The Search, page 7
“Ten years you’ve been married to me, and you think this is what I read?”
But then she began reading and stayed up all night. “Oh my, this is delicious! I thought. And I have a moment in my feverish state when I know exactly why I’m here on earth.”
Today Sonali is one of the country’s most widely read writers of Indian American romance novels.
Butterflies come in all shapes and at all times. But the critical detail is that they come at all. When they do, the most important thing is not to follow your plan just because you have a plan.
It’s follow your butterfly.
Keep Your Personal Life out of Your Work Life
The next piece of advice that everyone agrees on these days is to set strict boundaries between work and life. On the surface, who can disagree with this counsel? After all, who among us couldn’t do a better job of ensuring that our work lives don’t encroach on our personal lives? Now that more of us are working from home, the imperative to wall off our work lives is even greater, right?
Wrong.
The happiest people do the reverse: they understand that their lives are inseparable from their work. For starters, our lives before we even start working play an enormous role in our ability to find happiness at work. From Troy Taylor wanting to fly airplanes as a boy to designing airplanes as a grown-up, to Isiah Warner feeling unmentored as a child to mentoring students as an adult, we all carry our childhood longings into our adult choices.
Every day is Take Your Childhood to Work Day.
That influence only grows as we age. A stirring conclusion of the Work Story Project is that the single biggest influence in our decisions about work—from what jobs we seek to what jobs we accept to what jobs we quit—is our life outside of work. More than half of all workquakes don’t begin in the workplace at all; they begin with our families, our bodies, our mindsets.
I call these events nonwork workquakes. They’re still workquakes in that they redirect our work lives, but they’re also lifequakes in that they redirect our broader lives, too. Among women and diverse workers, the number of nonwork workquakes is even higher, which suggests that the very idea of separating life from work is a legacy of a time when the workplace was dominated by white men and someone else took care of the laundry, the kids, and the aging parents.
Today, the smartest people know that you can’t wall off your work from your life because no wall is strong enough to withstand a health crisis, a relationship crisis, a family crisis, or an identity crisis.
And sometimes that crisis can make us better at our jobs.
Wendy Chisholm grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Her father was a nuclear engineer; her mother was a primary caretaker. “I’ve always been open about having an emotionally abusive upbringing, because it shaped every decision I made about work.”
Wendy’s first nonwork workquake occurred when she was twelve and her father brought home a computer. She started programming, mastered BASIC and Pascal, and earned a scholarship to study computer science at Elmhurst College outside Chicago. Once there, she had the next of her nonwork workquakes.
“One of my psychology professors asked me to tutor a student in statistics. I was a very helpful person, so I agreed. But what I didn’t know was that the student was blind. I had never been around a blind person before, and I had no idea how to teach advanced math to someone who couldn’t see.”
So Wendy got creative. “I used Legos to teach bar graphs; I used a stylus to generate braille scatterplots. And the whole time I kept thinking, There’s got to be a way that computers can help with this problem.”
The student passed his class; Wendy had a new direction. She started volunteering with autistic adults; she became a Special Olympics coach. “My first job out of college was as a computer programmer at the University of Chicago. One day my officemate says, ‘Have you read this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education?’ It was about a professor in Wisconsin whose sole purpose was to develop technology to help people with disabilities.”
Wendy went to work with the professor, earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering, and joined a team of forty at the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT whose job was to write protocols to make the internet more accessible. The group scripted the first adaptability guidelines covering everything from speech recognition to screen magnification. “I never really thought of the impact I was having; I thought of the problems we were trying to solve.”
Then, her next nonwork workquake happened.
Wendy got married and had a son. “At the time, I thought I would take six months off and go back to work, but I decided I wanted to be a mom for a while.” She took consulting gigs with Google and Adobe; she cowrote a manual called Universal Design for Web Applications; she moved to Seattle with her husband and son.
She also suffered postpartum depression, stopped drinking, and, after feeling as if her husband was not being as supportive as she hoped, got divorced.
“It was basically the worst time of my life. But also the best, because I finally got the help I had needed for a long time. I went into therapy; I was diagnosed with an emotional disability. I credit my son for forcing me to change.”
And four years later, when Wendy was ready to return to the workforce, she was hired by Microsoft to run a program called AI for Accessibility, which gave out $25 million to support technological solutions aimed at helping the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities.
“When I was in college, I was always the only female in my classes. I remember being in the lab one day, and the guys were all collaborating on this big project. One of the guys sits down next to me, pulls the keyboard from my hands, and starts typing. I’m like, ‘Dude, I can program, too, you know.’
“For most of my life, I felt like I had to hide my femininity,” she continued. “I wore baggy clothes and tried to act masculine in order to be taken seriously. But when I became a mom, I finally had enough. I realized that if I wanted to be myself at work, I first had to work on myself at home. Only then could I be who I wanted to be.”
Wendy is not alone. A majority of all workquakes begin outside of work—55 percent. The largest percentage of these nonwork workquakes involves a change in our mindsets. Our interests evolve, our priorities adjust, our purpose shifts.
Derrick Ray had been a deep-sea fisherman in the Bering Sea for twenty-five years, including two seasons as a star on TV’s Deadliest Catch, when he felt the industry had become too overregulated for his taste. “The government instituted a quota system; 186 corporations divvied up the fishery. The joy went out of it.” Derrick moved to Hawaii, bought a coffee farm, and returned to Alaska every summer to lead tourist cruises.
Andrew Gauthier was making mindless celebrity and cooking videos as the head of content at BuzzFeed in Los Angeles when he watched a charged Supreme Court nomination hearing focusing on sexual harassment. “That was a big moment for me. It inspired me to go into therapy and made me realize I wanted to be involved in politics.” Andrew became the creative director for the Democratic National Committee.
The second category was a change in our personal lives—a family event, a medical event, a collective event. Massachusetts-born Jamie Levine was a hard-driving managing director of investment banking at Goldman Sachs when his daughter, Scarlett, was born without a third of her intestine. At first, Jamie tried to power through. He’d stay in the hospital all night, then go into work the next day; he relocated from London to Boston to be closer to treatment for Scarlett. But finally, the stress caught up with him. He was fired.
Shaken, Jamie worked on his marriage for a while, then worked on himself. A year later, he took a job as the CEO of a public biotech company in San Diego, where he could build a culture that prioritized family over ambition. “I had to strip away all the MBA stuff and become much rawer. In the process I became a better person—and a better leader.” Scarlett, meanwhile, grew up to enjoy a thriving life, going to school during the day, receiving nutrition through an IV at night.
From going through a heartbreak to having a change of heart, from getting sober to getting pregnant, sometimes the most powerful workquakes begin far from the workplace. For some, the best response to one of these disruptions is to keep doing what they’ve been doing; for others, it’s to take what they learn about themselves and do work that’s more aligned with who they’ve become.
Always Keep Your Eye on the Bottom Line
The last piece of legacy bad advice from the linear age is that the primary benchmark for measuring success is money. Instead, sometimes what people view as a step forward actually comes with a step backward in salary. When I tried to quantify how often that happens, the results were eye-popping.
Rishi Chidananda was born in the remote Indian city of Mysore; after his father died when Rishi was three, his mother moved to Cleveland and remarried. “My mother was so afraid I wouldn’t fit into America that she hid all Hindu traditions from me so I would become westernized as soon as possible.”
Her plan worked.
“I was very much focused on being as rich as possible,” Rishi said, “and having as much power as possible. Bill Gates was my role model.”
And he learned well. Rishi traded stocks in high school, entered the honors program at Ohio State, and landed a plum job in investment banking. “I was making six figures by the time I was twenty-one.”
A big reason why was that Rishi was a master at gaming the system.
“I quickly realized it was all about impressing the bosses. I would write all my emails, wait until the bosses had left, then go out, get drunk and party, then come back at midnight and press send.”
By the time he was twenty-five, Rishi was making a quarter of a million dollars. He proposed to his girlfriend in an apple orchard. The wedding was weeks away. “This was the moment when I was supposed to be happy, but I felt super alone. I was tense; I was anxious; I was unsure about everything.”
Then his fiancée suggested they needed to talk.
“Before I say anything, she looks at me. ‘I just want you to know that if we get married, we’ll have children, we’ll have a house in the suburbs, everything will be fine, but you won’t be happy. You’re meant to do greater things in the world.’ ”
With the wedding canceled, Rishi went on a three-month bender—drugs, alcohol, sex. Then his butterfly appeared.
“A cousin from India was staying in my apartment. He sat me down and said, ‘If you continue how you’re living, you won’t be living for very long.’ Then he handed me this book, Autobiography of a Yogi.”
Written by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1946, the book describes how the Hindi mystic came to America seeking self-realization and wound up introducing the West to yoga and meditation.
“Steve Jobs read the book once a year,” Rishi said. “When I read it, my life changed overnight. Suddenly I would go out with my friends to drink but I wouldn’t touch the drink. I became disgusted by the drugs I used to enjoy.”
Rishi told his mother he was going to India for a short visit. “I have a feeling that I will not see you for a very long time,” she said.
She was right. On his first day, Rishi had withdrawal symptoms; on his third, he walked down to the Ganges. A South African monk sat down and offered to introduce him to his spiritual teacher, Swami Vishwananda. “I felt a veil drop,” Rishi said.
A week later Rishi followed the swami on the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage, where fifty million people gathered. The next month he moved to Germany to join his swami’s ashram. Six months later he became a monk. The man who used to value his worth by counting his bonus denounced money forever. Seven years later, he returned to New York to teach meditation and lead retreats.
“I thought I knew what made me happy,” Rishi said. “It was money. It was power. But really, those were masks. They were covering my fears of loneliness and mortality. When I read the autobiography, the light flickered. Now the light has become strong again, and I can finally see my true nature—profound, otherworldly love.”
While Rishi might seem like an extreme example, he’s not alone in how workquakes compel us to rethink our most basic assumptions. Not just around jobs, hours, and meaning. But also around money.
In my conversations, I asked everyone to pick their biggest workquake—their superworkquake, I called it. I then went through more than two dozen questions about how they felt and acted during that time. One of those questions was: Did this workquake lead to a step forward, a step backward, or a lateral step? Ninety percent said a step forward; 10 percent said a lateral step; none said a step backward.
The next question was: Did you make more money, less money, or the same amount of money? Here’s where the results became interesting. Half of the people who said that their superworkquake was a step forward made less money afterward; 41 percent made more money; 9 percent the same. Put another way: among those who said that their biggest workquake improved their lives, six in ten made the same or less money than before.
This finding goes against a century of conventional thinking about money and work. But I’m not alone in this result. While most economists have long insisted that everyone wants higher salaries, a few behavioral scientists have begun to push back on this consensus. Two researchers in Toronto, Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsh, found that if workers consider a job meaningful, they’re willing to accept salaries that are 32 percent lower than for unmeaningful work. A separate study by bestselling author Shawn Achor and colleagues found that nine out of ten employees were willing to give up a quarter of their entire life earnings in exchange for work that’s meaningful.
Who are the people who make these choices? They’re some people that we’ve already met: Brijette Peña leaving her plant company for her seed startup; Eric Vélez-Villar leaving Disney for his mental health. They’re Shelby Smith, who quit a lucrative job in Dublin, Ireland, selling equity derivatives for the National Bank of Canada to return to her farm roots in Iowa and open a sustainable snack company selling roasted crickets. “I wasn’t building anything before; I wasn’t helping anyone. I was moving around big, fictitious amounts of theoretical money, and taking a cut.”
They’re Divya Anantharaman, a Miami native who parlayed a degree from Pratt in Brooklyn into a job flying first class around the world designing shoes for American Eagle and Coach. After stumbling onto a road-kill squirrel while hiking in upstate New York, Divya got drawn into the world of high-end taxidermy. Three years later, after securing assignments from Tiffany & Co. and the Audubon Society, she opened Gotham Taxidermy. “The traditional career is a trap. Most people would say my move was a step backward because I took a pay cut, but to me it was a step forward in my heart and my fulfillment.”
They’re Caty Borum Chattoo, a nonprofit executive in Hollywood who helped legendary TV producer and All in the Family creator Norman Lear send his copy of the Declaration of Independence on tour, only to bail when she had a baby to take a senior job at the PR firm FleishmanHillard. “I had a fancy title and a huge office but a total bullshit job. I love to wear pink, but I had stepped into the world of beige.” So she left to become the executive director of the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University. “It wasn’t glamorous; it wasn’t tenured. But I had freedom.”
The pace of workquakes has become so never-ending that these decisions become never-ending. That stream means that even if we opt for the supposedly safe decision this time, the law of averages suggests we’ll have another chance to make the supposedly riskier choice soon enough. The net result of all this volatility is to nullify the once universal conviction that we’re all on a coherent, forward-moving path in which our work always takes priority over our family, our health, and our happiness.
It’s time we bid farewell to that mythical path—and to accept that a big reason such a route no longer exists is yet another assumption that turns out to be false. That assumption is the third and final lie about work.
You have a job.
Chapter 3
Lie #3: You Have a Job
The Surprising Wisdom of Work360
Richard Scarry had a nonlinear work life. Born in Boston in 1919, he had no interest in the family department store, so he enrolled in business school, switched to art school, served in World War II, worked in magazines, and then published his first illustrated book in 1949. He went on to write three hundred books that sold a combined two hundred million copies.
In 1968, Scarry wrote one of the iconic books of my childhood, a portrait of the daily life in Busytown. A perfect illustration of the mid-twentieth-century American dream, Busytown was a cross between Norman Rockwell and Charles Schulz. Everybody had a job: Stitches, a rabbit, was the tailor; Charlie, a mouse, was the baker; Zip, a raccoon, was the postman, and so on. Each was traditionally gendered, gleefully happy, and gainfully secure. The only sign of the wigglyness that would soon upend such traditional roles was the tiny creature in the green felt hat who was hidden in every illustration, Lowly Worm.
Lowly Worm’s job was to pose the question that gave that book its name; it’s the same question I posed in this book.
What do people do all day?
The answer I heard, however, is the opposite of the one Lowly Worm heard.
Today, no one has one job anymore.
Everyone has multiple jobs.
Before we turn to the question of what’s true about work today and how you adapt to it, we have one more lie to confront. That lie—that you have a job—is by far the least understood; it’s also, at first blush, the least plausible. Of course I have a job. How do you think I pay my bills?
