How to Pivot Your Life Multiple Times | Bruce Feiler

26:36Damn it, that wasn't when it got interesting. Number one answer, overwork. Number two, strain on the family. Number three, unhappiness, okay? Those were all at a third. That is the story of work in a nutshell. People want to work hard, but they are not prepared to overwork. They are not prepared to strain on their families, even dads these days, and they are not prepared to be unhappy. And that is what's driving people to quit. That is what's driving people to walk away from what I call the should train. You know, what I would say to someone now, you know, I've kids, we were talking about this.

27:10I don't know if that made it into the top of the podcast. I just dropped identical twin daughters at college last weekend. And someone said to me recently, like, well, what did you tell them about work? I'm like, don't listen to me. Don't do it because you think I want you to do it. Because person after person told me they chased some dream that their parents wanted, that their culture wanted, that their country wanted, that their religion wanted. get off the should train and get on the want train. And that seems to be, for whatever reason, incredibly difficult for people. Yeah, I think it's because, and you refer to this theory about we're all living these scripts.

27:48So we're told, you know, I remember being four years old and going my first day of nursery school. And I clearly remember asking my dad, is this just for today or this week? Like, what's going on? And he's like, no, you're going to go to nursery school. Then you're going to spend a year in kindergarten, then 12 years in grade school, four years in college, about three to five years in graduate school. And then for the next 40 years, approximately, you're going to have a job. And then when you're your age of your grandfather, you're going to finally retire. And I remember starting to cry like this, this did not sound fun.

28:25And fortunately, that did not happen to me. And according to your book, it doesn't happen to a lot of people, but this is very important to ask yourselves these questions. And my daughter is of that age. She's about to graduate college. And she said, I have no idea what I'm going to do in my life. And I said, that is a good thing because you're going to do any things. You shouldn't be on a specific path right now unless you're totally driven by something, which you're not. And that's why follow your passion is such a lame idea because people change their passion, right? When I ask people, did you follow your passion, discover your passion, or make your passion, right?

29:04Only 10 % followed their passion because you can't anticipate what your passion is going to be, right? You're going to discover new things, right? Technology will create as many jobs as it destroys. and most people today will be doing things or a huge amount of percentage of people will be doing things that haven't even been invented yet, okay? And so it's not about fashion. It's about discovering the story you want to tell and ask yourself, here's a very simple question. I'm in a moment in my life when blank. It might be you're in a moment in your life when you need to make money to pay off student loans, right?

29:43In my case, to send two kids to college. It might be in a moment where you say, I want to climb, you know, I want to make a name for myself. And I want to stick with this company right now and finish this project and meet my potential. Or it might be, I've done the same thing for 20 years. And I want to change. And I'm in a moment in my life where I don't want to work for the boss. I want to work for myself, or I want to give back, or I want to fight climate change. I love the story in my book of Wei Te Quak, who was the head of an ad company, the leading Silicon Valley to China ad tech company.

30:20And his wife, against his will, drags him to see an inconvenient truth. Like there's this movie playing at the multiplex by Al Gore. And he said, by the end of the movie, I was in a full-on workquake and I would shave every morning and look myself in the mirror and say, what am I doing today to make the planet better? I don't have time for my kids to grow up and do it. I got to do it. And I'm sitting there arguing about the shape, the number of pixels in an app design. And he walks away from being the CEO to being a foot soldier to fight climate change. And even that wasn't enough. And he did what he swore he would never do as a kid.

30:57He runs for office in his community in California. Half of all people, we talked about the quitters at the top of this conversation, James, half of all people who change a job, change an occupation. The story you just told reminds me of, I just read an autobiography of James Patterson, the thriller writer. And I had no idea. He was like a major player in the advertising industry. He was like the CEO of, I forget if it was Satya or Satya. J. Walter Thompson, I think. Oh, yeah, J. Walter Thompson, right. And so it's one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. And he was the CEO. That was his career.

31:30And then nobody knows him as that. Like an entire industry knew him as that. And now, and then he's like, oh, I want to write novels. So for various reasons, he left that position and focused full-time on his Hope job, which was vaguely making money. And he's a superstar now. Well, I think that one of the things – so the way that I sort of encourage people to go through this process is kind of the basics of storytelling, right? Who, what, when, where, why, and how, right? So the who were your – what did you learn from your parents? That's a who question. Like who were your role models? That's a what question.

32:07because it's what did you admire about them. And I put how last, right? And I think that part of the issue is that people put how too soon. So they lose a job or they decide they're losing interest in a job or they want to move or they're in a change of life or whatever it might be. You're in one of these work wakes that happens every two and a half years and you decide you want to make a change. And in some ways, the worst thing you can do is go to how too quickly because odds are you'll find a job, but you'll be miserable and you'll be back where you were in two and a half years. That's why you put the other ones first.

32:44But when you are ready to get to how, you know, there are some interesting things that people do. Like one of the, let's talk about a when question, right? So this is a question that plagues a lot of people, right? Should I stay or should I leave, right? And the easiest way to answer that question is which pain is greater? when the pain of staying becomes greater than the pain of leaving like then you for sure know that now is a good time to change but but yet at the same time you talk about hope jobs a lot of what happens is people use time in interesting ways they like like i'll give myself a buffer like i'm going to give myself 18 months right or a year to see if i can make this work before they commit.

33:33And then what happens with hope jobs is often you have a main job, okay? So maybe I'm at a moment where I need the main job because I need salary and benefits, but I want to start this thing on the side. So you start the thing on the side and it becomes the side job or the hope job. But then there gets a point where maybe that's working. And this is how most entrepreneurial enterprises begin. And then people leave the main job and they go to the Hope job, but maybe they're still not making enough money. I'll give you an example, right? I talked to a guy who was a first-generation Korean immigrant.

34:08He grew up in Queens, sharing a bedroom and a bathroom with his three sisters. He did exactly as we were just hearing with your producer. His Asian-American parents said, you know, you should become a doctor or a lawyer or something predictable. He became a lawyer, but on the side, he starts helping his friends redecorate, what? Their bedrooms and bathrooms, because that was his pain point as a kid until he gets to the point where he makes the jump and he opens his own interior design place, but he's not yet ready. So he takes some legal clients on the side. By the way, he was working for Goldman Sachs as a lawyer before he makes his jump.

34:49So there is a kind of fluidity when you have a path, when you don't have a job, there's just much more non-linearity in the system. And that's what gives people, you know, both the opportunity to do more of what they want, but it ends up sort of putting pressure on people at the same time because people get sort of writer's block writing the story of their work life in this case. But the truth is ultimately the opportunities are far greater because the stigma from making these kinds of changes, even the stigma of failing, is much smaller than it's ever been. Yeah, I think that's true. I think you could, for instance, leave your job at an investment bank to do stand-up comedy.

35:30And I've known people who do this and no one's gonna crucify you if you don't succeed at stand-up comedy. Like you're allowed to do it and then not do it. Yeah, I collected the story of a guy named Brian Wecht. Brian Wecht was a tenured nuclear physicist in London. actually. He grew up in Pennsylvania. I got his PhD in California and he moved to London. And he's got this weird, quirky side job slash hope job as one of a YouTube comedy duo called Ninja Sex Party. And he's the one who doesn't speak. It's kind of like Penn and Teller, like one speaks and one doesn't. And he's the one who never speaks.

36:17Okay. And out of nowhere, this thing takes off and he is tortured. Like, should he go chase this crazy dream of being a YouTube comedy musician? Or should he stay in his tenured physics professorship? And he calls his PhD advisor who says to him, you can't quit this job. You're the only one of my students who ever got a job in his intended profession. But he says to me, and I love this story, It's both in my last book, Life is in the Transitions and referenced in The Search. He said, the pain of staying was greater than the pain of leaving. So he leaves and boom, they're playing huge venues in Las Vegas and across the world.

37:02And I had these millennials on my team. I was born in the last year of the baby boom in 1964, but I have these millennials and Gen Sears, like this is their favorite story because no one I know has ever heard of Ninja Sex Party, but they're like rabid fans of them. And they're like, oh my God, I get to learn about Brian Wecht. He just released a soft jazz album. Check it out. You know, that's an interesting thing too, is that there's all these, and you talk about this in the book, this definition of success has changed. It's rare now for someone to be famous to everyone. The world's now divided up into - That's interesting.

37:43Thousands and thousands of subcultures. So for instance, this guy is famous for doing ninja sex parties. Maybe it's the most popular YouTube show for a certain subculture. And I've never heard of him, but other people love it. And it's related to Kevin Kelly's concept of, you know, you can make a living if you have a thousand true fans. Like fans who love everything you do. Which means you probably have 10 ,000 to 100 ,000, you know, pretty good fans. I mean, Kevin Kelly, by the way, I just did an event with Kevin Kelly at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Well, you know, he's a, by the way, hope job of all hope jobs.

38:18While he's like, you know, telling the stories of Silicon Valley, he's traveling all over the world with this camera, taking pictures of, you know, spiritual moments around the world. It's an astonishing hope job. And he publishes these things. I mean, he's a great example of someone who was onto this idea very early. You know, here's what I would say about that, James. And this, again, reminds me of your own life, at least the part of it that's public. that we all know. Every story that I heard in one, and I've heard 400 of them, in one way or another has a moment with a choice that seems ridiculous or at a minimum upsets somebody.

39:02I mean, I tell this story that I crazy love of a woman named Maroi Park. Again, first generation Korean American. and she's born in the upper Northwest. Her 16th birthday present from her father is a chemistry textbook. I'm like, that'll tell you what he wanted her to do. And she's like, I wanted public service. And she goes to DC and she says, I went with the brand name and she joins the CIA. And she is assigned to the Soviet desk, like the most prestigious. I know you know the story because it's in the opening chapter. That's how much I love it. And she says, I think I can help the agency in a better way.

39:38So she leaves the Soviet desk to do what? To run payroll, like the least sexy job in the United States government. Okay, I had a question about this story. Like, it wasn't clear to me why she chose payroll. Because she said, I am better able to contribute. I'm an organized person. I think I can help everybody else be better. She's one of these people that is just, like, I'm like a logistic. one of my daughters this way, like just crazy conscientious and organized, and I can see the problems. And there are people who can analyze whatever submarine tracks better than I can. I can contribute more by helping the organization.

40:20So she runs payroll, then she runs human resources. And as you know from the story, she ends up running the CIA. And in this weird moment, when there was a turnover, actually, when Donald Trump first arrived, she is the director of the CIA for a very short window of time, the first Asian American woman to do it. And her friends thought she was crazy. And she's like, this is who I am. Every story has a choice that is the unright choice. And the key is that the unright choice is not necessarily wrong. And the opportunity of all these crazy stories, the crazy way I've lived my life, you know, going to college and going to Japan.

40:57I spent a year as a circus clown. I spent 15 years back and forth to the Middle East writing books. You spent a year as a circus clown? I spent a year as a circus clown. And the Clyde, can't you see like, you can see, our listeners can't, you can see me juggling on a camel, which is behind me, which is a combination of my circus life and the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus and my 15 years, you know, doing, uh, walking the Bible and a series of books about, you know, can we get along and, you know, sort of the, the clash of civilizations in the early part of this century. And now I'm this life story and collecting and analyzing stories.

41:30Like Like every story has a twist to it that seems like the wrong story and disappoints somebody. You know where this came up in these conversations? There's a part of my book, I mean, by the way, you're an incredibly careful reader and recaller. And I hope your listeners appreciate that. Certainly people like me appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. But there's a moment that goes by really quickly that you would have no reason to remember, which is when I ask people, what's the best advice they got? You know, did they get advice that was helpful in a transition? And if so, what was it and who gave it to you?

42:03And it's the who gave it to you that was really interesting. Because the number one answer was colleagues, which kind of surprised me because you think if you were thinking about leaving a company, you wouldn't tell your colleagues. And the bottom, the last answer was family. And I was surprised by it, but I think the answer is something like this, like the family are stakeholders in some way. Like if it's a parent, it may upset their vision. If it's a partner, like maybe the money will be less because, you know, half of people got less money after making a change that made them happier. So the people around us aren't necessarily the best people to help us because they have a stake.

42:44They want us to fulfill some dream of theirs if they're our parent or they want us to be stable rather than, you know, unstable if we're our partners and we're trying to, you know, raise a family together. but actually it's other people that give us better advice. I believe that because I kind of think your colleagues, you're not really talking to them about how great the job is. You're usually talking to them about how much you hate the job. That's good. That's really good. That's really good. Oh, this boss sucks or watch out for this guy stealing credit or whatever. You usually talk to them about problems.

43:19By the way, there's a moment in my book, there's Chris Donovan in that success chapter we were talking about earlier. We never really dug into that. But he's 29 years as a telephone repairman and he leaves to become a woman's shoe designer. That story is just crazy, crazy wonderful. He tells me that when he goes to his colleagues, they're like, oh man, I always dreamed of that. I don't think that they dreamed of becoming a woman's shoe designer, but they're like, we also dreamed of like, you know, walking out the door. So you're dead on. That's exactly the proper read.

44:06You know, there's a danger a little bit. Like, I feel like I've dreamed too much about walking out the door at every stage of my life. Well, okay, well, dig into that. Why? So why would that be? So what is it that you think is bad about it? I feel I've become a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. so I become really really good at lots of things but never like the best in the world at one thing so I think okay so the first question is exactly what is the what is the thing that you're unhappy with okay so the answer is um uh you're unhappy without without being the best at anything so let me ask you then the question I asked you earlier right which is I said people should best themselves.

44:50I ask you, who was your role model? Other than family, who was your role model as a kid? You know, it was funny when I was reading the book and you had this chapter, I didn't really have a role model as a kid. I mean, I read lots of biographies. I would say the two closest categories of role models was I admired writers. So I really loved reading and I admired the writers who wrote the books I loved. And I admired billionaires. Like I read tons of biographies of like Howard Hughes and Rockefeller and whatever. But I don't know if I, I never really thought of them as role models. Maybe later on, I thought of writers as role models.

45:30So what did you admire about the writers and the billionaires? Freedom. So, well, like in college, you would see the professors who were writers, they were sort of outside of the system a little bit. They weren't competing for tenure. Their main thing was the fact that they were, they had a talent, they had a skill that they could take anywhere. They could write a book and they had fans of those books. And so they had a readership with or without their college professorship. So I saw that they lived a different life than the other professionals on campus that I was close to. Okay. So here's my response to this.

46:07Let me first of all say, because I didn't say this at the outset, you would have no reason to remember this, but you and I have met once to my knowledge. backstage at the world's largest family reunion where we were both speaking that day. And I remember this green room that we were in. And what I remember about you at that time, that's going, I mean, it was a 10 year, it probably wasn't 10 years ago, was that you were in the middle, as I recall, of one of these moments of throw caution to the wind and make a big change, okay? I think it was almost like a downsizing thing or put all my belongings in a box.

46:45I could have romanticized this, but this is a memory that I have of you. So if I were trying to help you figure out what you wanted to do, what I would be doing in this conversation was repeating back to you the answers that you have given or dropped in. So what did you just say you admired about those people? One of my philosophies of life is listen to the first thing people say. The first thing you said was freedom. Yeah. Is that they were not bound by structure. They were not bound by preexisting narratives. It wasn't necessarily about being, the tenure was not the security. The tenure was the freedom to think what you want to think.

47:24And you said three or four minutes ago that we live in a world that is so bifurcated in terms of the ecosystem of information that no one is known by anybody anymore. Okay? And so the question that we're trying to get at here is what is it that brings you meaning? And there is a story, even though I have done, I'm the guest here and I've done most of the talking here. There is a story that you have been dropping in repeatedly about reading a book and changing your mind and how one thought triggers another thought and that leads you to do something else. There's something in the internet space, which I think belongs in the workspace.

48:04If you were doing the same thing today, you're doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. There is a moment of change that we're in. And that is the moment that you embraced early and that you continue to embrace. And that idea, I would venture to say, is more meaningful to you, frankly, and to most of us, than being the best single person at what you do. Nothing that you have said in this entire conversation is about one person, one source of excellence. You didn't admire Michael Jordan, who was the greatest person, okay? You didn't admire people who were the only person at the top. You admired people that did their own thing.

48:45And there was a moment in this book that I learned a lot. And I called a guy named Mark Savickas. And he's the sort of the dean of contemporary career construction is what this space is broadly called, even though it's got that awful word career in it again. And he said to me, when I meet somebody, I usually know within five minutes what they should be doing. But it's not my job to tell them. It's my job to help them discover it. So I would say the answer is right before you. Freedom, flexibility, novelty, chase something new, start a podcast on the side and let it come to something. That actually is more meaningful to you than being the best at anything, but somehow you were haunted by the ghost of being the best at something.

49:30Because somewhere along the line, you absorbed that, even though it doesn't characterize who you are. It is interesting how it all relates to stories. And I can see how, you know, just so people know, the way you constructed this book is all through storytelling. You tell hundreds of stories. It feels like hundreds of stories of all these different people who made these really amazing job situations. And A, it's great to tell that through storytelling because it really drives the point home in a very real way. But also, it kind of shows that all of these things are possible because you could just say, look, here's this person who did this amazing thing, went from being a telephone repairman to one of the leading shoe designers.

50:12Like, so it shows, it gives permission. It shows that it's possible. And the thing is, the idea that our life is a story, right? This was the topic of my last book, Life is in the Transitions. That is not kind of a new idea at this point. It's been around for several decades. And yet, we haven't really transferred that to work. The idea that you have a work story with pivots and turns and conflict and resolution, that is not how we talk about work. And that is, I think, a missing opportunity that we have. It makes me think of Tim Pierpont, who grew up in an adoptive family in Connecticut. He always wanted to work with his hands.

50:50And his parents said, no, you've got to do something conventional. He graduates from college and he opens a painting company in Greenwich, Connecticut. And it was like, sorry, that's a blue-collar job, and this is not a blue-collar town. And you got to do it. So he goes to work, and under this pressure from his parents, he goes to work in corporate real estate in California. And he stays for the next 22 years until the guy sitting next to him, boss says, you don't look very good. Why don't you go home? And a year later, he dies of cancer. And Tim Pierpott says, I don't want this to happen to me.

51:22And so he does one of these meaning audits, as I call it. And he goes to a Starbucks and he writes down, like, what are the five things that I could be doing right now that would make me happier? He writes them down in a Starbucks intentionally without even reading my book in which he is a character. And it's working with my hands, you know, being outside, helping people. And he says, if I were running a painting company, I would be doing all that right now. So he leaves his white collar job. He opens Pierpont Painting in Marin County and he's finally doing what he, and by the way, he's got a whole bunch of new friends.

51:55He says, mine is the only, everyone's got Teslas in my neighborhood and I'm the only one with a van with my, you know, with the company brand on the side of it. Literally like this culture clash. And around this time, reconnects with his birth mother and it turns out that she was an artist. And he said, my entire life suddenly made sense to me. We have this story inside of us that is there waiting. But for whatever reason, expectation, pressure on ourselves, you know, a cultural narrative or script that we're adopted to, pressure from our parents, whatever it is, we have spent most of our lives not telling the story that we are trying to tell.

52:38And to go back to the first thing we talked about, in a world where there's no career, in a world where there's no path, in a world where there's no job, you have greater freedom today and less stigma that will prevent you from doing what you've wanted to do along, which is tell the story of who you want to be. It might be what you wanted to do when you were 12, and that will give you some guidance, but it also may be what you want to do at 32 or 52 or 68. You know what's interesting too is also the rise in, this is an economic thing, but the rise in productivity created by things like the internet and now AI allows you to quickly ramp up in new careers, which didn't really exist before.

53:20Like in the 1950s, if you were an aerospace engineer, it probably wasn't as easy as now to switch careers, switch occupations, and so on. Yeah, for no other reason than self-education is much easier, right? If you want to start a podcast, you can watch seven YouTubes on how to do it, and you could be up and running in 24 hours. That would have required going to the library and doing a bunch of stuff. So yes, the - You have to get any expensive equipment. You'd have to have a radio studio. Yes, exactly. So a lot of these things, and that's why most, that's why if this is appealing to you and yet you're thinking, now is not the right time.

53:59I've got to support my family, right? Or I'm paying, as I said, paying off college debt or sending two kids to college. Start a hope job, right? Start a side job. Because what's not negotiable, and we haven't really, frankly, talked about this anywhere near enough in this conversation, so I'll jump in. The big lesson from all these hundreds of stories and all the coding I did and whatever is fewer people are searching merely for work, more people are searching for work with meaning. It's the meaning that's non-negotiable. And how you make meaning is different from how I make meaning, how that person and she and he and anybody else listening to us makes meaning.

54:39The challenge is to figure out what makes you meaning. But if you have to do your main job and it doesn't give you meaning, you don't have to be miserable all the time or anymore. You can start a hope job or a side job or do other things that give you meaning. You can arbitrage the meaning between and among the different things and know if right now the meaning is the side job, maybe the next time you go through one of these workquakes, the meaning can become the main job. Yeah. So what do you think, like, if you were to predict, you're slightly older than me, you're a few years older, if you were to predict your next workquake, because now, you know, average lifespans, people are living into their 80s.

55:16So, you know, on average, you probably have another 30 years to go. So what do you think your next workquake will be?

55:30Well, I've sold my first book 35 years ago. Wow. And I've never held a job since. anybody who is anywhere near the media business is in a workquake. I mean, like the business models are in the process of collapsing all around us, right? As we tape this conversation, there's an actor strike, there's a writer strike, there's a cable standoff between a content provider and a content distributor, newspapers are in flux, magazines are in flux, books are in flux, podcasts are in flux, like the entire information, like the good news is we've gone from a world where a small number of people have a microphone until we live in what I call a multi-microphone world.

56:12So anybody can tell a story, but the business of storytelling leaves us all in an actual real-time work week. So like everybody else, and by the way, as I said, I just became an empty nester last week. I lost a parent 18 months ago. I'm in a life transition. I really would like to have somebody around my life who can help me navigate a life transition. well do you miss your kids um you know yeah more than missing my kids and i do miss my kids but more than missing my kids um and this is what surprised me about it becoming because i went we went from because we have twins so we went from a full house to an empty house and empty nest and in an afternoon um i miss that time you know they said the night before like we don't want our childhood to be over and i missed that being a dad was incredibly important to me um i'll still be a dad.

57:04They'll still be my kid. But I think I just missed that time. That's what feels like, oh, wow, that 20 years when this was sort of the center of my life, we're pivoting to something else. Yeah, it's not every day now. Now you can literally count the number of Thanksgivings and Christmases you'll spend with them, right? So let's say you're going to live another 30 years. that might mean, let's say they get married, so half the time they're in one family, half the time they're in the other. So that might mean 15 more Thanksgivings, you'll see your kids. Not to depress you further, but. My wife has been quoting the statistic, which as a reporter, I'm like, we got to fact check that before we say it out loud.

57:49But I don't want to fact check it, which is like by the time you're 18, like your kids have spent something like 90 % of the time they're going to spend with you. But we also know people are bouncing back and we also know, yeah, so that's why this. I would say I miss the phase change, right? I miss the fact that that was a period of life that I enjoyed, that I felt I had some aptitude at and took meaning from, and that's not coming back. We'll figure out what comes next there. And I think, look, this is what my work has been like, James, for whatever, six, seven years now, which is we're going through change more frequently.

58:23We're going through life quakes. We're going through work quakes at a much faster pace. We spend half of our life in transition, and we have to stop looking at transitions as periods of misery and unpleasantness and despair where we have to grit and grind and resilience our way through. Because they are challenging, but they're also periods of growth and renewal, and it's how to flip that script. You're going to spend half your life in transition if you just close your eyes and try to get through it and hold your breath like passing a cemetery when we were kids. The young people wouldn't even know that reference.

58:59You're going to miss half your life. We have to embrace the transition as a time to rethink and reimagine who we are and revisit and revise the story that we tell about ourselves. You know, you ask a really interesting question that I never really thought about before. They're sort of alliterate of your questions like when is your when, what is your what, how is your how. But there was one question that I never thought of before, which is where is your where? And I think because most of my life I spend or all of my adult life I spent in New York City until just very recently. And so it was never a question that my where was in New York City.

59:37Because New York City is one of those cities where you feel you're hypnotized into at least believing that there's only one where. It's New York City. Where did you grow up? I grew up right outside of New York City. So and then I went away for college. and then after college and grad school, I returned to New York City forever until just a couple of years ago. But that is a very important question, which I never really asked myself and I wish I had earlier. Like maybe I would have said, oh, my where might be London for a while or LA or Oklahoma City or whatever. And there's, before I comment on this other question, so what places were you most drawn to as a, what environments were you most drawn to as a child?

1:00:18Only New York City. No, no, I'm talking about spaces. Was it the library? Was it the ball field? Was it the honky-tonk? Was it the ballet stage? Yeah, it was the... Was it the garage where you were tinkering with your bass guitar? It was the library and the mall. The library and the mall? Okay, that is the thing you're most embarrassed to have ever admitted in 1400 podcasts. Well, the mall had both stores. The record store at the mall. Like that's a cool place at the mall. For me, it was the bookstores and the arcade. Okay, fine. Okay, that's fair enough. The arcade makes a lot of sense for you.

1:00:58Okay, so I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, right? Five generations of Jews in the South. Like where dominated my life? Like when you grew up in the South, like where is important because it's like, it's not a place that's cool to be from, right? Or it's, you know, in Savannah in particular, 80 % of the buildings that were standing in 1800 are still standing today. It was the birthplace in a lot of ways of their modern historic preservation movement. So I grew up surrounded by where and in a world where narrative and identity was grounded in where. And I grew up Jewish, which is also a big where story because the story of the Hebrew Bible and the story of Jews is deeply connected to where you could be in the ghetto, where you could not be, right?

1:01:41Freedom, the lack of freedom. So I'm a where person. And I think that when I set out to do this, I felt like where was the underappreciated stepchild, the lesser angel, if you will, of work stories. And in fact, I finished the first half of this project with transitions, you know, back before the pandemic. The biggest single thing that the pandemic changed was where. So where, in a lot of ways, is the one, if you were doing it in that statistical trick you play of like the fastest growing, I would say where is the fastest growing because it gets to work from anywhere and how many days a week you want to be in the office if you want to be in an office at all.

1:02:22It gets to commute, okay? Do you want to commute? Why should I waste an hour and a half every morning and an hour and a half every afternoon when I could be with my family or exercising or gardening or volunteering or whatever? And then the other question is then the extreme work from anywhere, which is why is San Francisco hollowed out? because those people have moved to Puerto Rico to chase crypto or whatever it might be. So where is the thing that feels the most fluid now? And therefore, I think you're not alone in now asking the question of where do I want to be and thinking that's not what people would have asked 20 years ago.

1:03:03Yeah, without the pandemic, I never would have asked where. And I would still be in New York City today, which there's nothing wrong with that either. But I mean, I moved from New York City to Florida, Key Biscayne, Florida, which I never thought I would do. And then to bring things full circle, I am now in Georgia. You're old, Bob. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh my gosh, where are you in Georgia? I'm north of Atlanta, like an hour north of Atlanta. Okay, so I think I will see your, because of the pandemic, absolutely. But then I will echo what you said to me a few minutes ago, which is it's the combination of all of these things.

1:03:41It's the pandemic coupled with the career fluidity and the freedom to quit and do it from anywhere, right? Plus the technology, which allows you to be in Alpharetta or Key Biscayne or Newark or Puerto Rico and be able to engage with the world. And so it's the combination of all those things, which is interesting because it's both the, because all those in some ways are placeless, right? The internet means, the internet is a place, but it allows the rest of us to be placeless. But it does put, I think, exactly what you said, which is more opportunity. Be short on, I don't know, should you be short on who?

1:04:23Yeah, be short on who and be long on where in the six questions of your work story. You know, it reminds me of, you know, in standup comedy, I heard a comedian being rejected for a spot once and he was asked these questions. You need to know who are you, why are you, and why now? And those are similar to your questions. I mean, there's not the where are you or things like that. Well, just to do a where and why question, a where and who question, I mean, I tell the story of Kelly Lively. You may remember from my book. She grows up in Iowa and her family moves to Idaho. And she said she and her sister like cried on the back of a car the entire way because they're like, you know, they won't have indoor plumbing.

1:05:08I mean, I come from Georgia. I heard this joke in college, right? But there's no, and she goes and she gets a job. She doesn't go to college. And she goes and she gets a job working as what we, you know, what at the time was called a secretary at the Idaho National Labs. And she slowly rises and rises and rises. And, but she gets stuck in her 30s. She's married and with kids at this point. And she decides to go back to college. She leaves her husband and she, you know, ultimately takes this position as the first woman to lead this huge project involving this nuclear reactor that they're going to take into space.

1:05:44And she's in charge of driving it from Idaho to Cape Canaveral in Florida, not that far south from where you are right now. And they're like, you can't have a woman do this. And of course, she does it successfully. But after all of these years, these huge number of work weeks going back to college in her 30s, leaving her husband, ending up as a powerful woman who starts as a secretary at the Idaho National Labs. What does she tell me when I talk to her? She's going to move to the West Coast, live on a houseboat, and become a stand-up comedian. So this where story that she thought was awful in going to Idaho turns out to be, you know, central to her life.

1:06:22And at the end of it, she wants to go wearless again and live on a boat and spend her evenings in comedy clubs. And she says, I'm older than all the other comedians. Like I'm like old enough to be their mother and they want to tell dick jokes and they're doing it standing in front of me. And everyone's awkward, but it's like a great way to make comedy. No, it's interesting that a similar experience happened to me, which for about six years, I was doing stand-up comedy almost every night. And starting around right after we met at the A.J. Jacobs' largest family reunion, it was around then that I started doing it.

1:07:01It was weird being 20 to 30 years older, or not 30 years, but like 20 to 25 years older than just about everybody else who was doing it. Well, next time you go to my hometown in Savannah, the rabbi of my childhood synagogue, like you, has a side job and probably a bit of a hope job as a stand-up comedian. The two of you are closer in age, so keep at it. I've never been to Savannah, but people tell me it's nice and that there's nice little islands near there that have nice, interesting homes. One of them is called Tybee Island. My family, I grew up there in the summers and one of my twin daughters is named Eden for the Garden of Eden and one of them is named Tybee for Tybee Island, Georgia.

1:07:45Wow. So where became really important to you. Oh, yeah. In fact, we named both of our kids after places because both my wife and I are travelers and it's kind of one of the things that was sort of central to our relationship. It's really interesting. You've lived life. You've been a storyteller. You've told stories of all these people who've had these transitions and workquakes and changed career. But it was really not just to tell their stories, but to show that this is happening, that this is a valid way to live, which 15 to 20 years ago, this wasn't necessarily considered a valid way to live.

1:08:21Like there was still the, you must have a long-term career script that people lived by. And that's changed. I think that changed basically with the Gen Xers and continued from there. You know, so it's a fascinating book. I really love it. I highly recommend it. The Search by Bruce Feiler. What's the next book? Obviously, you're on a book tour for this. What are you going to do next? Well, first of all, I appreciate what you're saying. And I want to just echo, I think you're right. I do think maybe it's the Xers. To me, it's the millennials. But yes, they've saved work. They've saved work from the over-scripted should expectations of earlier generations.

1:09:01And yet again, the biggest changes in this case are coming from the young. And what's happening is it's actually now boomeranging back to their parents who are saying, I want some of what my kids are having. and I too want to go after. I think of my, the answer to your question is, I think of myself as in the transition space right now. And this is, I fell into this space because I had a kind of linear life early in my 20s and 30s where I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. Then I had some success and I got married and had children. And then in my 40s, my life blew up.

1:09:35First, I got the cancer that I alluded to earlier as a 43-year-old new dad. I had, you know, then I had some financial troubles in the last recession. And then my dad, who had Parkinson's in Savannah, got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And that back-to-back-to-back set of nonlinear experiences is what sent me down. And I was a storyteller, as you say, but I didn't want to and I was ashamed to tell my life story. And that's what sent me down this path of collecting and analyzing stories. And what I am now focused on and the topic, as you say, of my next book is I've been focused on how individuals can navigate transitions, both in Life is in the Transitions, my last book, and there's a TED Talk and a TED course that I run on how to master life transitions.

1:10:22And now the search, which is how to navigate work transitions. I've been focused on individuals and how we do them. And what I'm interested in now is how groups navigate transitions and how individuals and groups come together at certain moments in our lives and help us go through various kind of moments of passage. And I'm just beginning a project trying to think and kind of rethink and reimagine how we can do those group transitions. Because as you say, we're going through many, many more than we've ever done in human history. And, you know, it's very important what you said earlier, like the fact that we have multiple things going on at once, because you could like I feel like I'm in a transition moment right now, but it doesn't mean I'm going to stop this podcast, for instance.

1:11:07I have no intention of doing that, but there's other things that are stopping and other things that are starting. And like I'm kind of figuring that out. And so it's very exciting reading your book, even though many things I don't plan on changing. I think it's important to ask these questions all the time and see where the compass might even be pointing you a little bit, because a hope interest could turn into a hope passion, could turn into a hope job. So, you know, you just have to sort of follow multiple compasses at any one moment in your life. And the hardest single part of it, I think, James, is the giving of permission, the giving yourself permission to do something that for whatever reason you have resisted, you have feared, you didn't want to disappoint somebody, you're afraid to fail, you know, the, whatever it might be, giving yourself permission.

1:11:57I mentioned earlier, and we can end with this, I mentioned earlier that I asked people about the best advice they got, right? And we talked about who that advice came from, right? Colleagues, and I love your analysis, more than family members. But what was the best advice people said they got? Three quarters of people said, listen to yourself. Keep doing. Do the thing that you're secretly, your inner voice is saying. We know the right answer. And the question is, will we tune out all the expectations, the outer noises, the shoulds, the people around us, and listen, people don't want to kick in the butt or even, you know, a slap in the face.

1:12:34They want a pat on the back. You know that inside yourself, there's a story waiting to be told, the first and most important step is to give yourself permission to tell that story. You know, and I want to add to that, I know that was a good last moment. I could have stopped there, but I wanted to add one thing to that, which is there's an important skill I think people should at least become acquainted with, which is the skill of storytelling. Because then you can understand what is, A, what is a possible story for yourself where you have conflict and you have adversaries and you have allies and rising problems, but then solutions and so on.

1:13:23And I think that also gives permission that, hey, not everything is, oh, I've got to be number one the day after I decide to start something. Everything's meant to have some hardship and you push through it and that's how you love something more is by participating in the story of it. Also, in order to switch sometimes occupations, you need to be able to tell the story of that occupation. Let's say I'm interested in basketball, but I'm not going to be a basketball player. I'm five foot nine, you know, I'll say a Jewish guy. I'm not going to be, and I'm 55 years old. I'm not going to be on the New York Knicks.

1:14:07Well, maybe the Knicks you could be on. Fair enough, fair enough. But it could be the case that I could write books about basketball. You're only two feet shorter than Wemba Yama. That's true. That two feet, I could jump that high. So, but if I had the ability to tell a story, I could write a book about basketball. I could be a radio announcer about basketball. I could do a podcast about basketball. I could, you know, make a fantasy sports league about basketball because I could communicate some other aspect of my interest in basketball other than just playing. And I think the art of storytelling helps you realize those possibilities.

1:14:46The Italians, amen. The Italians have a great expression that I love called lupus and fabula. the fabula is the fable of our life. It's when it's fabulous. It's when everything is going right. The lupus is the wolf and the wolf shows up, right? And lupus and fabula means speak of the devil. Like just when everything is going well, along comes the wolf. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that people want to banish the wolf. Get the wolf, the ogre, the downsizing, the tornado, the pandemic, the diagnosis, the disease. Get the wolf out of my life. But you cannot banish the wolf because you banish the hero.

1:15:22The role of the hero is to get over, around, or through the wolf. That's what makes it a story. And when you get through the woods, when you get over the bridge, when you get around the bend, when you defeat the wolf, that's what makes it a fairy tale. And there's a reason that we tell our kids fairy tales. You know, night after night, year after year, generation after generation, millennium after millennium, because it's the fairy tales that turns our nightmares into dreams. Great, that's powerful stuff. And Bruce Feiler, author of The Search, what a pleasure having you on. Your book really puts a word so many things I've been thinking over the years and it's really described so much of what's gone on even in my own life.

1:16:06So I really appreciate it. And thank you once again, coming on the podcast and come on again. Look forward to your next time on. Let's keep the conversation going. You mean a lot to a lot of people and I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks, Bruce.