The Search, page 26
The second new rule of success is that no one succeeds alone. No frustration with the American success narrative comes through more clearly in conversations with today’s workers than its overreliance on self-reliance. Emerson elevated self-reliance to the pinnacle of American identity; Toni Morrison attacked his sacred cow head-on. “When you kill the ancestor, you kill yourself,” she wrote. “Nice things don’t happen to the totally self-reliant.”
Success is not I; success is we.
Success is not individual; success is collective.
Beverly Jenkins, the romance novelist, said, “Success in America is achievable, but it depends on how much community you have in your life. America was built on the backs of people who look like me. Our ancestors had to be so clever and creative just for me to be able to do my job. I ain’t gotta go into the fields every day; I ain’t gotta go to the steel mills. But if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I look at the people whose shoulders I stand on and try to do the same thing for the people coming up behind me, because that’s the only way America gets stronger.”
Ken Tang, the schoolteacher and board of education member, said, “Success is not about individual achievement, because success is never something you achieve by yourself. Anyone who’s done anything in life, there’s someone who pushed them, who inspired them, who gave them confidence. The Garvey School District gave me the chance to be a teacher; the Alhambra community gave me the chance to be a school board member; the California Teachers Association gave me the chance to be part of their leadership. Every success story is a shared story.”
Joey Clift, the comedy writer, said, “I think that for any marginalized group, it’s very important to help one another. I’m the type of person who when I’m being interviewed for a job, I’ll say, ‘Hey, if you’re looking for other writers, here’s some Native names.’ I’ll actively pitch people for jobs that I’m up for. Because there’s never been a Native person on SNL; there’s never been a Native comedian on a Netflix special. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love that opportunity. But I’d be just as stoked if another, crazy-funny Native comedian got it, because once they do, it does immense good for Native representation. I didn’t have heroes growing up, and it’s super important to me that the next generation does.”
3. Success Is Not Means; Success Is Meaning
The third new rule of success harks back to the formula we started with:
WORK = NUMBERS + WORDS
For too long, success was calculated almost entirely by the first variable. The more money you made, the more successful you were.
Today, a rival interpretation has taken hold. Success is a function of words. It’s about the meaning you assign to success. And each person gets to decide that meaning for themselves.
For many, the meaning still comes largely from money, and that’s OK. Depending on your personal history, money can represent security, freedom, self-confidence, or the ability to support your family. The difference between that past and today is that money is no longer the only metric by which meaning is calculated. For an equally large number of people, meaning is found through service, creativity, self-expression, or giving back.
In the world of work today, the role of numbers has decreased; the role of words has increased.
Success is not means; success is meaning.
Ben Conniff, the cofounder of Luke’s Lobster who left to build a sustainable seafood community in Maine, said, “You wouldn’t think it from 99 percent of the businesses out there, but there’s a role in business for people like me. People who put purpose over profit. I hope to show with our success that if you run your business exclusively to maximize profits, you won’t be as successful financially or spiritually. Especially as younger generations come into more purchasing power, people will realize that there’s value in values.”
Harmit Malik, the biogeneticist and sci-fi novelist, said, “I don’t have the aspiration to start a huge company and make a ton of money. It upsets a lot of people when I say this, but I’m very happy with the life I have. I can be a mentor; I can spend time with my special-needs son; I can write fiction. I know friends who’ve made the opposite choice. They’re making three times what I am, but they have three times the responsibility—and ten times less fun. We’ve become trapped by getting on an escalator and rising far beyond where we’re comfortable. I’m perfectly happy to step off that escalator.”
Eric Vélez-Villar, the former FBI intelligence chief who left Disney to deal with his childhood trauma, said, “The traditional definition of success was all about how much money you made. Now, the definition is to achieve the things that mean the most to you. Right now, I’m focused on being a successful father and a successful son. And those things are more important to me than being a successful CEO. I feel there are a lot of people out there like me who have achieved a high level of success, but who are weighed down by personal struggles. If I could say anything to them, it would be, All those prizes mean nothing if deep down you feel shame. You’ll never feel more successful than the day you start doing the right thing.”
4. Success Is Not Status; Success Is Story
The final new rule of success may be the most consequential: Success is not fixed; it’s always moving. Success is not a destination; it’s a narration. Orson Welles famously said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends on where you stop your story.” Success is not the pot of gold; it’s the downpours and rainbows that got you there, along with the sunshine and mud puddles that follow.
Success is not status; success is a story.
Jasminne Mendez, the schoolteacher who came down with a chronic illness then became a writer, said, “My story shows that success is not perfect; it’s fluid. In fact, even when it appears perfect, something comes along and you have to start all over. I thought I had a dream life. I was a full-time teacher; I had a fiancé; we owned a town house. Then I got a rare chronic illness and boom! I had to give myself a serious sit-down. It wasn’t, Girl, what are you going to do? It was, Girl, you need a new story. I’m grateful that in this country at least we’ve normalized starting over.”
Ninah Davis, who dropped out of high school when her father got sick and went on to become an energy healer and interfaith minister, said, “Success is what you dream, not what someone tells you to dream. My story has violence, it has trauma. Nobody wants that to be their story. But we have to learn to tell those stories—and to hear them—in order for all of us to succeed. After all, we don’t just dream for ourselves; we dream for one another.”
Issa Spatrisano, the Alaska refugee coordinator, said, “I grew up in a family that believed in storytelling. But what I’ve learned from the refugees I work with is that there’s not a single way to tell a story. There are unlimited ways. The problem with the story we’ve been telling in this country is that it’s too focused on meeting certain qualifications. The American story shouldn’t be about the house I own, or the car I drive, or the money I make; it should be about the ability of all of us to tell our individual stories and the ability of the rest of us to hear those stories in a spirit of welcome and understanding.”
The Six Answers
Faith Ringgold certainly had a story to tell—all she needed was someone to goad her into telling it.
Born in New York City in 1930, Ringgold earned two degrees from City College, entered and exited a challenging marriage, and started painting vibrant, searing works infused with imagery from her own life. Frustrated that she was not being taken seriously by her icons, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, Ringgold complained to a friend, the attorney Florynce Kennedy. “They don’t even know we exist,” Ringgold said. “You ask them about artists, they go to Van Gogh or Picasso.”
Kennedy’s response: “Write about your own damned self.”
So Ringgold did. She went on to write three children’s books and a memoir, illustrate fourteen more books, and master a form of narrative quilt making that earned her a place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and every other major institution in the United States.
Speaking of that conversation decades later, Ringgold said, “At the time I thought it was mean of her to say that. . . . But, you know, she was right. I had no control over what other people thought—or did—about my career. So I began writing my story. I became a primary source about my own damned self.”
You’re now at the point when you’re ready to become a primary source about your own damned self. Fortunately, you have a rough draft in front of you. The Kipling questions we’ve been reviewing involve plenty of looking backward; now the payoff arrives in that the answers point you toward the future.
Your rough draft is the first draft of the next chapter of your work story.
In going through this transition, I’ve realized that I want to be the kind of person who ____________________. I want to do work that ______________. I’m at a moment in my life when _____________. I want to be in a place that ____________. My purpose right now is ________________. The best advice I have for myself right now is ________________.
If you want, you can also layer in some of your answers from the other questions:
The upsides about work I learned from my parents were ________. The downsides were ______________. My waymaker right now is _____________. My role models growing up were _____________. The qualities I admired in them were ____________. The best thing about my work today is _________________. The worst thing is ____________. My work story starts when ____________. My view on whether I should stay or go is ____________. The places I wanted to be when I was young were ___________. The place I want to be today is ___________. My toothache as a child was ____________. The kinds of stories I like are ____________. The best piece of work advice I ever received was ____________. The best thing I can do to find work right now is ____________.
Your answers to these questions need not be fixed. This rough draft is not locked. Your work story is not being typeset, bound in leather, and enshrined in the Library of Congress. You can change it anytime, for any reason, by any means.
Your work story is always a work in progress.
Above all, it’s a story that need not conform to anyone’s expectation and almost assuredly won’t align to any preexisting shape. It’s not meant to be every story.
It’s simply meant to be your story.
The Gift of the Wrong Decision
My father’s story ended the week that I started writing this book. For the last eight years of his life, I emailed him a question every Monday morning. How did you spend your summers as a boy? Who was your first boss? What was your greatest accomplishment? My father was suffering from Parkinson’s at the time and could barely move his fingers. But he answered those questions, one after the other, until, just weeks before he died, he completed a sixty-five-thousand-word memoir—one question, one answer, one life-affirming story at a time.
Flying home for his funeral, I found myself reflecting on some of his most iconic sayings, many of which involved work.
You know it’s a good deal if neither side is entirely happy.
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
Be a team player.
As he vowed in his college thesis, my father passed up the opportunity to follow his classmates into top jobs in industry or finance in New York; he didn’t even stay in the Northeast, he later wrote, because “the folks who lived there were too pushy and acquisitive for me.” Instead, he returned home to work with his father in Savannah, because it was “a good place to raise kids.” My mother, who grew up in the Northeast, resented that decision for many years. One of the biggest gifts my father gave was not forcing me to make the same choice.
He let me make my own decisions—good and bad.
The night of my father’s funeral I went to his office in downtown Savannah, the same one I drove to every Saturday of my childhood. The vault door was open. Inside, in the clangy top drawer of a filing cabinet, I found the overstuffed file with my name on it that he had created more than fifty years earlier. Tucked away amid the photographs and report cards were two collections of poems. The first poem I read was called “T.V.”
T.V. IS VERY SPECIAL,
IT MEANS SO MUCH TO ME,
AND IF I COULDN’T WATCH THE TUBE,
I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’D BE.
I JUST TURN ON MY T.V.
AND LET IT DO THE WORK,
SINCE I DON’T REALLY DO MUCH,
MY MOM THINKS I’M A JERK.
So, Mr. and Mrs. Feiler, at least we know he won’t become a writer!
One poem, though, did jump out at me. Made when I was ten, it was written in blue ink around the edges of the paper.
A line is so very special. It can do most anything.
It could be a corner. Or form into a ring.
A line could be quite wavy, I added. Or could be quite straight. It could form a zigzag. Or even separate.
A line is very weird. It’s as sly as a fox, and when the ends are joined.
It becomes a box.
By the end of the poem, the line had reached the beginning and formed a closed container.
Even as a boy I seemed to long for a life that was undulating and nonconforming—and fearful of one that would trap me in a box.
If working on this book taught me anything, it’s that I’m not alone in that fear. In one of my last conversations, I was speaking with Leah Smart. Leah is the Oakland native who after graduating from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, went to a job fair and got hired in sales at LinkedIn. She bounced from office to office, left for a real estate startup, and then returned to LinkedIn, where she started a podcast and reinvented herself as a life coach. As a millennial woman in tech who’d been through ten workquakes in ten years, Leah described herself as “one of the one and onlys.”
Except, these days, no one is a one of many.
Everyone is a one and only.
And we achieve that distinction because at one time or another, each of us does what Leah did, what I did, what even my father did: we make a decision that seems, on the surface, to be wrongheaded. It defies logic; it bucks convention; it upsets the plan.
Even worse, each of these decisions disappoints . . . somebody.
The banker who disappoints his neighbors by becoming a painter.
The lawyer who disappoints her bosses by becoming a trainer.
The immigrant who disappoints his parents by becoming a teacher.
The comic who disappoints her critics by becoming a pundit.
The spy who disappoints her colleagues by becoming a bureaucrat.
The nun who disappoints her mayor by becoming an activist.
The bookkeeper who disappoints her husband by becoming a broker.
Each of these people, at a defining moment in their work lives, made a choice that seemed by all measures to be the wrong choice.
Only it turned out to be the right choice.
If there’s a universal message in these stories, it’s that there is no universal story anymore. With no single job that will make you happy, you are free to accept whatever job you want. With no single path that will lead to your dreams, you are free to follow whatever dream you wish. With no single career that will define you forever, you are free to create your own uncareer.
The lesson of the Work Story Project is that there is power in the unright choice.
There is pride in the unseized compromise.
There is beauty in the unaccepted trade-off.
Every search for meaningful work seems to contain at least one such uncustomary twist.
The tragedy in these stories is that our unconventional decisions often cause pain to someone in our lives—a loved one, a colleague, a boss. The glory in these stories is that our unnormal choices are becoming so common that they’re fast becoming the norm.
We are centering the edge. We are rewriting the narrative. We are converting our ghosts into ancestors. We are turning our toothaches into poetry.
We are forging new rules for success in America.
Write your own damned story.
If not you, who?
If not now, when?
Acknowledgments
“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you,” the comedian and actress Amy Poehler once said. “Spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.” I am deeply grateful to the 155 people who spent a lot of time with me, challenged and inspired me, and in the process changed my life. The stories gathered here are their stories, in their own words. Because this book is based on the premise that we all have work stories that define and shape us, I purposefully did not check the stories I heard against accounts of colleagues, bosses, partners, family members, or loved ones. Others may have recollections that differ, but I was focused on the views of the people I was in conversation with. Thank you for trusting me with your memories and your dreams.
Most of the people I met for this book I identified and tracked down myself, but I would like to thank a number of people who served as introducers, including Max Stier, Andy Levine, and Sabrina Bleich.
I was uplifted and enhanced by the remarkable team around me who helped code these stories, identify patterns, build analytical models, and run statistical comparisons. I am honored to pay tribute to the superb work of Lucy Ackman, Spencer Feinstein, Jack Robeson, Lina Tate, Tiber Worth, and Andie Youniss. Special thanks to the incomparable Elda Monterosso, who worked with me on my last two projects, and to Lauren Bittrich. And a hearty welcome to Mike Yoon, the wonderful designer who brought our data to life.
