The Search, page 4
The most revealing part of these answers: Only a few people mentioned what they do; the vast majority mentioned how they feel about what they do. Specifically, a third of people chose a word that described their work (union, manager, music, education), while two thirds chose a word that expressed their feelings about their work (joy, inspiration, tiresome, life). The largest single group—44 percent—used a positive word; 9 percent used a negative word.
Even considering that these are people who like what they do, the overall message is clear: the story we tell about our work is more important than the work itself.
This takeaway leads to the first lesson of the Work Story Project.
WORK = NUMBERS + WORDS
Most of the conversations we have about work revolve around numbers—hours, years, salaries, benefits, productivity, profits, output, efficiency. Yet most of the meaning we take from work comes from words—purpose, happiness, pride, connection, freedom, dignity, service.
The sad truth is that in the public discourse about work in America today, we over-rely on numbers and under-rely on words.
Too much math, not enough literature.
Let’s go back to the beginning to understand how we ended up in this quagmire. And let’s start with some numbers. For 95 percent of human history, work did not occupy anywhere near the sacred place it occupies today. Most people worked on the land and had no other choices. The historian Joyce Appleby notes that it took 100 percent of the working hours of 80 percent of the people to produce enough food to feed perhaps 90 percent of the population. Even then, famines were common, slavery was widespread, and starvation was routine.
Sure enough, the story that people told about work reflected this misery. The most influential story about work ever written—the Garden of Eden—was openly hostile to labor. Work was a punishment for defying the divine. Other ancient cultures were hardly more positive. The ancient Greek word for slavery, doulevo, is the root for both the ancient and Modern Greek words for work. The Roman word for business, negotium, means not an enjoyable activity. The French word travail (as well as the Spanish word trabajo) comes from the Latin word for torture. The English word office derives from the Latin for duty. For as long as we’ve been telling stories about work, work has had a bad name.
This dreary outlook existed for thousands of years, until it began to change in the premodern era. Beginning around the fifteenth century, people in the West started to believe that they could shape their own lives. Instead of being controlled by their environment, they could start to control it. They could have a say in what they did. Historian Peter Bernstein calls this moment the invention of curiosity. “The ability to define what happens in the future and to choose among alternatives lies at the heart of contemporary societies.”
Once again, the change was led by numbers. Though we hardly remember it, the math at the heart of contemporary work was largely invented during this early modern era. Numbers were not a major part of life before 1500. There was little use of zero, no long division, and no multiplication. The fifteenth century saw the invention of double-entry bookkeeping; the sixteenth century the plus, minus, and equal signs, as well as algebra; the seventeenth century forecasting, probability, and chance. All this flowering of math was made possible by an increase in agricultural productivity that allowed people to feel less threatened by change and more willing to take risk.
These breakthroughs in math were accompanied by equal breakthroughs in literature. Traditional accounts of the emergence of capitalism often leave out this critical development: The rise of numeracy was helped along by the rise of literacy. The same span that saw all those numerical inventions also saw literary ones: the printing press, the memoir, the novel, the newspaper.
All these milestones had the same effect: they gave more people opportunities to control their own lives and more tools to do so. The rise of capitalism opened the door to work lives other than farming; the growth of cities introduced lifestyles that were more literary and cultured; the age of discovery allowed people to set off for the New World to reinvent themselves.
Not everyone welcomed these changes, of course; millions were wrested from their homelands and shipped off to the New World against their will. By the nineteenth century, though, the impact of these trends had become clear. The West shifted from being an agricultural economy to an industrial one, from Work 1.0 to Work 2.0. As work opportunities evolved, people began looking for new ways to earn money and new ways to talk about it. With those changes came a new idea—and a new word—one that had never existed before but would soon shape every conversation about work going forward.
Career.
“This Is America. You Get to Choose”
Issa Spatrisano is the third of seven children in an Irish Catholic family in Kawkawlin, Michigan. Her mother was a public health nurse. “She worked weekends, had all those children, but also taught new moms how to breastfeed.” Her father drove a truck for Coca-Cola and was laid off in his fifties. “I remember that look in his eyes when he told us. It made me understand that you can’t control the narrative.”
Also, that she wasn’t meant for a corporation.
“I love chaotic environments, but I was always the peacemaker at home. I was the one who said, ‘Can’t we resolve this and move on?’ ”
Issa liked team sports for the same reason, so she enrolled at Western Michigan University expecting to be a high school basketball coach. But during a semester abroad in Germany, she fell in love with a new, chaotic environment—international diplomacy. She triple majored in history, political science, and German studies, and when her girlfriend, Jamie, took a job in Alaska, Issa followed and applied to graduate programs. To pay off her student loans, she visited AmeriCorps. “I think I’d be good at teaching English as a second language,” she told the interviewer.
“Do you have any experience?”
“No.”
“Then why do you think you’d be good at it?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. But you don’t know, either. When’s your next class? Let me go in for fifteen minutes. If I bomb, then we’ll both know.”
Fifteen minutes later, the students knew the difference between I am, you are, and she is, and Issa had a job. “Alaska has one of the most diverse zip codes in the country. Our public school has over a hundred languages. It was the perfect job for a year.”
Except at the end of that year she was rejected by all four graduate schools she applied to.
“That’s when my life took a drastic turn. I was standing in the classroom when a woman walked in. ‘Are you Issa? I’m the director of the refugee resettlement program for the state of Alaska. Our clients keep telling me you’re the best teacher they’ve ever had. I want you to run our education program.”
Issa ran that program, along with a few others, for the next six years. “I quickly realized I didn’t want to study international relations anymore. I love a chaotic environment; nothing is more chaotic than a refugee resettlement program.” Soon she was recruited to run the entire resettlement program for the state. At thirty-two, she had a $3.5 million budget with 411 cases from ninety-five different countries.
“We teach them cultural orientation. We coach them on how to buy groceries and survive the weather. One time I picked up a family at the airport and they looked worried. ‘How do you grow things here with all that salt on the ground?’ They had never seen snow.”
In return, they taught her about leadership. Issa hires only former refugees now. She works out of the smallest office to give others more credit. And after she pushed her clients to pursue higher education and they confessed they were worried about their English, Issa volunteered to read every paper they had to submit for the rest of their lives. A decade later, Issa still spends ten hours a week making sure her onetime students know the difference between I am, you are, and she is.
And together Issa and her clients were scripting a new narrative of the country they shared.
“In June 2013, the Defense of Marriage Act was before the Supreme Court,” Issa said. “I’m a political junkie, and I woke up ready to check my computer. But people were already texting me and celebrating.” She went to work intending to say nothing. “I always kept my private life to myself.”
But as soon as she arrived, one of her colleagues came running up to her in the hallway.
“He was Somali, and I thought he was going to ask about a client. But he reached out and took my hands in his. ‘Today is an important day for your family,’ he said. I didn’t know what to say. ‘You know, I come from a place where discrimination is real,’ he continued. ‘I’ve seen what happens when we pit one person against another. I’m Muslim, and it’s illegal in my country to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex. You get caught; you get killed. But I’ve been given the gift to come to this country where everyone is equal. And today your family is equal to mine.’ ”
Issa was speechless.
“I went to my car and started crying. That conversation changed me. I realized that by not fully being who I was that I hadn’t done them right. I hadn’t shown them what our country could be. Now that I’m pregnant, they’re throwing me a baby shower. They say things like, ‘Do we call Jamie your wife?’ I say, ‘You can call her Jamie. You can call her my wife. This is America. You get to choose.’ ”
Here Comes the Career
After undergoing no meaningful changes for millennia, the world of work underwent three massive changes in the century and a half after 1850. From agricultural to industrial (1.0 to 2.0), industrial to knowledge (2.0 to 3.0), and knowledge to network (3.0 to 4.0). While that story is fairly well-known, what’s far less known—and certainly less appreciated—is that each of those changes in what we do was accompanied by an equally titanic shift in how we talk about what we do.
Each change in numbers brought a change in words.
There’s no better illustration of this evolution than the rise and fall of the word career.
Before 1800, almost no one used that word. There was no reason to. As we’ve seen, most people lived where they worked, worked where they lived, and did the same thing for their entire lives.
The word career itself, which derives from the Latin carrus, or chariot, was first used in the sixteenth century to refer to running a course, as in a racetrack. A planet careered around a sun just as a chariot careered around a track. It wasn’t until the rise of capitalism that the word started to take on its modern meaning of running the course of one’s life. Dozens of books published in the early 1800s used career to mean one’s professional identity, as in your business career, your literary career, or your political career.
That usage grew over the next century as virtually everyone had their work lives upended. Once more, the numbers are staggering. Factories quadrupled in the thirty years after the Civil War, and their size ballooned—from an average of two hundred workers in 1865 to fifteen thousand at the first Ford factory in 1915. All of these workers had to be supervised, so an entirely new form of thought—management science—emerged from the work of an intense, humorless Philadelphia engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. The resulting boom of time clocks and efficiency metrics represented, in the words of one observer, the triumph of the mathematized world. It was rule by numbers.
Invention also exploded. In the seven decades before 1870, the US Patent Office recognized 118,000 inventions; in the four decades after, that pace increased twentyfold. Those patents included the backbone of a new way of life (as well as the heart of the stories my grandfather would later tell me)—the light bulb, the steam boiler, the elevator, the sewing machine, the vacuum cleaner.
Those inventions helped invert the country. As the reaper and tractor boosted farm production, droves of people fled their family farms. Eleven million Americans—nearly a third of the country—relocated from rural areas to cities in the fifty years after the Civil War; another twenty-five million joined them from overseas. The population of urban areas tripled during that period. By 1920, for the first time ever, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas.
This upheaval created an unprecedented crisis. On one hand, cities were completely unprepared for this influx. In 1890, half the residential buildings in New York City were overcrowded tenements; homicide, suicide, and alcoholism soared. On the other hand, millions of new jobs were being created in fields that never even existed before, like communications (telegraph, telephone), manufacturing (steel, automobiles), finance (banking, Wall Street), and leisure (travel, theater).
The result was a gap: Workers needed jobs; companies needed employees. But no mechanism existed to connect the two.
Enter a largely forgotten man named Frank Parsons.
Born in New Jersey in 1854 to a long line of doctors and lawyers, Parsons himself never held a single job for very long. He was a railroad engineer, a teacher, a lawyer, and a textbook writer. He never married, and died penniless. One reason for his poverty is that late in his life, while living in Boston, he walked away from lucrative work to devote himself to the public good. He became convinced that the way Americans worked was benefiting plutocrats over workers.
With the backing of the wife of one of those plutocrats, Pauline Shaw, Parsons opened the Vocation Bureau in 1908. Its mission: to educate the underprivileged, the immigrant, and the rural refugee on the importance of making good career choices. “The building of a career is quite as difficult a problem as the building of a house,” he wrote, “yet few ever sit down with pencil and paper, with expert opinion and counsel.”
Parsons was not the first to have this idea. Plato had written about discovering your life’s work (as long as you weren’t a woman or an enslaved person); books on this topic had appeared periodically over the centuries; guides were published using quack, quasi sciences like phrenology and physiognomy—analyzing one’s skull, hairiness, or voice tone—to determine suitable jobs.
Parsons’s timing was better and his tools more refined. The US in the early twentieth century was awash in programs to fix social ills. These programs did everything from helping children (playgrounds and kindergartens), to workers (unions and vacations), to women (custody and suffrage). Parsons’s insight was to harness this energy to help people find work; in the process he became known as the father of vocational guidance. In effect, he invented the career.
The Parsons method had three steps:
Know yourself—use a series of questions to identify your character.
Know the workplace—use a list of companies to identify your ideal job.
Make a match.
Parsons had huge blind spots. His process was designed to work only once, only on boys, and only on select industries. He pathologized indecision: anyone who didn’t know what they wanted to do had a “personality problem or defect.” But as Taylor did for management, Parsons scientized the career. From then on, finding a job was less about hunches and neighbors, and more about logic and objectivity.
Overnight, Parsons’s approach took hold. Schools began offering career guidance; Harvard introduced the first career counseling program; and the first career training association appeared. From nonexistence a century earlier, the career quickly became the dominant way to talk about work. The next big breakthrough was the visual manifestation of that idea—another new invention with ruinous repercussions.
The résumé.
“I Would Give It All Back”
Eric Vélez-Villar never told anyone his secret. Certainly not when he was an army brat. Eric’s father was a military police officer from Puerto Rico; his mother was a Spanish flight attendant. The two met in Germany, lived all over, before settling in San Juan. “I was a perfectionist,” Eric said. “I wanted to live up to my father’s expectations. I just wanted him to say, I’m proud of you.”
As a boy, Eric dreamed of becoming a pilot, and he enrolled in college to study aviation. “Then one of those pivotal moments that happens in my life.” A Puerto Rican independence group launched a rocket at the local FBI office where Eric’s father was working; the director decided to beef up security.
At eighteen, Eric was hired for the overnight shift. “I would go to all the desks, put confidential trash in big plastic bags, then go into the basement and shred them.” On his first day, his boss gave him a speech. “If a terrorist breaks in, lock yourself in the vault. There’s a revolver there for you—and a sledgehammer. Your job is to smash all the crypto equipment.”
One Friday night, Eric volunteered for what he called the “worst job in the FBI,” keeping watch over some copy machine repair people. An agent came in. “Hey, Eric, I just posted a job in computers. You should put in for it.”
“But I don’t know anything about computers.”
“I can teach you computers. What I can’t teach you is what you already have—being here on Friday night when no one else would.”
Eric started in the IT department and four years later made the rare jump from hourly worker to agent. His first assignment was in McAllen, Texas, listening to wiretaps of imprisoned Mexican drug lords. “My Spanish language skills got me this assignment, but I swear to you, on my first night, I didn’t understand a single word they said. I cried three times.”
He eventually cracked their slang, transferred back to Puerto Rico, and later moved his family to Maryland to work as a supervisor at the DEA. Two years later, another pivotal event occurred: Planes flew into the World Trade Center. Eric was sent to the fifth floor of the Hoover Building in downtown Washington, DC.
“People were running around everywhere. I was told, ‘Go into Room E. You see all those boxes? They’re letters written to Director Mueller. Read every single one and look for tips.’ ”
