How To Start (Even When You Don't Know Where You're Going)

26:20And so I just started asking questions like, well, what is the history of race here? And what has been done so far. I took courses on race. I put my foot in my mouth over and over and over again. I would say things and there was no social media. So fortunately, you could just kind of make mistakes. And I learned about a process through my mother actually called Sustained Dialogue. And I emailed the guy. His name was Hal Saunders. And I was very lucky that he helped write the Camp David Accords. He had retired. He was a senior diplomat. He was very interested in young people. And he said, I will come and train you and your peers in this process called sustained dialogue.

26:58And we launched this process, the student club, September 10th, 2001. And 9-11 happened the next day. And part of what happened was we launched, meaning we wrote a letter to the community saying this thing's happening. And all of a sudden, there was a deep and necessary demand for dialogue. And we didn't know what we were doing, but we had a practice, we had a need, we had trainers. And over the next seven years, I learned how to facilitate a dialogue group with people not like me. I learned how to help people have conversations safely that usually only happen behind closed doors. And so I started with this question that was like, why is everyone asking me, what are you?

27:46Wow.

27:55I was fired from my job as a columnist at the Columbia Daily Spectator. But it made me hate journalism. It made me say journalism is this messy, chaotic, non-rigorous, non-trustworthy thing I want no part of. And I thought, I admire what lawyers do. I did an internship at DOJ. I was a Nazi hunting intern. What does that mean? So DOJ used to have an office that rooted out former Nazis that had lied on their immigration papers to get into the U.S. I didn't lie about that.

28:49and DOJ found these people and sometimes denaturalized them and sometimes deported them but anyway I went to law school and then in my first semester of law school one night at three o 'clock in the morning I had an epiphany that was half horrifying half thrilling which is that I really really really really really did want to be a journalist and I had no evidence that I could succeed in fact as you now know I had evidence to the contrary and then you know I scrambled and thanks to generous friends thanks to Frank for to whom this book is dedicated, I was able to get my first job in journalism, and within a week, I said I'm home.

29:42I want to get into the text to how to start, and I think Jodi has two really core ideas in this book, which I think deeply resonates with both of us, which is focus on a craft and focus on a need, And I want to actually just read you a paragraph. Most successful, fulfilled people are practicing a combination of expertise and skill, the special thing they know how to do that other people do not. This is craft. Craft guides the hand of the surgeon restoring an accident victim's body. It's how a writer, composer, or director holds an audience's attention for hours at a time. It's why restaurant meals cooked by experts taste so good, and also why the best written home recipes turn out beautifully in amateur hands.

30:36Craft is why an AI summary, even an accurate one, feels blank, because it's missing an author's voice and intelligence. Now listen to this paragraph. It's one of my favorites in the book. when contracts, science experiments, and brand campaigns are well-crafted, investment becomes more secure and likely to pay off. Craft protects us in the face of disaster. Firefighters and psychologists rely on strict rules and knowledge passed through generations to protect us and lead us from devastation to repair. When we hone our craft, we build up protection against being regarded as disposable or interchangeable.

31:17What is craft and how did you find yours? Craft is a special expertise or skill that you have that other people don't. You know, part of what the Columbia students were asking me was, how do I gain agency, right? How do I empower myself. And when you have a craft, it's protection against being regarded as disposable or interchangeable. Craft is something you learn over a long time, right? Like it's, in so many ways, it's not really rewarded on social media, like the kinds of slow stumbles and repetitions and experimentation and exploration that are required to really build a great craft, like they're not gonna look good on social media, right?

32:13They're not gonna look sharp on LinkedIn. The online world is telling 20-year-olds that they should become crypto billionaires. I'm arguing the opposite. I'm arguing have something that's yours. You can be fired from any job. The employment world is cruel, but your craft can never be taken away from you. Craft is also incredibly rewarding and pleasurable in a way that's really hard to see when you're 22 years old because you don't have it yet, right? And it's only when you get, there are rewards along the way, but it's really when you get to like that highest level of mastery that the feeling is completely different.

33:00Young people are being told you're not needed. That's false. It's degrading. It's wrong. And so I want you to come back to the world with a craft that's going to pull and guide you and say, this is my offering. I mean, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking we need to make one distinction because in the last years, instead of talking about craft, people have been talking about passion. What's your passion? And, you know, passion doesn't have an on-ramp. Passion is not something that you learn. Craft is a different story. It's practice. It's iteration. And that's why it takes place over time. And every time you think you know, you realize how much more there is to know, but you're less uncomfortable with the fact that you don't know.

33:54because I think that there is a pressure these days for people who begin to think that they should already know. They're just starting. You know nothing. Don't be afraid of being caught not knowing because you don't. I think as a therapist, which is really one of the professions that you can continue to learn until the day you drop dead. There's relatively little ageism in it in that sense. it was finding teachers. I've always said to my students, don't just think about which approach and which theory. Find the teacher. A good teacher will make any approach and any theoretical model fascinating.

34:38A bad teacher can destroy the most fascinating subject. So get good training. Then, together with training, it's get supervision groups. Stay with other clinicians. But this is true for journalists to come together. In the profession of psychology, it's actually a fantastic thing that people continue to meet on a weekly basis with colleagues to discuss cases, to not feel alone with the weight of so much challenges that people bring to us, but to feel that we are supported. I have had supervision till today. People are very surprised that, hey, I practice. That's another thing. The craft is something you stay connected to.

35:24It doesn't matter what else is happening to you because it's the thing you can come back to. And it's the thing that gives you authenticity. And it's the thing where nobody claps. The door closes, you sit with the patient and you do the work. And you make mistakes, you try, but it is humble. To me, it's very important, the notion of staying close to the craft, not just knowing your craft and developing it, but staying close to it. and sometimes you're good at your craft and sometimes you're not that's another well especially at the beginning like I feel like when I talk to a lot of young people now they feel like the entry there's so much pressure that they feel like the entry into the career world has to be like one of those perfect Olympic dives where there's like technical excellence and no splash and if there's a splash, you know, like you get dinged or you don't win.

36:17And that's not the way craft worked. I mean, you have described to me with real vividness when you first became a facilitator, like feeling awkward and uncomfortable, right? I mean, terrified. We would get trained and then you basically, in the ways that we did it, I had 12 students in front of me for three hours and we were supposed to talk about race. That all sounded good, you know, theoretically. and then I was sitting there and everyone's around me. My palms are sweating. My heart's beating. My hands are shaking. And it's like, how do you begin this conversation? What do I actually say? How do you create connection across difference?

36:57And so much, I mean, I think the writer David Brooks, I heard him say this at a conference years ago. He said, no question worthy of pursuit is answerable in a lifetime. And so as a facilitator, and I know Jodi is like this, Esther is like this. Esther still sees clients every week. Jerry Seinfeld still writes jokes every day. And these are people who are driven forward in part because there's a craft that is interesting and curious. I mean, one of my first jobs as a facilitator after I graduated was to work with Hal Saunders. And my job was, I was the baby facilitator in the room, and my job was to sit for, we'd go for three days at a time.

37:36There'd be a room of a table of 18 senior officials across the Arab world, Arab, European, and American leaders. It was off the record. It wasn't allowed to be recorded, but it was allowed to have a transcript. And guess who got to write the transcript? And so what that meant was for eight hours a day on the laptop, I would sit there with headphones through simultaneous translation and write as fast as I possibly could the notes of the meeting. And I did that for years and years and years. And if I missed a word, people would be livid. That is not what he said. That is not what the, there was risk and stakes and my, my hands would cramp and I, and I was so terrified that I wouldn't get it right.

38:20And I took typing in high school and I had no idea that that would have been, that was why I got the job. I knew how to type. And so, so much. And yet, and today, 25 years later, if you, it's a really weird trick, but if you want to, if we're ever in a room together and you want to like say, Priya, can you just play back the last 120 minutes of dialogue? I can literally just tell you exactly what happened. And that's one of the elements that is my, one of my edges as a facilitator is specifically around dialogue. It's dialogic facilitation. I understand communication, I understand craft, but not theoretically, but because I've listened to thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of where and when does something change in a group?

39:01And how does this one moment of vulnerability or a word choice shift everything that we think is actually possible between these people? And so whether it's a therapist or whether it's a journalist or whether it's a painter or whether it, one of the things I love about this book is you're so imaginative about all of the jobs that people can be, a chef, right? A firefighter, a policeman, if you are a person. And so much of what I think we can sometimes think about is, oh, everyone needs to be a consultant. It's like, what? Like, what does that mean? Find a craft. And then I think what you want to do is you want to pair your craft with a need.

39:39Yeah, like in the sea of bad advice and no advice and intimidation, I wanted to give young people two really solid building materials, right, that would be powerful in combination. So if the first is craft, the second is need. Craft is authority. Need is propulsion. Need is you looking around the world and saying, what is going to be needed in my lifetime in my working years, 40 or 50 years of working. What kind of goods, what kinds of services, what kinds of new things that haven't even been invented yet. And the thing about need is that I want it to be a counter to the roller coaster of like hollow conventional wisdom about what you're supposed to study.

40:34I can tell my entire life story since I was 16 years old. Like I can diagnose every era by remembering what the conventional wisdom was about the thing you had to study. Like when I was in high school, it was learn Japanese. The Japanese were going to take over the world economy. And if you didn't speak Japanese, you were like a loser. Japanese is an incredible thing to study, but it didn't turn out to be right. The Japanese stock market slumped and didn't recover for 30 years. Then it was genetics. Then it was Mandarin. Then of course it was computer science, right? And listen, these are all great things to study.

41:19But the idea that any one of them is going to be a golden ticket, I think is completely wrong. And so what I want to force you to do, what I want to ask you to do is make a more independent need assessment on your own. Because I think with your own ideas, sometimes using tragedy, sometimes using the hardest things you have faced in life, you are going to find that propulsive force. It could be altruistic. It could have to do with business, but that is part of what is going to give your career velocity.

42:03I'm thinking about romantic relationships. This is to you. and how often we find ourselves kind of waiting to be discovered, waiting to be found, to be met, for something to just land or someone to just land in our life. And sometimes a similar approach is happening around work. I want somebody who knows my potential without my even knowing it exists.

42:35and I wonder what you thought about you know how how we switch from being a passenger to a pilot from waiting to becoming the author of our own life I mean it is interesting that you chose two people here and I think neither of us have ever worked for anybody yeah that's not except ourselves. We have worked with a ton of people, though. It's different. But we haven't been part of large structures. You are actually part of a large structure. And in that sense, we have been pilots for a long time. But I think a lot of people need help to transition from waiting to acting. Well, especially now. I mean, this very unfriendly employment environment is making young people feel like supplicants.

43:33You know, there's like that anxiety of not knowing whether you're wanted, of not feeling like you have a lot of control. So I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about making yourself the pilot. but so about 20 years ago, there was a group of young writers in New York, and they were outsiders. You know, publishing, especially at that time, could be a very clubby industry. These were all women. A lot of them were freelancers. They didn't feel that connected. And so they formed a group, and they started meeting and most writers groups are about what's on the page, right? They're looking at text together.

44:21This was different. They wanted to write books and they decided that they were going to figure out publishing together. So every meeting was devoted to a different topic like how do you get an agent or what's effective book publicity? Do you really need a book trailer? what makes for a good blurb and they studied these things together and they called themselves the invisible institute and they and you know they initially considered themselves kind of nobodies you know the way this story ends the members of the group were Rebecca Skloot who wrote the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Gretchen Rubin, who wrote The Happiness Project books, Sherry Fink, who wrote Five Days at Memorial, Susan Cain, who wrote Quiet.

45:20Pamela Paul had to leave the group because she became the editor of the New York Times book review. So these women went from feeling like outsiders to banding together in a collective to sort of climb together. And so, you know, I don't want to be like overly prescriptive because different scenarios are right for different people. But, you know, I and a lot of people are tortured right now by this question of, like, if you're a young person who's applying for job after job and not getting any traction, what can you do to both improve the outcome and give yourself some agency during the process?

46:12And I think forming something like the Invisible Institute is a really good idea.

46:22There is still so much to talk about. We need to take a brief break, so stay with us.

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48:51Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Esther, you said something amazing to me the other day. we were talking in your kitchen and you said, you know, Jodi, this career thing is very parallel to what I say about relationships because your famous formulation in mating and captivity is that to thrive, romantic relationships need a balance between security and stability on the one hand and freedom and exploration on the other.

49:36You said really, you know, career relationships work the same way. So I thought we could talk for a second about how to think about risk at this time. It's a big dilemma. Everybody's aching for stability. It's a chaotic world we live in right now. And yet, you don't really get anywhere in a career without taking on some risk. So how do you think through that problem? I remember always saying, we all need security and we all need freedom. When it comes to work, I can tolerate the lack of security better than I can tolerate the lack of freedom. That's why I'm self-employed. But I think that it's not which one do I need more.

50:33It's we need both. But some of us really need the security for a host of very important reasons. that that work provides and then risk comes second and some of us can tolerate the lack of security better than they can tolerate the lack of freedom i couldn't tolerate somebody telling me all the time what to do because i had a lot of things i wanted to do so first of all i think this question applies beyond work there is a risk aversion at this moment and the need to want to experience to have predictability you know in one's life like you have when you open your phone and the app tells you how to get someplace so in that sense it's not limited to work and i think the word risk at this point is not linked enough to the word exploration serendipity spontaneity improvisation surprise curiosity all of that has to do with risk the word risk at this point is about danger, uncertainty, and therefore lack of safety.

51:39And I think if you redefine it as a major aspect of life, that it has to do with growth, that it has to do with friction, then you begin to think about doing things for which you need the craft, for which you need time, and you're not just there to deal with anxiety management. So much of work at this moment is about managing anxiety. It's actually not even about thinking about work. Work becomes a symptom of the uncertainty that is in the world. And I would add to that that one of the most important things that has happened to work is that because it is the place where most young people are going to spend 10 years before they deal with any of the other aspects of their life, since people date less, have less sex and everything else, Work becomes this hub for belonging, for identity, for fulfillment, for continuity.

52:34I mean, it's like work has become a central place for those kinds of needs beyond just the job, J-O-B, fully spelled. If you define risk as the thing that will make you fall, the thing that will make every parent feel like I invested so much. I worked so hard to be able to have you go to school, to pay for it, or to at least pay a portion of it, or all of that. And this risk is the devaluing of this entire enterprise. Rather than you're young, you have plenty of time to find a thing. And how many of you people here are thinking that you chose what you do versus a bit of choice and a lot of life?

53:24Kind of life brought things to you. And things began to develop, and that's where you ended up doing a thing. Life may be a mentor, life may be an opportunity. It's life. Except for people with vocations, artists, musicians, people who know from the beginning that that's what they're going to do, then life doesn't really... I mean, life has a lot of influence too, but you have at least a sense, I want to be X. but many of us didn't we didn't have a career that is based on I want to be wonderful okay so Priya is going to close us out tonight but I just want to say that if there's one thing you take especially for like the under 30 crowd here that's still sorting it out if there's one thing I want you to take from this evening is a feeling of encouragement and warmth and a feeling like Esther, Priya, and I have confidence in you that there are other older people in this room who do too, that there are people you can ask questions of, because I think your experience of entry into the work world has been too cold and too lonely, and I think people our age need to counteract that.

54:40applause applause applause applause applause so we began with the text, we're going to end with the text and we're going to close with Jodi's words. Here are her tips at the end of the book. Exit the library. Do not let your parents decide your career. Look to your friends instead. Observe the obvious. Drop the assumption that your college experiences will dictate what becomes of you. Consult your demons. Relax about coherence. Find by starting. Listen to your positive emotions. Find alternate doors. Make your pursuit a group exercise. you should not have to do any of this grappling alone.

55:45We wanted to pass on the experience of three women who each had a story of how they started that was very far from where they had arrived or where they are currently, which may not be the end point for that matter. the intergenerational conversation around the work isn't just between parents and children or bosses and people who work for them mentorship actually starts the moment you have one year longer experience than the person who comes after you and mentorship is not just what the other person should do, but it is also the sharing of your own experience, which is really what I thought we were doing as well, was to basically share a portion of the story of our career, to give a sense that where people arrive is often very, very far and different from where they started and where they imagined they would get to, and to introduce a little bit more flexibility in the thinking about work or what Jodie Cantor called coherence, kind of linearity, that it's not just one straight line.

57:03When you mentor, when you pass on the experience, when you share names of people, when you introduce relationships, when you introduce need with craft, resources with aspirations. All these encounters actually highlight something that is ultra dear to my own work, which is the importance of relationships. Work is rooted in relationships, and relationships travel to work.

57:39Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julian Hat. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul.

58:43We'll see you next time. Plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Stitch Fix. Shopping is hard. Let's talk about it. I don't have time to shop for clothes. I have to buy everything in three sizes to find one that fits. They know me at the post office. Workout wear is my only wear. Stitch Fix makes shopping easy. Just show your size, style, and budget, and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. No subscription required, plus free shipping and returns. Oh, wow. That was easy. Stitch Fix. Online personal styling for everyone. Take your style quiz today at stitchfix.com.