The Search, page 19
Present: Should You Stay or Should You Go?
Then turn to the present and ask, Is now the right time for my next step or should I first plot, and plan?
In 1951, the poet Langston Hughes, who had first come to prominence twenty-five years earlier, set out to create an unconventional masterwork called Montage of a Dream Deferred. Inspired by the rhythms of blues and jazz, the book-length poem explores the continuing experience of racial injustice that prevented many Americans from achieving the recognition they deserved—including him.
Today Montage is best known for a stand-alone poem called “Harlem (A Dream Deferred).” The work was inspired by a passage in Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” and in turn inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The poem begins with a question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” then asks, does it wither and fade? Does it turn sugary and sweet?
“Or does it explode?”
Three quarters of a century later, I found that question to be among the most haunting for those in a workquake. Should I act now on my dream, or should I defer?
Some years ago, I spent a morning with Professor Laura Carstensen at Stanford University. Carstensen studies how time affects our decisions. I was writing a book about happy families at that time and was interested in Carstensen’s research showing that as people get older they pare back their relationships. They cast off casual friends and focus instead on those closest to them, especially their families.
But Carstensen’s research extends to work as well. In a study called “Taking Time Seriously,” Carstensen and two former students show that “as people move through life, they become increasingly aware that time is somehow ‘running out.’ ” They have less patience for waiting; more urgency to act. “It becomes increasingly important to make the ‘right’ choice, not to waste time on gradually diminishing future payoffs.” In other words, the longer the past becomes and the shorter the future becomes, the greater the pressure becomes on the present to make the right decision.
What creates that pressure is not aging, per se; it’s the transitions that come with any age—ending a relationship, graduating from school, completing a medical treatment, leaving a job. The key to being emotionally fulfilled, Carstensen writes, is to lean into that urgency—to decide as if your clock is running out. If you do, you’re more likely to choose what makes you happy.
I spent considerable time in my conversation trying to suss out exactly how people factor timing into their biggest work decisions. In the end, I found they do three things:
They read their gut.
They read the room.
They read the clock.
Let’s review these one at a time.
The first of these time checks, reading your gut, means asking yourself a simple question. It’s the same question that Brian Wecht asked when he left his job as a tenured theoretical physics professor at Queen Mary University in London to devote himself to his YouTube comedy band, Ninja Sex Party, and that Lisa Ludovici asked when she left her senior job in internet sales at Microsoft in New York City to become a medical hypnotist: Which is greater, the fear of staying or the fear of leaving?
Half the people who said that when was a primary motivation during their biggest workquake said they wanted to act before it was too late. Alton White, who walked away after twelve years from a secure job playing Mufasa on Broadway, said, “It was time to fly higher. I was afraid of learning lines; I was afraid of being on a movie set; I was afraid of losing my house. But these were all fears I wanted to conquer.”
Tim Pierpont, who left his two-decade job in commercial real estate for his nerve-racking job running a painting startup, said he was motivated in part by seeing a colleague get sick. “He had worked in the same office from eighteen to sixty-four. One day the boss told him to go home early because he wasn’t looking well. A year later he died from cancer. I didn’t want to show up for another six years just because I had always showed up. I wanted to have more control over how I spent my life.”
The second time check, reading the room, involves understanding the larger forces at play in the world. The people who do this successfully focus less on what’s happening in their own heads and more on what’s happening in the society around them. Alicia Rodis believes that her work as an intimacy coordinator would never have taken off without the exposé of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent rise of #MeToo; Shardé Davis knows she would never have touched a nerve with her hashtag about discrimination in the ivory tower without the protests around Black Lives Matter.
Ben Conniff became interested in the boutique food business in high school while working the morning shift at Beach Donuts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. “Some kids would come in overnight and do the shaping and frying; I would come in around four in the morning and do the jelly, the frosting, and the powdered sugar.” In college Ben bartended; after graduating he wrote about food and cocktails for Playboy; at twenty-four he answered an ad on Craigslist from an investment banker who was looking for a cofounder to open an artisanal lobster roll shack. “This was the period when sustainable food was just catching on. Our timing was perfect.” Luke’s Lobster went on to open thirty-plus franchises, ship sustainable seafood around the world, and generate $80 million a year in sales.
Nathaniel Peterson, the Ohio-born Jaws fan, was trying to get his animal television series off the ground just as the cable TV business was stalling and online streaming was taking off. Nate rebranded himself as Coyote Peterson after his role model, the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, but nobody was buying. “YouTube had just opened, but no one had monetized it yet. I went to a TV conference where all these companies announced their online services. I was like, Holy cow, we’ve got to make a digital version.” Discovery Digital was interested, but instead of offering Nate and his producer the half million dollars per episode they requested, the company offered $30,000 in total for twelve episodes. “We brought in fifty-two episodes with that money. Plus, we posted everything on our YouTube channel, Brave Wilderness.” Within two years, their channel hit a million followers; eight years later it has twenty times that number. “When was critical in our story, because we launched at a time when YouTube was still in its infancy. Today, they’ve changed the algorithm and it’s insanely difficult to build brands on that platform.”
The final test, reading the clock, involves managing risk. Should you give yourself a deadline? Should you create a buffer zone that gives you a window of time to succeed or fail? Shelby Smith, the Iowa native who quit her job trading equity derivatives in Dublin to found the sustainable food startup Gym-N-Eat Crickets, set a benchmark. “If I don’t make $10,000 in my first twelve months, I’m going to walk away.” She achieved her goal. Jasminne Mendez was in her twenties, teaching theater in the Houston school system, when she came down with a chronic immune disease and had to step down from teaching. “I looked at my finances and said I have six months to try writing.” She’s since published two memoirs, three children’s books, and a volume of poetry.
Sang Kim combined several of these time tricks when he quit his job as a contracts lawyer at Goldman Sachs to open an interior design firm. “I told myself, One, you can’t be unhappier than you are now. And two, I’ll give myself three years. If I haven’t made meaningful traction by then, I’ll go back to law.” Six years later, Sang Kim Designs LLC was still thriving.
No one I spoke to better illustrates the way that whens, both good and bad, shape our lives than Judith Heumann. Judy contracted polio in Brooklyn in 1949, seven years before the vaccine became available. At eighteen months she was put in an iron lung and outfitted with leg braces; she still became a quadriplegic. Her father, an architect, used money from the GI Bill to build a ramp onto their home.
In many ways, Judy was trapped by her times. She was denied access to kindergarten because she was deemed a “fire hazard;” in elementary school she was locked out of regular classes and confined to the basement with those with mental disabilities, even though she had no such learning issues; in high school she was told to forget college.
Judy instead enrolled at Brooklyn College, where she earned a degree in speech therapy. When she applied for a teaching job in New York City, however, she faced daunting challenges. Her friends had to carry first her, then her wheelchair, to the second floor to take the qualifying exam because the building was not accessible. Judy aced the test but was denied a job “because the Board of Education did not believe I could get my students out of the building in case of a fire.” It was the same excuse she’d heard fifteen years earlier about why she couldn’t enroll in kindergarten.
But here’s where timing played to Judy’s advantage. The ACLU turned down her case, saying the city was justified, but two independent lawyers agreed to help. At twenty-two, Judy filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New York. Invoking the country’s most famous polio patient, the New York Daily News blared the headline you can be president, not teacher, with polio; the article prompted the Today show to invite Judy to share her story.
Faced with a wave of publicity, the city settled. In 1970 Judy Heumann became the first teacher in a wheelchair hired in New York State. Overnight, she became a leading figure in the disability rights movement, leading efforts to shut down traffic in Manhattan, occupy the Federal Building in San Francisco for a month, and launch the independent living movement in California. After the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990, Judy became the assistant secretary of education in the Clinton administration.
All this would not have happened, she believes, if it weren’t for a confluence of timing. “My lawsuit was decided by the nation’s first African American woman federal judge. My lawyers were trained in the civil rights movement. A lot of my fellow activists were veterans who lost limbs in the Second World War. All these factors created momentum, and I was just carried along by the moment.”
The notion of being carried along by the moment may be the best way to characterize so many answers I heard to the question of Should I stay or should I jump? If your gut says yes, the room says yes, and the clock says yes, who are you to say no?
Future: I’m at a Moment in My Life When ____________
The final step to deciding When is your when? is to put the earlier two questions together—When does your work story start? and Should you stay or should you go?—and complete this statement:
I’m at a moment in my life when ____________.
Before you do, two reminders.
First, your answer is not forever. If the peril of the nonlinear work life is that we face existential moments like these more frequently than we’d like, the advantage of the nonlinear work life is that no answer lasts forever. Odds are, you’ll face another defining moment in the not-too-distant future. When there is no path, there’s far less consequence for stepping off the path.
Second, you’ll almost surely look back on your decision fondly. I asked everyone to think back on their biggest workquake and answer this question: Do you wish you had been more wary of risk, more embracing of risk, or did you handle the risk about right? Only 9 percent said they wished they’d been more wary of risk. The rest split evenly between saying they got the balance right and wishing they’d been more embracing of risk. Psychologists have suggested a number of reasons why we remember our decisions favorably, from selective forgetting to rationalization. Whatever the reason, these tendencies are your friend. Even if you take the riskier choice and fall short, you’re still likely to be grateful that you made that choice to begin with.
Some people take the risk because the rest of their life seems stable. Wei-Tai Kwok said that he could leave his job running an ad agency for an unknown future fighting climate change precisely because he was feeling secure. “I was already very successful on the outside. My family was healthy and happy. Everything seemed perfect. Until I saw that darned movie and realized that in a broader sense everything was not perfect. I was at a moment when I realized I was in a bubble and had to change.”
Others take the risk precisely because their lives are not yet stable and thus failure seems less consequential. Deniese Davis is a second-generation Las Vegan who made promo tapes for her high school dance team and moved to Brooklyn to attend college and try to get into television. While interning at The View, she had a meeting with Barbara Walters, who told her, “As a woman, you’ll always be overlooked, so you can’t be second-guessed. You have to learn everything—how to shoot, how to edit, how to write.” Deniese took that advice. She moved to Hollywood, attended film school, and instead of trying to work herself up as an assistant, took any freelance assignment she could get.
When Issa Rae, the rising actor and writer, was looking for a producer for a new YouTube series, she offered Deniese a pay cut to take the job; Deniese didn’t hesitate. “If I hadn’t listened to Barbara Walters, if I hadn’t started at the bottom, I would never have been prepared. I was at a moment in my life when I finally understood that in order to be successful you have to be willing to go backwards as well as forward.” Deniese and Issa went on to produce more than sixty hours of award-winning television, including two series for HBO.
Still more people take the risk because they know it’s essential for their survival. Susan Venturelli, the Indiana native whom we met earlier as having a side job selling brownies and a care job tending her grandson, always dreamed of being a mom. After high school, she taught aerobics, hawked Mary Kay cosmetics, and then got a job as a security guard at a steel mill. She also married at twenty, had two children, and then divorced.
“Then my mother called one afternoon. ‘Something happened with Dad. He fell out of bed, and I can’t revive him.’ ”
Susan hopped in her car and sped toward her parents’ house. “This cop pulled up next to me at a stoplight. ‘Ma’am, you got to slow down.’ ‘Something’s wrong with my dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to save him.’ He turned on his lights and followed me. Just when I got to the house, the paramedics were bringing Dad down the stairs. I knew he was gone.”
Her father was declared dead at the hospital.
“My dad was everything to our family. He was our rock, our stability. I knew in that moment that I had to change my life. I had to assume his role; I had to take more responsibility for my mom; I had to raise my children. I wasn’t going to rely on any man. If someone in our family needed protection, I had to provide it.”
That evening Susan logged on to the Blueline website, which lists jobs in policing. With her background in security, she was easily accepted into the academy. She was hired by her hometown police department in Thorntown, Indiana, then transferred to Amtrak, where she stayed for the next fifteen years.
“No one else believed I could do it, but I was at a moment in my life when I knew I had to be strong.”
We all reach moments in our lives when time seems to stop. When the wind switches direction. When our heart skips a beat. We can succumb to these moments and remain stuck in place. Or, as Linda Greenlaw says, as Judy Heumann showed, as Susan Venturelli proved, we can tack. We can head in a different direction. We can make a difficult choice. We can course correct.
We can transform a moment when our story seems to stop into a moment when our story starts again.
Chapter 9
Where Is Your Where?
I Want to Be in a Place That ____________
Sandra Cisneros loves houses. Born in Chicago to Chicano parents, Cisneros, the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, and the winner of the American Book Award, the MacArthur fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts, grew up splitting her time between Mexico and the United States. In her writing, she tries to bridge that divide by leaving a trail of love letters to the many homes where she’s lived.
Her autobiographical collection of essays opens with a piece called “Hydra House,” about a hideaway on a Greek island where she lived in her twenties. The collection ends with “A Borrowed House,” about her first crush. “My first crush was over a book, and not just any book, but a book about a house.” The name of that book, The Little House; the name of Cisneros’s autobiography, A House of My Own.
In an introduction to her most famous work, Cisneros describes the Chicago house where she lived as a teenager and another where she returned after graduate school. There, she summons the courage to tell her unsupportive father that she wants a house of her own. A writer needs “quiet, privacy, and long stretches of solitude to think,” she declares. “The father decided too much college and too many gringo friends had ruined her.”
In the house she eventually settles in, Cisneros writes in the kitchen, “the only room with a heater.” There she begins her book, which is not a novel, she insists, but “a jar of buttons.” The book will go on to sell six million copies and be translated into twenty languages. It will be required reading in classrooms around the world. And before she writes a word of it, Cisneros already knows its title.
The House on Mango Street.
You can’t write a story without a house to set it in. Setting is everything. Yet, when I asked people to rank their top influences in their work stories, where came in last. Perhaps that slight is the legacy of a time when caring about where you worked was considered a luxury. You’re lucky to have a job. Go where they tell you! Or perhaps it’s a deeper problem with storytelling itself.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author and lifelong Mississippian Eudora Welty complained about the disrespect given to setting in a famous speech at Duke University in 1955 called “Place in Fiction.” Place is “one of the lesser angels” of storytelling, she declared; it “gazes benignly enough from off to one side,” while “character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on are doing a good deal of wing-beating.”
