other ingredient. Sometimes you need more of it. Sometimes you need less of it, but you do need to take chances.

3:45This is Fixable, a show where we take the problems at work that feel unfixable and prove that they are not. I'm Anne Morris. And I'm Frances Frey. As we continue our Purpose at Work series, this week we're talking to the amazing New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor. Recently she's been thinking and writing about how work fits into a meaningful life. Her work has changed the way I think and honestly, the way everyone I know thinks about work. She's reported on everything from power dynamics in Silicon Valley to allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein. She has masterfully documented what is broken about work, and she still believes it can be beautiful.

4:28We got to know Jodi years ago when she did a story on gender issues here at the Harvard Business School. And she's been on a rocket ship of impact since then, picking up a Pulitzer Prize along the way. She has a new book out now called How to Start, Discovering Your Life's Work. It's a really moving guide to finding your purpose through work. We're going to talk to her about what that pursuit looks and feels like and try to find the sweet spot between what you're uniquely built to do and what the world really needs from you. And I hope we find out what got her from there to here. Like, why did she write this book?

5:03It's beautiful. I have so many questions, so let's bring her in.

5:16Jodi Kantor, welcome to Fixable. It's great to be here. So we wanted to start with a hard-hitting question that's worthy of your status as one of the world's great investigative journalists. Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada, too? I have. Oh. Yes, we could have an entire conversation about that because it's very much about work, not to mention about journalism. I did think that this is a good movie about the workplace. And we have some of those, but I don't think we quite have enough of them. It was a little Hollywood. A little. Just a tiny bit, Anne. I mean, I wear that stuff every day personally.

5:56Unfortunately, yeah, I mean, there were some specific lines towards the end of the film. I think there was a beautiful tribute to work near the end, right, where they say, like, this is why we come here every day. This is what we want, this partnership, these relationships, this feeling of trying to do something big. Like, I thought it was a very good defense of that because I think, I mean, I'm curious whether you agree. I think what's basically happening is the idea of work needs defending in the culture right now. And I've seen various parties do it. The other cultural moment right before the book came out was the astronauts.

6:36And I don't know about you, but I fell down a rabbit hole of watching their teamwork, ambition, craft, precision, optimism, respect for one another. And I thought this is the most like this is the most provocative thing right now because people are regarding work as so dystopian and they're putting together both this very high achieving but joyful sense of what what work can be like. I found the reaction to it to be kind of just as interesting the moment because I think and we see this all the time people are really hungry for those positive examples and those really hopeful examples of work it seems like part of your mission with this book and your wonderful commencement speech at Columbia this fabulous press tour that you're on is to rehabilitate the idea of work as a path to a meaningful life.

7:38Is that how you think about it? I mean, thank you for seeing that. Certainly, I don't know that I can rehabilitate it, but I think what I can try to do as an author and what we can all try to do is not lose a sense of aspiration at this time because it's a really hard time and we can't mince words about it. You know, if you, as you know from being educators, if you say naive things to young people about work now, you're going to get shocked. Like anything that comes off as naive or overly nostalgic or false optimism, you lose instant credibility. So we both have to acknowledge what is so hard about the workplace right now.

8:20And I hope we can get into it in the next hour. But then I think we need to fight for the things that so many of us believe in, which is that the workplace is our engine of progress and that strangers can come together in shared discipline and purpose. and the workplace can be a fair place and it can protect you from the negative forces outside. It can give you a very special kind of happiness that's different from the happiness available, say in the family or romantic realm. I want young people to know that that exists because many of them understandably just think work is like horrible and something to protect yourself against.

9:16Jodi, for some people listening, you will be an unexpected messenger for this. Yeah. Because I've reported some of the crappiest things about the workplace. I know, I know, I know. That's part of why I wanted to do it because I was like, look, the Harvey Weinstein story is about entry-level work. Those women were actresses. They were young assistants who wanted to be producers. Many of them were in their first week on the job. And Weinstein turned their aspirations against them and used work as a tool of predation, not as his real legacy. And also I reported these stories about Amazon and other workplaces, essentially managing people by machine.

9:59You know, the thing I've seen over the last 10 years in my reporting is that management and the employer-employee relationship has been partially taken over by technology. And more and more it is. It feels like a really natural line from that to the AI moment in so many ways. And as that happened, it's been unbelievably disruptive. And it has really strained relationships. And it continues to. So in reporting the book, in releasing the book, I am talking to a generation of young people who are being interviewed by AI for their first jobs. Look, like right now as we're talking, some dudes are prognosticating on a podcast, professing complete certainty about AI and the future of work.

10:46Whatever that is, right? Like I don't know how that's going to turn out. I think we should have humility about what we don't know. But however the big story turns out, what's happening right now is that hiring is being digitized. And so the initiation into the workplace that is the hiring process is becoming very lonely, very cold, very sterile. You're not only being rejected, you're being rejected by a robot. Frances, I'm curious from your perch as a professor of operations and technology, what your reaction to that kind of automation story is right now? Well, I mean, it's first of all grim and you can imagine the trauma people are going to have about it going forward.

11:33But I will say at least they're being interviewed and at least they're hearing back. Because what happened right before this, you would never hear back after your interview. Like, so without the digitization, we had gotten to a death valley of the hiring process. So I think that it's imperfect what is going on. It's not the right use of AI. I hope it's an experimental way to do it. But there was so much room. Like the nostalgic view we have of, oh, the inner view. And then you tell like none of that. That was dead a long time ago. That was dead a long time ago. And it was really grim out there.

12:16Yeah, no. And I think that not getting back to people is still correct because the overall thing that young people are saying is that hiring is becoming a black box. You know, you submit online and then you just can't tell. Like you have no idea what you, is this a ghost listing? Is this job even real or is it just a magnet for resumes? You know, was I seen at all? Was I considered? What kind of feedback? Even the body language you used to get in an interview was valuable. You know, real data about how you were performing. That is increasingly harder to get. But the reason, listen, I mean, we shouldn't waste our like precious time together talking about all the negative things about there because the more interesting question I would argue is what is a young person actually supposed to do in this environment?

13:05Because, you know, I know just from knowing the two of you, all three of us have a stubborn belief in working past these obstacles and fighting for your ambitions and your dreams. And so the question is, how do you do that right now? And especially for people our age, what do you tell your kids about how to do it? I love that pivot. It is the thing that I think threads the three of us together is this bias towards a practical, optimistic way forward, even in conditions that feel grim. This conversation is part of a series we're doing on purpose. And Jodi, you have lived a very purpose-driven life.

13:44You know, I think the thesis of the conversations we're having is that purpose is an important part of figuring that out for any human walking the planet. I'm curious how your sense of purpose revealed itself to you. Does it feel like a settled question? Where are you in your relationship with purpose in this moment? I would say it's 90 % answered by context and circumstances because I'm an investigative reporter at the New York Times, which is thriving, but journalism on the whole is not. And as everybody knows, our information systems are very, very troubled, reliable. Information is getting crowded out by unreliable information.

14:31Like the kind of journalistic infrastructure that has helped keep democracy standing up for hundreds of years in this country is severely compromised. So my purpose is to use all of these decades of training and the security and might and skill of the New York Times and our amazing 13 million subscribers and the sources who are willing to talk to me and all of the cred I got out of the Harvey Weinstein story, the fact that like, you know, not to be presumptuous, but I think I've worked hard to have a relationship of trust, not only with my sources, but with readers. You know, how can I use that in the biggest and most meaningful way possible?

15:25The days I feel the worst at work are the days when like, you know, I'm not really sure what story I should be doing. Those days are very rare now, but earlier in my career, I'd be like between stories and like, did I really use today well? And what do I really have going? Those days feel terrible because my internal dialogue was like, my seat is precious and I need to use it well every single day. So that's given me tremendous purpose. And then I found like a second purpose with this book. And then we can, maybe you guys can also help me figure out why having like one job does not seem to be enough for me, but that's another topic.

16:04You said, you know, the toughest days for you at work were the days when you were trying to figure out what to write, what am I doing here? What changed for you in experiencing fewer of those days? Because the language you use resonates very much for me as a young person starting out feeling a lot of urgency that I had to quickly get to my purpose and impact and I had to make a mark and it had to be visible. And in retrospect, a lot of that friction was unproductive and it didn't get me to that impact any faster or to that clarity or self-knowledge. So that evolution is part of what we're trying to explore in these conversations.

16:43Like, how did you make that pivot? I think everything you're saying resonates because absolutely for young people, especially young people with great educations, they're like, I went to the school. It costs so much money. I worked so hard. I know I'm incredibly lucky to be in this position. I have to somehow deliver on my promise. And Anne, you're telling like such a recognizable story of the pressure that creates. And I did and do feel a grown up version of that. Like, I'm at the New York Times. I have a Pulitzer Prize. Like, how am I, what am I doing to make good on this every single day? I think a couple of ingredients that have helped me in the last few years, because you're constantly doing it, right?

17:26Yeah. It doesn't go away. It becomes quieter in my experience? It becomes easier because you have craft. Will you define craft just for people listening? Yeah. So my book is very much about craft and about craft being one of the main ingredients of successful and happy careers. Craft is having a skill or expertise that other people don't. It's authority. It's what distinguishes you in the marketplace. A lot of people right now, are being treated as disposable or interchangeable. Craft is what protects you against that. You can have a classic craft. You can be a surgeon, certainly like one of the highest crafts.

18:10Or you can have a craft that doesn't necessarily get recognized as such, but is very much a craft. Running a restaurant's busy dinner service, as Francis, our operations expert, knows, is absolutely a craft. So craft for sure. And then the other clue I would give to people is there are times in life and certainly in journalism when you have to think ambitiously. So I think another thing, and this is not right for everybody at every moment, but I have an instinct that part of the way this next generation will get out of its very understandable work rut is by focusing on big, urgent problems. Frances, this feels very aligned with your worldview and experience of purpose in your own life.

18:59Am I reading that right? Yeah. Whenever we do work with a company, Jodi, and we ask them what their ambition is, we have what we call the magic dust question. But we're like, if we could sprinkle magic dust on this, what would be different? And whatever they say, our response is at a zero. So we're basically in the business of helping to amp up people's audacity and ambition because you make more progress in the presence of great ambition. So incremental change is harder than bold change. It's a surprise to people, but it's just harder to maintain. It's harder to care about it. It's harder to get momentum.

19:42And so your prescription that this is what younger people should do, it totally hits my worldview. You know, when we swing big, we have to make sure we enjoy the process. And I think that's the other part of your book that was really wonderful, is that it doesn't have to be drudgery when you take these big swings. And even if you take a big swing and you miss, you still will get so much out of it because of the joy and the process and the learning of it. I love everything you're saying. And another thing is that swinging big doesn't mean changing everything. It can be finding the right toehold or lever where you say, if I change this one thing, if I report this one story, it sets us down a path of change or it punches above its weight in terms of impact.

20:33Because changing everything is too hard. Like it's overwhelming. You're setting yourself up for failure. For sure, you want to honor what you're not changing so that you can talk about the few things you are changing. But I don't want to let go of your idea of ambition, which is the swing that we're taking should be bigger than polite company suggests. Totally. I mean, the word we use in journalism is impact, and impact can be defined in a lot of different ways. Yeah. The other power of ambition is that there's a relationship between ambition and resilience. And the higher the ambition, the higher the resilience and kind of vice versa.

21:16I'm interested, your grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. You grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors. Yeah. How did that experience impact your own ambition and sense of purpose. Oh, I mean, it's the whole thing. It's the solvent. I was born 30 years after my grandparents were liberated. I grew up in a world of Holocaust survivors. I thought everybody's grandparents were Holocaust survivors. The crazy thing now is that I think back on these people, and they were my age when I was a little kid, which is such a crazy thought. And my My grandmother only died three years ago, and I'm 51. So this wasn't like a long ago experience of firsthand, you know, contact with the legacy of the Holocaust.

22:10This was spending my life with a genocide survivor who became the happiest person I knew. So this was a lifelong, intimate witnessing of recovery. It for sure made me an investigative journalist, right? Because like all the, you know, who did this? And are the victims speaking? And what was the system? And why didn't anybody stop them? These are all the classic questions of investigative journalism. And I think like one of the puzzles of my family and my life is why did my grandmother recover so well? It was really like something I've wrestled with my whole life. But it has taught me for sure that the most negative circumstances do carry within them the seeds for great improvement and that the people I respect most are the people who have responded to really difficult things in productive ways.

23:16And so that's part of the reason I really want to galvanize this generation is not to be unrealistic about what can be accomplished, but to be tough, to dig in, to realize that things can get better, that they are not statistics, that they have agency, they have a self-determination. and the ability to respond well to very hard things, like that's just everything to me. It's everything. It's everything. I don't want them to feel like victims of this circumstance even when things are very hard. You know, the research on how to build confidence, Jodi, you just gave a great ode to Because you can systematically build confidence if you stack wins on things that are hard enough so that it feels meaningful, but not so hard that it's out of reach.

24:24And so you, in dire times, you can still build confidence by stacking the wins. I think it ties to what we said to ambition. I'm friendly with the therapist Esther Perel and she talks about just the Holocaust survivor family phenomenon of just needing to live a very full life if you survived and I identify with that completely.

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26:32people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

26:47Jodi, we've touched on your book, How to Start Discovering Your Life's Work. Let's dig into it a little bit. It's essentially a guide for young people finding their way. You explore these two ideas, craft and need. We've touched on craft. I want to talk about need. It It feels harder in some ways because the needs of the world change fast. Right. Well, what I would ask of young people is, you know, try on different crafts. Think about what your craft or crafts will be. But also think about yoking yourself to a need, whether it's a business need or an altruistic need, because that's propulsion.

27:22If craft is authority, need is propulsion. You don't want your career to be like a lonely paddle upstream. You want your career to be buoyed by the things that other human beings are going to need during the course of your lifetime. You can follow the conventional wisdom on that. Like all of our lives we heard like learn Japanese or learn genetics or learn Mandarin or learn coding or whatever. Like that's just conventional wisdom, right? It may work for a certain amount of time. It's not invaluable. It's not a golden ticket. I think the people who have had the best careers are the people who independently, using their own eyes and ears, identify what needs they want to address and that can pull them along.

28:09I mean, you've got to be specific about it because, look, I mean, there are plenty of needs we have, like, that might not make the basis for great careers, right? Like, should we tend to stray animals in the streets? Sure. Like is doing so necessarily going to pull you along in your career? I'm not so sure. But I also noticed, speaking of kind of hard things and hard backgrounds, some of the people who are the best at identifying needs are the people who have been through really hard things. And, you know, in that category of the people I respect most are the people who built a career as an answer to some pain or tragedy or struggle they and their family experienced.

28:55Because it's a very productive, healthy kind of response, which is like, instead of just struggling with this thing forever and being tortured, I'm going to learn a series of professional tools, that's your craft, that is going to allow me to answer this thing and fight it every single day and make a contribution. And that's my life's work. And I think those people are often very happy because they've found a route to recovery that's not just a therapist's office, as great as that is, but involves like what they do every day. Yeah, this is not an easy equation you're laying out in practice. So how do you know when you're kind of on the right path of craft and need lining up is you are propelled in some way.

29:42And that idea really resonated. You have a whole section on money in this book. Money, of course, means different things to different people, security, freedom, status, identity. What's your advice about how to think about money and all of these practical needs? And where does it fit into this equation for you? I'll rattle off, let's do some quickies because we could talk about this forever. the really rich kids just need to get a job. For the opposite ends of the spectrum, people who are coming from backgrounds of struggle, I want them to take their happiness in the workplace seriously. I hate this idea that fulfillment is just for rich kids and that they have to take these jobs that are like all duty, all obligation, you know, very low on the satisfaction index.

30:31Like I just think we actively need to fight that and help them insist on happiness and satisfaction. And then very specifically, first jobs, early jobs, I want young people to be evaluating them, not just by how much they're earning, but how much they're learning. Not everybody gets a choice of a first job right now. It's a screwed up entry-level employment market. We know that. But if you do, the things to look for are how much stimulation are you getting in this job? Are you going to work for a good person? And you can define good for yourself. I'm not going to do it for you. But, oh, I might throw out some ideas like wisdom, integrity.

31:20You know, like are you going to work for a faceless corporation that's treating you like a widget? you know, or are you going to work for leaders who are going to bring you along? Because prices are so high and housing in particularly is such a torture. There are a lot of young people who are like, oh, you know, this first job pays$56 ,000 and that first job pays$49 ,000. So like, obviously I have to take the$56 ,000 job. And even though we know that's not true, They don't know that that's not true because like a few thousand dollars is a lot of money in, you know, especially in a big city. So I think that idea that your 20s is a time of investment in yourself and that you are laying the foundation for a whole career, even if you end up doing something completely different, is really important.

32:12What was your first job, Jodi? I have many early career experiences to talk about from being thrown off my college paper to being a Nazi hunting intern. But the most important is that I worked – my first in journalism is that I worked for Slate when it was starting. It was owned by Microsoft. I was a temp first. Did you have a pay stub from Microsoft? Oh, totally. I have – better than that. If anybody from like Microsoft in the 90s is listening, I was A-Jody K at Microsoft.com because if you had the A -, it denoted that you were a temp. But crazily enough, Microsoft had started Slate as part of its content strategy.

32:49And Michael Kinsley was the pioneering editor. And it was a very small upstart magazine meant to figure out journalism on the web. It was a flat organization. Young people had a ton of opportunity. And probably the biggest benefit was that it was divided into three different offices and email was like new and magical and sensational. So we had these email lists where story ideas were discussed. And so even as the youngest and least experienced person on the team, I had full visibility into all the story discussions. And that was just incredible. Yeah, that's another thing about, you know, first jobs.

33:34Like, are you, are the decision makers allowing you to eavesdrop and witness what's really going on? Because that is how you learn. Frances, what was your first job? First meaningful job? Seventh grade. I worked at the general store in the town that I grew up in. I went down and asked for a job and they said, when do you want to work? And I said, every day there's no school. So I worked from 8 to 12. Every day there wasn't school. And I remember my first salary,$1.25 an hour. So I would work 16 hours and get a crisp$20 bill. It's interesting to me that what you remember is that crisp$20 bill. That's totally what I remember.

34:16We see with our own kids, they get a lot, talking about confidence, in a sense of self, in a sense of agency. Like they get a ton from - When they knock on that door to get the snow. Knock on that door to like snow, to shovel your driveway. I mean, that kid, particularly our youngest, comes back lit up in a way that going to, you know, cross country practice that all the adults are forcing him to do. Like it doesn't happen for him. So it's that entrepreneurial, it's like feeling like he's also participating. It's not lost on them. They're operating in a capitalist system, right? And so for them to be able to go and participate in this thing that seems to distract all the fucking adults around them to the point that they're not, no one's paying attention to them.

35:01Like that is, I do think there is something there that doesn't happen when we force them into these activities that are simulating the world of work that they will enter. What was your first job, Anne? My first job was for the public interest research group. that. Oh my God. They hired everybody. Totally. And you know why they hired everybody? Because they don't even tell you what the job is. You, you walk in on the first day. They just say, come save the environment. That was like the headline. Come save the environment. We all showed up and they tell you what you're going to do. You're going to go door to door.

35:34You're going to talk to strangers. You're going to stand on street corner. It's going to be terrible. And then two thirds of the people just walk out. So then there's like a third of you who stay. And then they send you out to these neighborhoods where they have no expectation that you're going to make any money. And then every buddy comes back. And then the next day, two people come back out of like a room of 30. And I was one of the two. And I just stayed standing. Like I just did the thing and I stayed standing. And by the end of the summer, 17 years old, by the end of the summer, I was running the place because like no one else would do it.

36:12And it was such a crazy learning curve of like knocking on a door, building trust with a human in seven seconds, trying to get them to give you money for this thing. They don't want to give you money. They don't want to hear you talk. Like I learned more in the 60 days I spent on the PERG payroll than in any job I've ever had in the rest of my life. Wow. That's amazing.

36:52Hey, this is Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily. This episode is supported in part by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue. Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore?

37:37Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks adenosine. the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded and you crash. Modafinil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Modafinil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and orexin. It's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy. To learn more, go to mod.com. Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider, and if approved, Mod Alert ships straight to your door.

38:20Go to mod.com to get started. That's M-O-D dot com.

38:39needs repair, they've got the K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask. If you're trying to level up your wash day, the Kerastase Elixir All-Time Hair Oil leaves your hair looking ridiculously shiny without feeling heavy. And if you're into that glossy, healthy hair vibe, the Gisu Honey-Infused Hair Oil is a must-have. Also, Sephora makes it super convenient with free shipping and same-day delivery. Shop hair at Sephora and give your hair the upgrade it's been waiting for.

39:11Jodi, we have a listener question from a young person that we'd love to play for you and get your reaction. I'm graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Linguistics. A lot of the people I know personally are very saddened by the fact they can't do the work they want to do or have to pivot. And I think just like, how do you navigate that when you know your purpose or like you know so strong, like this is what I want to do and you can't do it. And you must see a version of this in journalism now, maybe outside the New York Times, which is thriving, but people who feel like I know my purpose and that the world is not interested in it or I can't make a living from it.

39:47Yeah, but like, I just have questions. Who are you? How did you become so sure that anthropology is not going to translate into what you do next? Like anthropology to me seems like a very useful skill in about, you know, a million different settings. Like if you want to be Margaret Mead, Like, I get that that is, you know, a very hard path. But if you want to use anthropological wisdom and even research in the workplace in a way that will also, you know, provide a real job and provide financial stability, that's not a crazy goal. What might one of those jobs be? Just one for example. Oh, that asks the Harvard business professor who studies human behavior.

40:34I don't know, Frances. What might it be? I'm with you. I'm sitting in the first row of the church, but I'm just now channeling this person. I need to know more. Like, it's so hard to give good advice based on that, you know, tiny little bit of information. Again, like, I don't want to presume too much, but this caller did sound a refrain I sometimes hear from young people, which is like, this thing is not an option. This thing's totally off the table. This is not an option. And I just want to know why. Now, if her answer is that she's$300 ,000 in debt and just needs to take the most lucrative job, okay.

41:15Like, got it. Understood. And in that case, maybe we need to deal with her feelings of grief, you know, and talk about a path back to what she's interested in in many years. But if the problem is that she doesn't have a capacious enough sense of the workplace's possibilities because she hasn't experienced it yet or because she got sent to like a very conventional career services center where, you know, the options are very out of the box. I love this answer, Jodi. I think my answer is knowing the little that I know about you, I would encourage you to explore why you think certain things are not possible.

42:00And I would challenge you to not just sit in a library and think about it because like this is that's very painful. I don't think introspection is so good for students, to be honest. I think they need stimulation and exposure, not like self-marination and extended anxiety. But like go out into the world and talk to people about how the stuff you're interested in could translate to the workplace. I mean, there's no shortage of former anthropology and even linguistics majors who have made fascinating careers. I find myself saying at least once a week to a group of people, if there were an anthropologist observing, what would they, right?

42:43What would they see? What would they say? So I'm calling on anthropologists regularly. Yeah. Yeah. I love challenging the story that she's using of the world is not interested in the thing that I love. Sometimes she's interested in human beings, right? So that would be, that's my tough love advice in this. So get out there with other human beings. My experience of this search for craft is also that craft for me didn't present in any kind of a traditional way. It wasn't a major that you could, you know, it wasn't, you know, you couldn't go to the trade school on what I was interested in, what was kind of pulling me forward.

43:22And I suspect that she's probably circling something like that. Jodi, this book is geared towards young people. It feels like a lot of your advice works for anyone and seeking impact and purpose and activating ambition. Do you have a different coaching for people reinventing themselves later in their careers? Yeah. I mean, the main thing is, and this is like so basic, but it's really worth saying because anybody trying to reinvent themselves needs to hear it every day. The main thing is to encourage them to insist on their own happiness, not in a naive way, but making a change requires real bravery and it requires risk.

44:04I mean, maybe that's the note to end on. This is an environment in which everybody is seeking stability because it's a chaotic, intimidating environment. And I get that. I mean, of course, I understand why everybody just wants security right now. But the problem is that you don't really get anywhere in your career without risk. Like it's just the other ingredient. Sometimes you need more of it. Sometimes you need less of it, but you do need to take chances. And so like through the book tour conversations, I feel like some of my work has been to rehabilitate the idea of risk, even when other people are trying to totally minimize it.

44:48And especially making a change mid-career that like, there's a lot of risk and there's a different kind of risk than there is when you're young. Frances, what's your reaction to that? I just was thinking of all of the people that I know mid-career and your word risk is right, because when they did it, awesome at their last job, successfully transitioned, but didn't make it on the same timetable they wanted to. So I'm thinking of junior faculty that switch what they're studying are totally happy in the new thing, but it didn't happen in time for them to get promoted. And I think that's the risk.

45:28In retrospect, I think they'd still do it because they went towards happiness. They're now doing the thing. They ended up in another school doing the thing. So I think your point of risk on which dimensions, and it's probably not as devastating, like a no here, I don't, no doesn't mean anything to me. I get said, I get told it all the time. Like I, I hear not now, you know, not here, but I don't really hear no. Risk, I think has, if it has a small R, we can just, you know, go and do it somewhere else. I want to treat it as a small R risk. So that's what my thought process was. Jodi, for people listening, what's one thing that our listeners can do this week to start?

46:10Okay. I hate cheesy journaling exercises, but I am about to recommend one because I really believe in this one. You are a very credible messenger for this. Thank you. Okay. Buy like a really cheap notebook. Don't go to like one of those fancy stores where the notebooks are$67. I'm talking like$1.99. And I want you to use the notebook to notice yourself as you go through whatever, your work, your extracurriculars, your classes. I'm going to give you the first couple of pages, like in terms of what you should label them as categories, and then you can go on and make your own. I think the first page is tasks I like doing.

46:52tasks I haven't, not in the abstract, but like observing yourself as you go through your life. Which tasks made me the happiest this week? Which tasks did I hate? Which people did I feel most drawn to? Who couldn't I stand? Which people do I hate? Just to keep the structure and poetry You have to be very careful that this notebook doesn't fall into enemy hands. You might want to Those code names for the people you hate. Another big one is like, which events or meetings lit me up? Or were there events or meetings that I wanted invitations to, even if I didn't get them? Which were total bummers for me.

47:33This is the first step to finding craft. And I think to starting, again, because we're filled with like duty and obligation, and because we like go through the workday looking at our phones, I think we don't do enough noticing of which are the hour by hour tasks that I really groove to. You don't have to be amazing at them at first, but they need to hold like some sort of magnetic attraction to you. And that is the first step towards craft. I love it. I love light me up. I love groove too. I love all those phrases. And I think an anthropologist would be really good at this. Yeah, if only we had an anthropologist who could help guide us.

48:13All right. Last question we ask all our guests. What are you currently fixated on outside of work? Ooh. Oh, my God. I have a great one. I'm going to take a sabbatical a year from... Yo, look at you guys. So I'm going to take a sabbatical a year from July. I'm going to do it when the younger kid is in summer camp. So for the first time in my working life, I will have no work responsibility and no parenting responsibility. It's four weeks. I can do basically anything. I mean, not something that costs$4 million, but like within a reasonable spectrum, I can do anything. I don't want to like learn a new skill, like no violin, like not like I have worked way too hard.

48:58The goal is rest and the goal is letting go. But the thing I think about every day is how do I use that time really well? not in like an over-optimized, every minute needs to be accounted for way. But like, this is special. This is really special. I've worked really hard over the years. Jodi Kantor, you're a rock star. Thank you so much for coming on Fixable. Thank you for having me. It's great to talk to you guys again. And if you're enjoying this show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.

49:41Fixable is a podcast brought to you by Ted and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Frye. This episode was produced by Trina Menino. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Baloresso, and Roxanne Heilash. Our show is mixed by Louis at Story Yard.

50:11I love that we have audio of Jodi Cantor at work. On the typewriter. Keystrokes and everything. Keystrokes. Yeah. Yeah, it's exciting, guys. I mean, the sending of emails, just brace yourselves. Very glamorous. Yeah, exactly.

50:30Hey, this is Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily. This episode is supported in part by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Hey guys, it's Drew Afualo from the comment section. Listen, it's time to stop settling for hair products that just don't work.

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52:35Thank you.