The Search, page 1
ALSO BY BRUCE FEILER
Life Is in the Transitions
The First Love Story
The Secrets of Happy Families
The Council of Dads
America’s Prophet
Where God Was Born
Abraham
Walking the Bible
Dreaming Out Loud
Under the Big Top
Looking for Class
Learning to Bow
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Feiler
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Feiler, Bruce, 1964– author.
Title: The search : finding meaningful work in a post-career world / Bruce Feiler.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022049262 (print) | LCCN 2022049263 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593298916 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593298923 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Quality of work life—United States. | Work-life balance—United States. | Conduct of life—United States. | Success—United States.
Classification: LCC HD6957.U6 F44 2023 (print) | LCC HD6957.U6 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/60973—dc23/eng/20230201
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049262
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049263
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover images: (sky) vectortatu / Adobe Stock; (magnifying glass) chakisatelier / Adobe Stock
Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
Bruce Feiler is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.
pid_prh_6.0_143790368_c0_r1
For Pat Conroy
For writing the way
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—MARY OLIVER
I’m here to persuade you not to have a job. . . . That doesn’t mean try not to do anything.
It means try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things that you want to do with your time and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are.
—BRIAN ENO
Contents
INTRODUCTION: The Work Story Project
How to Write Your Own Story of Success
I
THE THREE LIES ABOUT WORK
1. Lie #1: You Have a Career
The (Short) Rise and (Rapid) Fall of the Career
2. Lie #2: You Have a Path
How Workquakes Overtook Work
3. Lie #3: You Have a Job
The Surprising Wisdom of Work360
II
THE ONE TRUTH ABOUT WORK
4. We All Need Another Hero
Who Gets to Be the Face of Success?
5. The Meaning Audit
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do
III
THE SIX QUESTIONS TO ASK IN A WORKQUAKE
6. Who Is Your Who?
I Want to Be the Kind of Person Who ______________
7. What Is Your What?
I Want to Do Work That ______________
8. When Is Your When?
I’m at a Moment in My Life When ______________
9. Where Is Your Where?
I Want to Be in a Place That ______________
10. Why Is Your Why?
My Purpose Right Now Is ______________
11. How Is Your How?
The Best Advice I Have for Myself Right Now Is ______________
CONCLUSION: The New Rules of Success
The American Dream Is Dead, Long Live the American Dreams
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FURTHER READING
SOURCES
INDEX
_143790368_
Introduction
The Work Story Project
How to Write Your Own Story of Success
Brijette Peña grew up in the middle of Middle America clinging to what she thought was the American Dream.
“I come from a working-class family in Baldwin City, Kansas. We lived on Tenth Street; my grandma lived on Ninth Street; my aunt lived on Seventh Street. Ninety percent of my family lived within one mile.”
Brijette’s mom, a veteran, raised three children; her father, an auto mechanic, worked at the local Chrysler dealer. “He never missed a day of work in forty years. And this was Kansas, where it can be one hundred and ten in the summer and negative twenty in the winter. It put a roof over our heads, but he was deeply unhappy.”
Brijette understood exactly what was expected of her. “I would be the first in my family to get a four-year degree. I would get a nine-to-five job. I would work my way up the economic ladder.” But she didn’t share those expectations.
“I wanted to be happy.”
Brijette fell in love with plants while watering mums in a greenhouse one summer. She moved to Costa Rica to study ecology, met her future husband, and followed him to Southern California. “I was so naive, I expected to find a job quickly.” Instead, she waited tables for a year and was fired “for being a terrible waitress.”
“When you grow up poor, there’s always that fear that you’ll backslide out of the American Dream.”
Brijette took some classes and volunteered at a farm that hosted schoolchildren. One day she watched a third grader pull a carrot from the ground. “He was so excited. He had no clue where carrots came from.” Brijette had an idea: I’ll open a seed company!
“It’s Southern California. There are 365 days of sun. You can breed everything from avocados to mangoes. I figured, I’ll grow vegetables and herbs—not to sell them, but to harvest their seeds and sell those. Again, I was so naive.”
Seeding is expensive. Only two dozen seed-cleaning machines existed in the country, and the cheapest was $12,000. To save up money, Brijette took a job managing a gardening company. “I brought in a lot of business, I had a team of twenty and a company vehicle, I was making $50,000 a year. With my husband’s salary from Costco, we were on top of the world.”
Then, a lifequake—actually, two.
Brijette’s brother, then mother, died in car accidents five months apart. Brijette spent so much time flying back and forth to Kansas that her boss brought in an employee to help her. When she returned, the employee started groping her. “He sexually harassed me constantly.”
Brijette told her boss, who did nothing.
“This job was our main source of income. We had just bought a small piece of land. I needed a plan.”
Brijette took her W-2 to the bank, secured a loan, and bought a white Toyota Tacoma. “The next day I walked into the office, called a meeting with my owner and entire team, and said, ‘I can’t have somebody that reports to me touch me, grab my ass, pull me into cubicles. Either you fire him, or I can’t work here anymore.’ When the owner remained silent, I handed him my keys and walked out the door.”
Here she was again, on the brink of backsliding out of the American Dream.
“I made a vow that with my unemployment and my husband’s salary, I had a year to make the seed company work.”
Two years later, San Diego Seed Company was selling three hundred varieties—from artichoke to zinnias—and shipping three hundred thousand packets a year from Brijette’s living room.
“I kept thinking of my mom. She called herself a bra burner. If she had known what was going on—and that I let it go on for so long—she would have been outraged.
“But I also kept thinking of my children. I don’t have any now, but when I do, I want to be able to tell them that they don’t have to be treated unfairly, they don’t have to do something that makes them unhappy. Each of us gets to write our own American Dream. And the bliss that awaits at the end is being able to say, I did everything I could to be fulfilled.”
The Story of Your Work
This book is designed to help you write your own story about work. It grows out of an unprecedented shift in how we think about what we do. More people are taking control of their work lives.
In recent years, for the first time in history, the number of Americans quitting their jobs reached a million people a week. Buoyed by the tightest talent market in eighty years, a million marketing directors and money managers, truck drivers and tech designers, artists and acupuncturists decided they weren’t doing what they wanted to be doing and opted to do something else. Many of these people did what their parents and grandparents would never have dreamed of doing: walk away from one job without have another job lined up.
Most of these decisions have been attributed to a supposed surge in resignati ons set off by the pandemic. But that narrative is grossly misleading. What economists call the quit rate, the number of people who quit their jobs every month, has risen every year except one for two decades. After reaching a low of a million and a half people following the recession in 2009, the number of monthly quitters rose to two million in 2012, three million in 2018, a record three and a half million in 2019, four million in 2020, and then four and a half million in 2022.
A third of the workforce now leaves their jobs every year.
Another third redesigns the jobs they’re in. They assert more influence, work more remotely, dial back hours to spend more time with family, dial up flexibility to pursue side work that brings them purpose.
Even those who lose their jobs say they don’t necessarily want to return to the grind; many would prefer more variable arrangements, even if that means sacrificing some conventional metrics of achievement.
Clearly something is happening in work that’s never happened before in work.
This book is about that something. It’s about a once-in-a-generation rethinking of the rules of success. A rebalancing of power away from employers and toward employees. A shift from a time when most of us were forced to bend to someone else’s narrative to a time when more of us assert the freedom to write our own narrative.
Fewer people search merely for work these days.
More people search for work with meaning.
We’re moving from a means-based economy to a meaning-based economy.
And this book is about learning to take advantage of this opening to get the happiness you deserve and the meaning you crave. The first step in that process: revisiting the script you inherited about work. For generations, Americans have been fed a narrow definition of success. That script was passed down by our parents, encouraged by our neighbors, reinforced by our culture. These days, more of us are turning our backs on that playbook. We’re questioning its values and challenging its assumptions. We’re flipping that script and replacing it with . . .
Well, we’re not sure, exactly.
Turns out, we’re much better at rejecting scripts than we are at writing them.
Many of us feel lost, adrift, frustrated, confused.
That leads to the second step on this journey: rediscovering your own scripture of work. A huge flaw in the myth of success we’ve been sold is that it gazed too exclusively and elevated too reflexively on only one type of hero and one measure of achievement. The only way to be successful is to always push ahead. March forward! Reach higher! Get more!
This advice is wrongheaded at best and dangerous at worst.
The most important step to being successful today is not to look forward.
It’s to look backward. Peer inward. Dig deep.
When you do, what you discover is that each of us is grappling with our own internal definition of success. We have a roiling assortment of homilies, parables, truisms, and beliefs, some imprinted on us by our families and inscribed on us by our surroundings, but more chosen by us from our role models and forged by us from our wounds. The best way to understand these stories is as a kind of scripture, a sacred treasure that each of us tries to live up to even as we try to break free from it.
This book is about learning to identify that scripture. Tapping into it at the defining moments in your life so that you don’t waste your time chasing someone else’s dream.
You chase your own dream.
That leads to the final step on this journey: taking control of your own work narrative.
The last few years have seen a renaissance of storytelling. Through the confluence of narrative psychology, which showed that our internal narratives lie at the heart of our identity, and cognitive neuroscience, which revealed that our brains are wired to process information through narrative, we’ve come to accept that stories define many aspects of our lives. But for whatever reason, our work lives have been largely left out of that conversation.
The time has come to correct that imbalance. In these pages, I explore the idea that each of us has what I call a work story, an ongoing, unspoken narrative that we’re constantly revisiting and revising in response to changes in our jobs, our families, and our lives. The freedom to rethink that story comes at a time when our work lives are more volatile than ever before. We face a never-ending barrage of interruptions—some voluntary, others involuntary; some unique to us, others shared by the entire planet; some that grow out of changes in our workplace, others that grow out of changes in our mindsets. I call these moments workquakes. And as I’ll lay out, at any given moment, eighty million Americans are going through one.
I also offer one more thing: a set of questions to ask when you’re in a workquake that maximizes the chance you get the outcome you want. As each of us goes through this process of rewriting our individual story of success, we also participate in something that’s urgently overdue: rewriting our collective story of success. This new story is more complex—and more elastic—than the one we’ve been telling. It’s more colorful—and more welcoming.
It doesn’t undermine the American Dream.
It opens the door to myriad American Dreams.
This book is about how I accidentally discovered these new variations on how to think about success. And how we can achieve the version that’s right for us.
“This Is Your Story; Own It”
Troy Taylor was born in what he calls “the smallest independent country in the Americas,” the islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis. His mother was a college professor, his father a carpenter. “I watched the man my entire life, come rain, snow, hail, or sleet, get up every morning and get the job done.” But because his mother was the primary breadwinner, when she was hired by the City University of New York when Troy was seven, the family emigrated to the Bronx.
Troy was obsessed with aviation. “I was always interested in why big airplanes could fly, but I couldn’t tie a towel around my neck and fly.” He enrolled in Penn State to study aeronautical engineering, and his first interview after graduating was at Boeing. “I walked into this giant room and saw all these desks in a line, and at the front was an office. My entire life flashed before my eyes. You start at the first desk, then move to the next desk, then the next, until one day you make it to the office. I thought, I’m looking at the next thirty years of my life. I’m not saying I’m a wildcat, but what kid at twenty-one wants their entire destiny laid out before them?”
Troy took a job at GE instead, designing satellites for NASA.
“It sounded great, and the company had a mystique. I was a rocket scientist! But the real job was learning discipline and how to break insurmountable tasks into their individual parts. That shaped how I approached my work. Even if I don’t know where I’m going, I always get better at where I am.”
And he did. After six years, Troy transferred to GE Electrical Distribution; five years later, after earning a master’s degree in systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to GE Industrial Services; four years after that he was offered the job of general manager of a failing division, GE Renewal Parts and Instrumentation.
On the one hand, this job was a dead-end move, Troy said. “There’s a whole lot more sex appeal in selling a brand-new, shiny widget than in selling spare parts.” But his mentor, Lloyd Trotter, the vice-chairman of the company, gave him a piece of advice: “Dispel the notion that if you do a good job, the company is going to take care of you; only you can take care of yourself.”
“I turned that into a motto,” Troy said. “ ‘Forget the ladder; embrace the smorgasbord.’ At every turn, I either want to create something from nothing or take something from worst to first.”
Over the next five years, Troy turned the worst division of GE into a $250 million profit center. His reward: a call from Johnson & Johnson inviting him to run a new clinical diagnostics division worldwide. “On the phone, I told the CEO, I’ve always been interested in medical equipment! But internally I thought, Can I really duplicate my success outside the fairyland?”
Once again, he dove into the smorgasbord. And in eight years at J&J, Troy amassed a team of one thousand employees on four continents and flipped an industry also-ran into a $2 billion juggernaut.
