The Search, page 3
“I was always very close with teachers growing up. Plus, I was a language nerd. So when a friend told me about an opening at my high school, I called the assistant principal. They hired me the next day.”
Trevor spent the next four years teaching high school Spanish and world history. He moved to Philadelphia to earn a master’s degree, then to Houston to get a PhD in Hispanic literature. But as a young academic, Trevor struggled. He taught courses at Rice, dabbled in community theater, wrote some articles.
“Finally, my wife said to me, ‘You’ve got to help out more.’ The academic job market had collapsed by then, and the high school market was hardly better. I applied for twenty positions and was finally hired by Bellaire High School in South Houston.”
Once again, though, life had other plans. The night before Trevor’s first day of teaching, his father went into the hospital for a routine surgery, suffered a complication, and died the next morning. “It was so sudden that none of us knew what to do. I’m a mama’s boy, and I didn’t want to leave my mother and go back to Houston.”
A week later, resigned to fulfilling his obligation, he started his new job. “I was a complete zombie; I was depressed; I was barely giving 50 percent. I felt like a total failure.”
Then life showed up with other plans again—and this time, those plans came with wings.
One day after class, Trevor watched a group of freshman girls lean a cell phone against a window and record a choreographed dance. “They weren’t teaching one another the moves. Everyone just somehow knew them. It was like watching a nineties teen movie.”
Trevor asked if he could join them.
“They thought my request was hilarious. They started making videos of us dancing together and posting them on Dubsmash, Snapchat, and TikTok. It was just a silly thing we did after a class—a way for me to connect with them.”
The recordings went on for months; the students pressed Trevor to open an Instagram account, but he wanted to keep his personal life separate from his work life. Finally, he relented.
“That winter I opened an account called @Dr_Boffone. The students tagged me. Within a week, I had ten thousand followers; within two weeks, fifty thousand. Within two months, we were on GMA and our lives just blew up.”
When the school year was over, Trevor returned to the academic conference in Orlando where for years he had tried to secure a job. “And for the first time, I thought, This is not my place. My place is with those kids. That’s when I realized that we had flipped the model: They had become the teacher; I had become the student. Instead of my saving them, they had saved me.”
Three years later, Trevor spends the first hour after he wakes up every morning working on his academic writing. He published a book with Oxford University Press on digital dance cultures, then started another book about TikTok and Broadway. During the day, he teaches five high school language classes and the occasional college course. At night, he volunteers to promote up-and-coming playwrights and manages his social media accounts.
“I think back on my parents losing their business—twice. I think back on what I wanted for most of my adult life—none of which I got. What I’ve learned is that our dreams don’t necessarily work out. But sometimes the dreams that come true are even better than the ones that don’t.”
The New American Success Story
Here’s what I learned from the Work Story Project.
Lesson #1: The Unbearable Likeness of American Success Stories
One of the first things I did when I committed to writing a book about work was to assemble a shelf of iconic books about work. It included motivational writers—Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey; big thinkers on economics—John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Drucker; and seminal novelists—Horatio Alger, John Steinbeck. These books would ground me in the numerics and poetics of the American Dream.
That’s when I had a horrifying realization.
Every single book had one thing in common.
The story of success we’ve been telling in America is terribly outdated. It’s the story of only one subset of our community, seeking only one expression of our dreams. The heroes in those stories all had the same-gendered bodies, shared the same-colored faces, lived in the same-furnished homes, and chased the same-shaped careers.
Those stories defined the American Dream. That dream helped build this country, but it also helped prevent many members of this country from making their own dreams come true.
Our national scripture has been far too limiting.
Exactly how limiting? I stacked the five most influential success books of the twentieth century on my desk. The books are Choosing a Vocation by Frank Parsons (1909), How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936), The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (1952), What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles (1970), and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (1989).
I then turned every page and researched every person in those books. Here’s what I found:
Choosing a Vocation includes 94 white men, 2 white women, no Black men or women, and no other racial or ethnic minorities.
How to Win Friends features 252 white men (including Jefferson Davis), 24 white women, no Black men or women, and 2 other minorities.
The Power of Positive Thinking showcases 144 white men (including Stonewall Jackson), 23 white women, and 5 Black people. The latter group includes 1 singer, 1 redcap, 1 “colored woman, a cook,” 1 “colored maid,” and 1 unnamed “wise and philosophical Negro man.” No other minorities are featured.
What Color Is Your Parachute? mentions 85 white men, no women, no Black people, and no other minorities.
The 7 Habits spotlights 56 white men, 2 white women, no Black people, and no other minorities.
The total: 631 white men, 51 white women, 5 Black people, and 2 other minorities.
Those tallies mean that of the 689 stories told in these books, 7 percent are women.
Meanwhile, 0.7 percent are Black and 0.003 percent are other minorities.
It was impossible to evaluate such diversity markers as sexual orientation and disability, though there are no outward signs that any people meeting those descriptions are included.
Even Studs Terkel’s landmark 1974 book, Working, is overwhelmingly white and has a casual racism that’s jolting to today’s ears. Of the 136 interviews in the book, only 8 are with Black subjects, and those include a maid, a washroom attendant, and a jazz singer; 2 are of other minorities. The N-word appears 11 times.
Before we can turn to the emerging portrait of what it means to find happiness and success at work today, we have to acknowledge and lay to rest the narrow-minded, restrictive, even cruel, depiction of how happiness and success have been portrayed in the past.
Lesson #2: The Emerging Kaleidoscope of Success Today
By contrast, the workforce today is blossoming with diversity and dynamism. The emerging face of American success is multidimensional, multilayered, and multishaped.
Multidimensional. The American workforce is changing—fast. Overall, women now hold more American jobs than men, and that gender gap is expected to grow to ten million by 2030. Also, for the first time in history, the Department of Labor reports that the majority of workers hired today are people of color, led by Black and brown women.
Multilayered. The widespread belief that our lives are divided into work and life that we all somehow try to balance is misleading. Even the idea of a job is becoming irrelevant. As we just saw with Trevor Boffone, and I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 3, 90 percent of people now say they have more than one job; most people have up to five. Some of those jobs are ones that economists don’t even count as work, yet ordinary people do.
A more accurate picture of how we spend our time includes a main job, a side job, and a care job, like caring for young children or aging parents. This book then introduces two new terms. The first is hope job—something people do in the hope that it becomes bigger, like writing a screenplay or selling jewelry on Etsy. The second is one of the larger revelations of the Work Story Project. Every person I spoke with said they spend a meaningful percentage of their time battling unseen forces. These specters include self-doubt, discrimination, money, and mental health. I call these invisible time sucks ghost jobs, and the stories behind them, in chapter 3, are haunting.
Finally, multishaped. As the stories of Brijette Peña, Troy Taylor, and Meroë Park make clear, the idea of a traditional career that follows a linear path has also been obliterated. It’s not just that we have multiple sources of income and work unconventional hours (which we do); it’s not even that we change roles faster and are forced to learn new skill sets sooner (which we are); it’s that the very idea that our identity is based on committing to a field of work at some point and sticking with that work for decades has been irreversibly eroded.
The most valuable skill today is no longer how to have a career.
It’s how not to have a career.
My data show that we go through a breathtaking number of workquakes in our lives—at least twenty. Those workquakes start earlier, continue later, and happen more frequently than most people think. As I’ll show in chapter 2, more than half of these workquakes aren’t even initiated at work—they begin with our families, our bodies, or our minds. Meanwhile, the number of workquakes is increasing with each generation—and is higher among people of diverse backgrounds—which means their frequency is only going to grow.
The bottom line: The traditional stories we’ve been telling about success no longer apply. And yet, we’ve not refreshed them with new stories.
Which leads to the final takeaway.
Lesson #3: Success Is a Story You Write Yourself
We need a new way to talk about work—one that doesn’t generalize our experience but individualizes it. One that doesn’t force us to compare ourselves to rigid standards that no longer exist but personalizes our experience for the fluid realities we all face. One that encourages us to ask—as often as we wish—What makes me happy today? What fits my life at this moment? What should I do, as the poet Mary Oliver put it, with my “one wild and precious life?”
Fortunately, a new approach has been emerging. It comes from a group of scholars steeped in contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. It’s called narrative career construction.
The premise is simple: The biggest impediment to a meaningful life is not what you don’t know about work; it’s what you don’t know about yourself. Specifically, it’s understanding the underlying themes of your life. You can bounce from job to job; you can shift from field to field; but if you don’t tap into the earliest tensions, frustrations, and longings of your life—that personal scripture that’s unique only to you—you’ll never be happy.
The themes of that scripture stretch back to your earliest childhood. They’re rooted in the values—positive and negative—you learned from your parents. They’re grounded in the qualities you admired in your role models, the environments you were drawn to, the deepest tensions you’ve been trying to resolve since before you could think.
No one but you knows the answers to these questions.
Only you can crack your own vault.
Which is why only you can write your own story of success.
But how can you learn to do this?
There are options out there. You can hire a counselor; you can dig into the research; you can wing it.
Or you can meet the people gathered in this book and, like me, be emboldened by the richness of their experience and the courage of their choices. I think of these people as the most comprehensive informational interview ever assembled. And the collective wisdom of their stories offers something that I believe is desperately needed: a tool kit for discovering your own work story.
A road map to authoring your own life.
I lay out that road map in three sections. The first busts the three biggest lies of modern work. The second embraces the one truth. The third lays out the six questions to ask in a workquake.
To be clear, I didn’t go looking for this map. But it emerged as the single most valuable takeaway from my conversations. You might be skeptical, and that’s understandable. You might be thinking, I’m not a storyteller; how can I tell the story of my life? and that’s fine, too.
But the truth is: You’re already telling the story of your life. You’re probably just not telling it as well as you could.
This book is the guide for the most consequential story you’ll ever tell.
The story of what makes you a success.
I
THE THREE LIES ABOUT WORK
Chapter 1
Lie #1: You Have a Career
The (Short) Rise and (Rapid) Fall of the Career
Isiah Warner grew up in Bunkie, Louisiana, population 4,656. “Whites lived on one side of the railroad tracks; Blacks lived on the other.” The local post office featured a mural called Cotton Pickers and Isiah, indeed, picked cotton every summer.
“I was terrible at it, because you were supposed to just grab the bolls and keep on going. But I’m such a meticulous person that I would pick all the seeds out.”
He made five dollars a day.
“My first mentors were those cotton fields,” he said. “My hands would be bloody, and I don’t like bugs. But the caterpillars would crawl all over me and cry out, Go to college!”
But how? Neither of Isiah’s parents went to high school, and his segregated school had no science labs, no calculus classes, and only six-year-old textbooks. “The fancy would use the textbooks, and when they became outdated, they’d pass them on to us.”
Fortunately, the local, historically Black university offered a full scholarship to the valedictorian of Isiah’s school, and he won it. Isiah thrived in college. He met his wife and majored in chemistry. When he graduated, he accepted a job in Seattle at a contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission. He had never been on an airplane.
Once on the job, though, Isiah was stymied by discrimination and plagued by self-doubt. “I’m sure you’ve heard of impostor syndrome,” he said. “No matter what I accomplished, I always felt like they were going to find out about my background.”
Isiah told his boss he wanted to quit. But the supervisor, himself an Asian American sensitized to being an outsider, had another idea. “You need to get a PhD. When I explain things to other employees, they ask me questions. When I explain something to you, you get it the first time.”
Isiah earned his doctorate at the University of Washington in three years instead of the usual five. He was offered a job at Bell Labs in New Jersey but turned it down because on the day he visited there were eight inches of snow on the ground. He opted for academia instead. “I knew if I wasn’t around students, I wouldn’t be happy.”
Isiah moved his family to Texas A&M, where again he was denied resources, promotions, even a lab, because of discrimination. He soon left for Emory. “A small private university in a community like Atlanta that had an elite Black population was appealing.”
A decade later, Isiah was lured back to Louisiana with an endowed chair at LSU. Of the school’s forty highest-ranked professors, Isiah was the only Black person. LSU had given three Black people PhDs in chemistry before he arrived; he’s since awarded PhDs to one hundred. He has more than three hundred eighty peer-reviewed publications and is a worldwide expert in fluorescence. He received a presidential award of excellence from Bill Clinton.
Yet when he named a group of new compounds GUMBOS, an acronym for group of uniform materials based on organic salts, he was denounced by a reviewer. “Despite the well-known sense of humor of the author, to call these compounds GUMBOS is ridiculous.”
“Now what he doesn’t know,” Isiah said, “is that gumbo is an African American word. Part of my rationale was to set an example. I’m not the kind of person who complains, but that was racism. I’m working with two colleagues—we’re probably the three most prominent analytical chemists in the country of any race—to write an article about the lack of Blacks in our field.”
But while chemistry is Isiah’s profession, his life’s work is becoming the role model he lacked as a child. The man who was mentored by cotton fields spends two thirds of his time mentoring scientists of color. “Let me explain in the words of a former student, who’s now a professor. She said, ‘You love working with students more than you love science.’ When she said that, I was offended. But when I thought about it, I realized she was right. I love helping young people find their Yellow Brick Road. I think of myself as Dorothy.”
And does Dorothy still think, There’s no place like home?
“When I first moved back to Baton Rouge,” Isiah said, “I bought a house. I wanted to impress my mother, so I invited her for a visit. She looked in all the closets, opened all cabinets, then sat down at the kitchen table. I thought she would be blown away, but she hadn’t said a word. Then she leaned over. ‘Son, I’ve spent my whole life cleaning houses. I’ve never even been in a house as nice as yours.’ I started to cry. That’s when I knew I was no longer an impostor.”
Work = Numbers + Words
Perhaps our greatest failing about work is that we’ve left such a vital part of our lives largely to the realm of number crunchers. Economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants. Fair enough. But talk to actual people, and they tell a far more emotional story.
The first question I asked in every interview was, What’s the first word you think of when I say work? The answers were rich, varied, and evocative. Passion. Purpose. Exhausted. Growth. Commitment. Pain. Serendipity. Persistence. Dreadful. Justice. Heart.
