Bruce Feiler: The Non-Linear Life
Bruce Feiler is an author and speaker known for his insight and perspective on how we can better show up in the world. With seven New York Times bestsellers like Life is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families, he blends wisdom and contemporary knowledge to inspire individuals to lead more intentional and joyful lives. He is also a writer and presenter of two prime-time series on PBS, Walking the Bible and Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler. Additionally, he writes a newsletter called The Nonlinear Life.
In today's conversation, we chat about his latest book, The Search: Discovering Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World, based on real-life narratives for finding fulfillment in the workplace. He tells us that those who find the most meaning and success don't climb; they dig. They go looking inside of themselves. Bruce's first hand approach to his work, living the experiences he writes about, allows him to provide practical guidance on navigating life's transitions and finding reasons for why we’re all here.
MORE FROM BRUCE FEILER:
The Search: Discovering Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World
Bruce’s Newsletter
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, Bruce, I love talking to you because I actually, hopefully you won't take offense at this, but I feel like we have similar minds and I love surveying and synthesizing and thinking of all of us as these communal threads that can be pulled together and how similar we are. And yet it can feel like we're all alone and are experiencing, and so, you know, you do such a beautiful job in Life is in the Transitions. I love that book. I know that really hit a cord for people. But like you, I like seeing what seems imperceptible, and invisible, and then tugging it out into the light so that we all see ourselves in each other's lives.
BRUCE FEILER: Well, first of all, that was beautiful and thank you, and I'm touched to be here. I remember that conversation that we had about Life is in the Transitions when we were all in the middle of a massive life transition but the thing I remember most was your empathy and your humanity and your desire to find, you know, connection and dare I say, even dare I say it, even beauty in that moment of upset that we were all in. And you're right that that book touched nerves, but what’s interesting about that book was that I had felt that the idea at the heart of it, right, which is that we were all raised with linear expectations, but we had non-linear lives and that sort of chasm between the expectations that we had and the reality that we were living was the source of a lot of the disconnection and confusion and pain. And just the sense of like, I'm off schedule or off kilter, right? The life I'm living is not the life I expected. I had that sense for a really long time when I started collecting and analyzing these life stories. In that case, three years before the pandemic, and now it's been a full six years, and it was hard for me to persuade people that this is what was going on, but the pandemic suddenly, the entire planet was in a transition at the same time. And I had, I was sort of sitting here and I think that that's, I was sitting there at the time with the idea, it turns out that people needed, and I think that a lot of what motivated me to keep going and to do this for another three years and another, you know, several hundred of these stories was the idea that this was incredibly labor intensive work. Dare I say painstaking work.
I find the people do collect these life stories and they're much more intense than regular interviews, and I've done a lot of irregular interviews in my life. Then hire a team and then code them and looking for patterns was that it turns out to be an incredibly, I don't know how to say it, effective way to surface ideas about what all of us as humans are going through, the simple act of asking different people the same question, and then I think this is again, something else that we have in common. Then listening incredibly closely turns out to be a way things that we all have in common that isn't necessarily in the journalism, in the academic literature, just in the ethos because it takes so much time and so much, as I like to say, sort of sitting down and shutting up and doing the work rather than sort of being on output all the time, which is what our culture seems to value.
ELISE: Yeah, and I loved this, someone once told me that I'm a cultural psychic in terms of like seeing what's coming. And I would argue, I love that idea, but really it is about just paying attention and listening closely. And all of the signals are there, as you know, and they emerge in the search as well when you start paying attention and looking beyond, you know, there's that page at the beginning of the book where you, and I love doing this. This is one of my favorite things, auditing lists, books, guests on podcasts to understand who is influencing culture and who we're listening to. And it is unsurprisingly, predominantly male and white, and straight. And when you took the five most influential success books of the 20th century and then went through them, I mean, we know this on some level, but the statistics are staggering. Can you talk a little bit about that?
BRUCE: I think I have them in my head at this point, but the core, so what's the core idea? So what happened was I started, if I just take a half a step back, right? So going back, it was six years ago. You know, I had had a kind of traditional linear narrative of success in my life. Like I'd figured out in my twenties what I wanted to do. I did it for no money for a while. Then I had some success, and I got married and I had children, and I had that line, that straight upward line that we all fantasize about. And then of course, as you know, in my forties, my life was totally disrupted, you know, completely discombobulated, right?
First I got cancer as a parent of three year old, identical twins then. Then I had financial trouble. Then my father had Parkinson’s and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And for a long time though I'm a professional storyteller, I didn't know how to tell this story and I didn't want to. And when I did, it turned out that everybody else had these moments in their lives where their lives were upended in some way. And so I set out on this mission to start collecting life stories and I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew that that was the essence of it. How do we tell our stories when we don't know how to tell our stories anymore?
That's what produced this idea that the linear life is dead and we all have nominees lives and they involve more transitions. I wrote this book and as we discussed, Life is in the Transitions, came out in the middle of the pandemic when the entire planet was in a life transition. And what I realized at that time and what I maybe intuited and maybe even, you know, psychic-‘ified’ or whatever the word would be, because I do think that we have that in common. And I do think a lot of it has to do with just being willing to listen, actually, so when that book came out, I sort of intuited or maybe psychic-ified or whatever the word is. I do think we have that in common. And cause I do think it comes from a willing or willingness to listen, that work was gonna be the next domino to fall. That this combination of the political upheaval, the social upheaval, you know, the public health crisis that we were in, it was gonna prompt people to reimagine what they were gonna do with the work. And that's again, all that I knew.
And so then I went out and I collected several hundred stories and I did make a specific emphasis to find people from underrepresented backgrounds women who are now the majority of the workforce, more diverse workers, et cetera. And what became apparent was that in the process of each of us rewriting our individual story of work, that we were rewriting the collective story of work, and it was when I realized that, that I got curious, what were we pushing again?My wife and I have this sort of interesting kind of tension right now. My wife, Linda, works with entrepreneurs around the world, as you know, and we've been out and about recently, and when people talk to me, when people ask me what the search is about, I will say it's, you know, the essence of it right, is that we don't, that fewer of us are searching merely for work. More of us are searching for work with meaning, right?
That we're transitioning from a, what I call a means based economy to a meaning based economy. And a lot of it then I say, is that, we don't want to chase someone else's dream. We don't wanna chase our parents' dream, we want to chase our own dream. And she keeps saying, you're over-emphasizing. It turns out that a lot of people do what their parents want them to do, and a disproportionate number of these people are women. And this keeps coming up over and over again. Like this was the story I was expected to tell. This was the path I was expected to follow. So where did that come from? And that's what prompted what I did that you've asked about.
So I picked the five most successful defining success books of the 20th century. That's How to Win Friends and Influence People from the 1930s. That's what the original, the first career book from the 19teens. That's The Power of Positive Thinking. That’s What Color Is Your Parachute? That's the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Every 20 years, ne of these books became the book selling millions of copies, et cetera, and I read them all, first of all, which I of course had never done. And that's when I realized, oh my gosh, they all have one thing in common. All of their authors are the same kind of person. And then I went one step further and I turned, I got first editions. I turned every page, I counted every name. And you have the numbers there in front of you. I think it's what, 963 people is that there are mentioned entirely?
ELISE: It is 689 stories, 631 are white men, 51 white women, 5black people, and 2 other minorities.
BRUCE: And the black people are like a jazz singer and a colored cook. And I think that this is the baseline if we do not realize how limiting, I would even say cruel, you know, and anachronistic the story of success that we've been selling, then we don't realize how hard a time people have trying to write their own story because the narrative that we have rags to riches up by your bootstraps and on and on. I mean, the idea of a Horatio Alger story. Why did Horatio Alger become a novelist? As you know, I tell this story in the book. Because he was a pedophile before that and he was at a church and he got run outta town and he fled to New York and befriended a bunch of young kids and started writing about them. Like, this is how limiting that story is only the story of one type of hero chasing only one type of dream. And it turns out now that the workplace today is majority female. Okay. Majority minority. Okay. And lots of things that when you and I were growing up were not possible. Like, taking time off to raise a child. Or care for an aging relative. The idea was once you got off the ladder, you could never get, get back on the ladder. Well, when there's no ladder and there's no path. You can get off and on whenever you want. You can make changes whenever you want. You can say, I'm gonna do this for five years. Like, okay, now I need to make a lot of money because my spouse has to go get a second degree. Or because I got two kids, for example, as I do getting ready to go to college, right? And now I can do something for myself. Or now I can prioritize my family, or now I can give back.
So it turns out that when you find out that the story we've all been sold is a limiting story, there are many more stories. The challenge then is how do you identify what's your story? What is it that brings you meaning? And that's of course what the second half of my book tries to tackle head on.
ELISE: Yeah, I wanna put this idea of ascension and dissension in a parking lot so we can come back to it because I think it's spiritually essential and core, both to life and to so much of your work. So I'm flagging that for us to come back to. But one of the revelations in the book, which is how I've lived my life is that the average person, as you say, has five jobs. There's main jobs, side jobs, care jobs, hope jobs, and ghost jobs. So can we orient people in that? I think everyone who's listening might perk their ears at this because so many of us are doing more than one thing.
BRUCE: So, okay, so the core, so what do I do? I go collect these stories. I then analyze them, what are the themes that emerge? Okay. The first is, we are sold three lies about work. Lie number one, you have a career, okay? The idea that you are going to follow your passion, right, and lock into something that you want to do early, and then you're gonna do that from 21 to 72. That's dead and deader than it's ever been. And what's more, that turns out to be a historic elaboration. The idea of a career was never even used a hundred years ago, it was invented a hundred years ago when people fled farms and came from overseas and moved into cities and didn't have anything to do, so they invented this idea of the career, but only for only for boys and only and only once. Okay, so line number one, there is a career line number two, there is a path. There is no path. The average person goes through what I call a work quake, right? So a work quake is a moment of infection or change or reconsideration or reevaluation. We go through 20 of these in the course of our lives, okay? That's every 2.85 years. That's two years and 10 months. And that number is higher for women. And X-ers go, them go through them more frequently than boomers. Millennials more than X-ers and Z-ers, are doing them more than millennials. So you are going to have all of these changes and they could be small, they could be large.
And here's what I think actually is the signature piece of data in the entire project, Elise. And that is that more than half of these work quakes begin outside of the workplace. Okay, so it's not that something is wrong with the job or the boss or the hours or the benefits or whatever it might be. It’s that something happens outside, okay, you have a relationship change. Okay, you have a child, okay, you get sick, you just change your mind. I don't wanna be a corporate lawyer anymore. I want to go off and be a fitness guru as Robin on from Peloton did, a story that I tell so that in, in and of itself, is a weakness in how we think about work is that we only are talking about the workplace when most of the changes happen outside the work, the workplace.
And that I think, is essential because it particularly relates to younger workers, female workers, more diverse workers, et cetera, where these other considerations begin to weigh. And then, so what is the third lie? It's the one that seems most preposterous. Uh, yet it's true. It's that you have a job. Like, of course I have a job, like, you know, how do I pay the bills? Like, you know, how do I have health insurance and car insurance and things like that, but it's not true. Part of the problem that we have, the kind of the frame, I think that's, that's helpful here is, you know, what is work work, you know, as I keep beating to death in, in the search is work is numbers plus words, two-thirds of the conversations that we have about work are about numbers. Salary, benefit hours, efficiency, you know, profits, loss, that kind of thing. And those are important. I'm not saying that they're not, but two-thirds of the meaning we take are from the words, right? Happiness, purpose, service, success, these kinds of things. And when you, ask people, like, the first question I asked in every interview was like, what's the first word that comes to your mind? Let me ask you, Elise, what's the first word that comes to your mind when I say work?
ELISE: Addiction. Kidding. Meaning, for me, I think.
BRUCE: I'll take either one of those because either one of those are not what you do, right? It's not right. Think podcast, you know, be a public figure or, you know, or edit or curate the kinds of things that you've done. Two-thirds of only one-third of the people mention what they do. Union manager, right? Carpenter, you know, beautician. Two-thirds of people mention how they feel about what they do. That's when you get to the meaning. So let's go back to this question. So it turns out that we don't have one job because a job, as defined by an economist, is like work you do for money. But that's not how we use it in the culture. These days, we have up to five jobs. Okay? First is a main job, and by every measure, only half of us, even have a main job anymore. In my study it was 39%, okay, then we have, two-thirds of us have a care job that's caring for children or aging relatives or other things like that. For some people it's a pet or multiple pets. Then, so a side job is something you do, right? Some side job is something you do for love or money. And it could be volunteering, it could be serving on your co-op board, right? It could be being the mom for travel soccer, which you talk to any mom of the travel soccer team. That is a job. Full stop. The economists may not call it a job, but that's a job because every week you're getting the mandarins and the little bottles of the water, and that's a job. It takes whatever it is, eight hours a week to be that. And as you're beginning to allot, and by the way, in every dictionary, that's the second definition of a job, is a task. So there's a side job. We talk about that a lot, that’s three quarters of people, but there's two other categories that we never talk about that take a huge amount of time. The first, as you say, is what I call a hope job. Again, this term doesn't exist in the literature, but 80 plus percent of us have one of these.
A hope job is something that you do that you hope becomes something else, like writing a screenplay, right? Or selling blueberry muffins at the farmer's market, right? Something that you do that you hope becomes something else that you're pouring time in, that there is no money, by the way, for a lot of people, their hope job is managing their social media. Maybe they'll become an influencer, right? And get free products, or whatever. Podcasting for many people is a hope job because they're trying to build their brand and find an audience and communicate with people. 86% of it, but even that's not the biggest one. The biggest one, again, I didn't go looking for this, is that we have this invisible time suck that takes a huge amount of time, which doesn't give us meaning, but subtracts meaning from our lives. Battling discrimination, staying sober, struggling with your mental health. Worrying about financial wellness, like I, now I have money, but I didn't grow up in a family where I was taught what is debt? What is savings? You know, what's a bond? What's a stock like? I have to do a lot of research to manage these things because my father is an alcoholic and I'm gonna have to take care of my father as a woman at Vox said to me, and so therefore, I'm, I'm having to worry about money cause I'm gonna have to take care of people that should be taking care of me.
BRUCE: And so I decided to name this. It was really hard. And finally I realized that what it, what it felt like to me was a ghost job. Something that was invisible, that haunted us. Do you have a ghost job?
ELISE: That's a great question. I don't know that I feel like I have, I mean, Sure. I mean, I'm in, I work on myself, but I don't feel like I have it to the same extent that you describe in the book, I don't have a workplace where I'm dealing with microaggressions.
BRUCE: Yeah, like the, I mean, I'm talking to a senior black executive at GE and every time she walks into a plant that that makes, that makes airplane engines, everyone looks at her like, you're not supposed to be here. Right? And that's just something that she constantly is struggling with. So I try to quantify it, most people said it was all the time that they were constantly, but when I asked people to put a number, it turns out it was 12 hours a week. That's a quarter of the typical work week. So we have this mix of jobs. Okay. And I think that our impulse is to cry. We all are working too hard and we understand that. But I think we're missing something, which is that one of the reasons that we have these multiple jobs is that they are a way for us to cobble together meaning. The one thing that's non-negotiable, is that people want meaning in their work. That is not changing and that's what's non-negotiable. For some people, that's money and hallelujah. Right? Cause money might be in freedom, right? Or providing for your family, right. Or not living in the circumstances that you lived in growing up or replacing that car, or going on vacation or whatever it might be.
But even for those people, it's rarely the entire span of their work life. Maybe when they're younger, they're not so focused on that. Maybe after a time, you know, we know a lot of people in their fifties are kind of re-imagining themselves looking for the second mountain or whatever it might be. So it comes and goes. But there are 4 million school teachers. There are 6 million people who work in nonprofits. There's a lot of people in public service. There are a lot of people for whom money is not the, the highest in ingredient. And so, what happens is the the meaning is non-negotiable, and we can take it from different things. So maybe I'm doing this job because it's the salary, it's the benefits, it's the health insurance. So maybe that's not bringing me the meaning. So then my side job or my hope job is what I do for meaning, right? Or maybe my main job now is starting a new thing and that's not fully there yet. So I've gotta take a side job to make some money to pay the bills while I get this other thing going. So these multiple jobs are ways to make sure that we get the meaning that we want, no matter how we do it.
ELISE: You know, I'm looking right now for the stat about how, um, I can't remember exactly what you said, but this idea too, that these side jobs, hope jobs, et cetera, only augment the way that we feel or perform about our main jobs. And it's interesting to think about this as an eventual double click for anyone who works in HR who's listening, because I think often there's this idea that these things are threatening, that if you have a main job, you are owned wholly, you're a wholly owned subsidiary of the company who is paying your salary, which is a terrible feeling, right? Like that's a sense of enslavement that I think naturally we wanna buck up against. But then the research that you cite suggests when we can find meaning in other parts of our lives, it only augments and makes us more valuable employees. You think about it almost as like, what would it look like in a world, an HR world, where there was help, that there was meaningful support in helping people's hope jobs take flight or dealing with ghost jobs. And that people could sort of choose, you know, I hear a lot, my brother's, my brother's gay, he wasn't talking about this, but one of his friends who's also gay and childless was talking to me about this, where he was like, you know, I understand how awful it is for women and no paid family leave and all of this. And yet at the same time, like the idea of taking, working at a, he is a corporate lawyer who has great benefits, but this idea that parents get a little sabbatical, he was like, you know, I would love that. I would love to like travel, or I don't know, work on his own hope job. I'm not sure what that would be. But you think about it as like, if employees insist on being main jobs and they need, we hear this all over the place. Nobody really wants to do that anymore. How can you make a compelling work environment? Well, you can make it compelling by acknowledging and supporting that people are finding meaning outside of your four walls.
BRUCE: I love this question for seven different reasons, but to go back into some of the kind of the themes that we've been talking about in this conversation. One of them is the unexpected thing that happens when you start asking people, tell me about your life. I'm interested in you. Tell me your story. And one of the things that that has happened in the course of this project while working on what I call the work story project of collecting and analyzing these stories and then writing the search, is that I was focused, primarily on helping people write and rewrite and revise and get the story of work that they want. We know there's been a lot about storytelling in the larger culture, you know, in the last, say decade, but for whatever reason, we haven't really carried that into the idea of work. The idea of a work story is not a phrase. If there's like one thing that comes out of this, I hope the idea that we have a work story and that that story we have been telling our entire lives, and in order to tell it most effectively, you've gotta go back to your childhood, which I'm sure we'll get to in a second. But the other thing that I didn't expect, It turns out that a lot of people are responding to this book by saying, oh, I'm in the workplace and this is teaching me what's going on in the minds of my workers. Because a lot of what is happening now is that there is a tug of war, and you just alluded to it, like for most of the history of, you know, industrial capitalism, most of the power has been with the employer. And the tension of you know, six days a week, right? Seven days, you know, then it became six days a week, and then five days a week. And now we're looking at alternatives even beyond that as the four day work week begins to be embraced. But in increasingly a lot of this is workers taking power back from employers. And I think that what the pandemic is really what turbocharged this, right? So the old days where you could say, okay, Elise, I'm very sympathetic that you have a child with an anxiety disorder, right? Or you're going through a personal health problem, or you have a partner who might be having a challenge. Whatever it was that was in your personal life, it was, here's a fruit basket. You know, come back to work in four days. And that's basically what it was.
BRUCE: And we know that when workers are changing work every 2.85 years, and when still a million people, or week. Let's just remind, let's just pause and say this again. A million Americans a week are quitting a job. This number is almost twice as high it's ever been in history, not laid off. Not being fired. Quitting. That’s 50 million people a year. That's a third of the workforce. And another third of the workforce is saying, Hmm, I don't wanna come in five days a week. Okay? Like, what if I give you Tuesday and Thursday or Tuesday Wednesday? I mean, only 15% of Americans in white collar office jobs are even showing up to work anymore on a Friday. So there is this big renegotiation, can I do it remotely? Can I do it from anywhere? Like not even be in the same town? All of this is a rebalancing of the balance of power between workers and and workforce. And so I think that if you are in HR and you are particularly in the wellness and health and safety and you know, mental health, you were three years ago in a small basement office with no windows and no one ever talked to you. It turns out there's a lot of people outside your door now, and we are beginning to realize if you want to recruit and retain talent, you have to change the way that you talk to your workers. And I think the pandemic has a lot to do with this. The fact that the workforce is now majority female has even more to do with it. And the fact that younger workers are just not prepared to sell their soul to companies anymore. And so you want me there and I'm gonna uproot my spouse and my children. It's just not gonna happen.
So that brings me to the question that you asked, and there was a study about side jobs and what the study about side jobs showed was if your side job. Is the same as your main job, it might zap your, you know, interest or enthusiasm if you work at a printing company or right, or if you are a graphic designer at a magazine back when they made magazines, but if you're a graphic designer and your side job is to telegraph wedding invitations, that may in fact reduce your enthusiasm or productivity or willingness to do your main job, but if it's totally different, it will actually reinvigorate you. So if you're a graphic designer and your side job is, as we discussed, you know, selling pickles, right, or being a notary public. So if your side job is something that's totally different, Because it will give you meaning and give you more energy, you’ll do your main job better. So again, HR has to readjust, some side jobs are threatening, but most side jobs are not.
ELISE: Yeah, it's super interesting. This was near the front of the book. It was someone who worked at GE and one of his sort of supervisors said to him, “Dispel the notion that if you do a good job, the company is going to take care of you. Only you can take care of yourself.” And I feel like that's been another seismic shift. And you saw a lot of this at the beginning of covid, people pushing back against this idea that your work is your family and that there's somehow these deeper ties that bind us. And yes, like I think you can make friends who feel like family, but at the end of the day, most families can't reduce your benefits or let you go or, you know, change the scope of the agreement. I think that, as you said, as the balance of power has shifted and people within this wider movement, which is what makes it quite miraculous that everyone together is pushing and redefining how much they're willing to give of themselves. This feels like the opportunity to recenter our own stories in a greater narrative.
BRUCE: I think that's exactly the point. I think it is a two inch sword, right? So the good news is there is no career, there is no path. You know, there is no job. You can write your story. The one truth is only you can tell that story. The answer is inside of you. You already know it. You just have to identify it. The reason that's a two-sided sword or a, you know, a two-edged sword is that it's hard. It's difficult, okay? That we get paralyzed by choice. We get writer's block trying to write the story of our own life, okay? And we get entirely frozen thinking, I can do anything. How do I do that? Okay. Which is, you know, you've, you've been kind enough to mention, and I hope people listening realize how rare it is that you spend the time to read the books and get to know the people that you're interviewing and God bless you for that. But it's why the, but we've been talking about the first half of the book and it's why the second half of the book is really, how do you do that? I feel like this idea's been building for a while, that we want meaning, but okay, I don't know anything about meaning.
How do I find the meaning that I'm looking for considering I've been sold all of these lies? And I think that the essence of that is where I think we make a mistake because, okay, you know, as you know, the second half of this book is built around what I call a meaning audit, like trying to figure out who you are and what is the story that you want to tell. What's the basic building block, by the way? First of all, what's the difference between meaning and happiness? Happiness is a fleeting feeling. It’s only present oriented. And meaning is something that binds past, present, in future, and the only thing that binds that is a story. So you have to tell your own story. So if you walked into a writing class, a journalism one-on-one class, they would say, you're gonna ask what, you know, what, what I call the six Kipling questions, it's who, what, when, where, how, uh, why and how. And the mistake that most people make and work is they start with how?
How do I get a job? I'm not happy. I wanna do something else. I've just graduated from college, okay? I'm an empty nester. I realized I spent 15 years doing this and I wanna do something how, and they go right to calling their friends and making a resume. And the problem is they succeed. They get a job. They do what they think they want to do. But they're not happy and don't find meaning in this new job because you put how to early. How is the last question to ask? You've got to start with the other questions and actually, to me, the thing that was most surprising, and I would have to say most meaningful because it's kind of speaks to me as a person that came through, is the people who are happiest in what they do. The people who find the most meaning and therefore are the most successful on their own terms, they don't climb. They dig. Right. They go looking inside of themselves. So let's just start with a very simple question, let me ask you, what were the upsides and downsides you learned about work, at least from your parents?
ELISE: Well, I learned that my mother wanted to work. She was officially at home with us, though she was always finding ways to do unpaid labor in the community and that she would much rather work than take care of children, although she did a great job.
BRUCE: Is that an upside or a downside? Sounds like it was a double-edged sword for you.
ELISE: A double-edged sword. Yeah. Lots of double-edged swords. And my dad, who's a doctor, found a lot of meaning in his work and also a lot of exhaustion, you know, being on call at night, like disrupted sleep. He was an intensivist, so he was often at the hospital in the ICU, in the middle of the night. And, so to me it felt like my dad did a good job because of all the supports in his life, primarily my mother of having, everything that he wanted, but for me, my mom, her life ricochets the most of mine, and it's not a coincidence that my mom, who is incredibly intelligent, didn't have a great education, but educated herself and loved to read and is incredibly curious about people. And so it's not a surprise that my brother's a book editor and I work with words because I think that that was very pronounced.
BRUCE: Here we go. Okay. Why I start with this question is that this is the backstory, the backstage, the lighting and the atmosphere behind every decision that you make about work. And if it's offstage to you, then you are not getting close to it. Like we have to go back. So what have we learned about you? Okay. That you know that you're wary of working too hard. We know it's important to you to balance work and family, but it's also important to you, and you use the word unpaid work. So you'd already know that there's a tension between paid and unpaid and you know that meaning is central. You said even your father had worked too hard. So now we know that. So now everybody ask yourself this question, what were the upsides and downsides? This, just to put this in context, is part of what I call 21 questions to find work you love, which is the second half of the search. Now, one more question about your childhood, other than parents or family, who were your role models as a child?
ELISE: Susan Sandberg, Nina Totenberg, Terry Tempus Williams, who's a writer in Utah. Gloria Steinem, the founder of my school. Strong women, ultimately who had big intellectual lives.
BRUCE: So these are the six questions, right? Who is your who? What is your what? When is your when? where is your where? Why is your why? And how is your how? These are the questions that you want to ask. The question about your parents is a who question, right? Because it's like, you can't pick your parents, right? You know you're giving your parents and it's what you learn from them. Who are your role models as a child and what did you admire about them, is a what question, because in effect, this is the first decision that you make about work. It's the first time that you're choosing something. What is it that you're choosing? You're choosing women, you're choosing strong women. Might I also add of Susan Sandburg, by the way, whom I know and reminds me a lot of you, Nina Totenberg, Gloria Steinem, they're all incredibly good communicators. Okay, so they're strong. They’re actually empathic, in many cases, they're seeing the invisible in things. Nina Totenberg and Susan Sandberg are in invisible. They're radio people. You know, Gloria Steinem sees invisible forces.And they are able to communicate what they see. So now we're beginning to see if we're trying to find out what does Elise want to, you know, if you're basically all this is an attempt to answer this question, like, I want to do work that, right. It's your what question, so the way to think about this is, first of all, we gotta go back to our childhood and understand where this story begins. Then we want to turn to the present, right? So you answer this question, I'm in a moment in my life when. Okay, so if you answer that question, in fact, I'll ask you fill in the blank, I’m in a moment in my life when…
ELISE: Hmm. I'm in a moment in my life when I am ultimately gonna be tested because we are book twins more or less on the validity of the dream that I have for myself. And it's a turning point for me, probably more psychologically than practically about whether I can really do this or whether I need to go and get a main job again.
BRUCE: Awesome. What do I hear in there? I'm in a moment when I actually unapologetically want to focus on myself. Like I'm really important. Maybe I don't have young children, or maybe I don't have a dying parent, or maybe my spouse is not the one who takes priority right now. Like, I'm in a moment in my life where I want to try for my dream. I'm aware that it might not work, or it might work in a different way than perhaps I fantasize, but I know that there's no getting a dream without certain amount of risk, and I'm gonna moment when I'm prepared to take some risk. Okay. And I know I'm gonna learn about by myself and different people answer that. It could be different. I'm in a moment when I need to make money because I wanna buy a new house or cause I need a new car or because I'm about to send two kids to college. Or I'm in a moment when I wanna prioritize my family, or I'm a moment when I wanna serve my country because there's great turmoil right now and I wanna go out and march in the streets.
So this is a question that you get to ask over and over again. What's the old myth? You ask it only once when you're 21 and you lock into a field and then you do it for 40 years. This is the benefit of the non-linear life, is that we can make changes and it changes over time, which is why you have to keep revisiting these questions. And we can go right down through all of these questions, but my larger purpose in this book is first of all, sexplain how it is that we got here, to this moment of great opportunity. And then also how do we take advantage of it to make sure we're writing the story that we want to tell. Not that our parents or our culture or our religion or our neighbors or, you know, people around us want, or our company might want us to do. How to tell your own story. And it begins through this process of, what are the ideas about work that have been inside of me for a very long time? How is it that I'm feeling right now? And how do I take the lessons I learned from the past and the present to begin to write the story that I want to pursue in the future? That's the essence of writing your own work story and of finding the meaning you crave, the happiness you deserve and the success that you want.
ELISE: Yeah. And I would offer too that arriving, I probably could have arrived where I am much sooner. And, but as you say, these are often sort of torturous, non-linear experiences and I've learned so much even in some of my jobs that seem. Really far afield and you know, we're meaning making, right? So we're always gonna look back and pull the things forward. But in every job I've had, even the ones where I worked and was the only creative amongst the sea of engineers or whatever it may be, have been fascinating and helpful. Even if on paper, you know, you talk a lot about how the resume went mainstream and how strange it really is to summarize our lives in that way. And there's certainly things on my resume that you would be like, that's odd. But in retrospect, as I pull these threads forward, there's nothing I would do differently.
BRUCE: A really interesting thing because the resume kind of fetishizes, I think the idea of a linear thing and then each thing has to lead to the other, and I think what you're expressing is what many people feel. I mean, the only thing that I would say twings my heart a little bit, just listening to you is the slight sense of either regret or an apologetic tone, or a regretful tone that I should have been here earlier. That's to me, the ghost of the linear life that's still haunting you, because I asked everybody in my conversations, the building block of this is the work quick, let's just, so let's just say you're in a work quake now. It's a positive. I mean, it is a positive work quake, right? You’ve, said, this is important to me. I want to try this really hard thing, and if it works, you're gonna look back at this work quake as a defining moment in your life because it got you closer to being who you could be and in that regard, as you know, as we just heard in that viral video about success from, from Giannis, the basketball player from the Milwaukee Bucks, that there is no failure, right? Because what you're saying is there is never a failure in trying for the dream, in trying for the fantasy and, and coming up a little short because it's always gonna be not exactly what you thought it was going to be. But I asked, so you're in a work quake, I asked everybody, how many work quakes did you have? And then we would sit there painstakingly and count them. Okay, so if I asked you your first work quake, you know, Elise, I'm almost prepared to guarantee it was probably cause the average age of a 16.2 is probably when you were in high school. Maybe there were one or two when you were young adults in college and you had summer jobs and you liked, or you did.
And then we would go through these various jobs. Some, you know, some had great traditional metrics of success. Some might have had heartbreak attached to them, some might have been nonsensical. And then when I would count these things and the number was always higher than people thought. Remember, the average answer is 20 between 16 and 72. Okay? And then everybody was, oh my God, that's so many, or I'm apologetic or it really did take me a long time. And I was like, no, we have to get over this idea that because it didn't follow this track that we expected when we were a certain age, that it's wrong. It's not wrong. This is the gift of the non-linear age, is that these turns can come whenever. Midlife crisis, the idea that happens between 39 and 44 and a half is it's worse than a lie. It's harmful BS, because if you think about the pandemic, if you were between 39 and 40 and four and a half, you were having a traditional midlife crisis in the 1970s. But if you were 52, you were in, you know, a life quake. If you were 32, if you were like, my teenager is 15 at the time, you were in a life quake. So the point is we have to stop fetishizing stability and stop demonizing instability. So for whatever reason, it took you a long time to get the confidence, to have the skills to be in the life position, to be in the personal position, to be able to chase this dream, that is where it is. There's no reason to be, and it's sad to me that that you and every, and lots of other people say, you know, I wish it had happened to me earlier. If that's what comes out of the search, like it can happen to you whenever. That would be a blessing, but it can happen to you whenever.
ELISE: Yeah. I appreciate that, and I appreciate all of your work that pushes against both this idea of stability and also the ascension. And maybe we can end on this cause I think it's such an incredibly important lesson, and you were talking about the distinguished professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Yale, Robert Steptoe and his book from 1979 From Behind the Veil, and he's talking about those prototypes for, for black literary narratives that you have the narrative of Ascent, which is Frederick Douglass. And then you have, the narrative of immersion, which is W. E. B. Dubois and this is a bigger theme, this going up and down and culturally right? And you've obviously done a lot of work in religion. We love this culture of ascension, this idea that the body is base and the world is base and we're really just trying to get outta here, right? We're trying to get to heaven, we're trying to ascend. And, really then you have sort of the other, many other people who are like, no, this is it right here, and it's both. And that seems to be what you're suggesting it is. Both of these things simultaneously an ascension and a dissension like, yes, it's here and yes, it's there. And in all ways, we're moving in both directions simultaneously, but can you talk a little bit about that, you've talked about it a bit, but just this idea of ascension and ascension.
BRUCE: First of all, I just love talking to you, and I love the way you bring in these things from all areas of your life. And of course, you do this in your podcast and I'm excited to read your new book because it does also draw on these many different themes. In some ways the kind of signature intellectual moment in my life in the last 10 years was meeting a man named Marshall Duke. Marshall Duke is a professor at Emory. He just stepped down after 50 years teaching psychology. And at the time I was writing about family dinner, and I called Lori David, actually and said, I wanna talk to you. She says, you don't wanna talk to me, you wanna talk to Marshall Duke? And I went and I invited myself to dinner at Marshall's house. And Marshall told me about this research that he and his colleague Robin Favish did 22 years ago now, which I later popularized in the New York Times, about children and children who knew more about their family history, were better able to navigate the ups and downs in their own lives. It was the number one predictor of a child's emotional wellbeing. And I wrote about this in the New York Times in a story called The Stories That Bind Us, and it kind of went crazy viral and it shaped a lot of my thinking. And I asked Marshall why that was, and he said that families have one of three types of narratives. They either have an ascending narrative. We came from nothing. We worked hard and we got a lot. Or there's a descending narrative that we have a lot, and there was a war recession or pandemic, and we lost it all. But in fact, the families who are healthiest and who raise the children, who have the greatest self-confidence that they can navigate the world, understand that they have an oscillating family narrative. Okay. That maybe grandpa came from nothing and worked hard and became the vice president of a bank, but then his house burned down. Okay? Maybe the daughter was the first to go to college and she became, you know, she became a principal of a high school, but then she had breast cancer that she had to overcome.
And children who understand that life is oscillating are better able to navigate the world. And this is a very profound idea, and I think it absolutely goes back. religion. If you look at the greatest stories of all time, look at the biblical story. Look at the greatest moments of, of growth are when Abraham leaves the stable world and goes to the prom. You know, goes into the unknown when the Israelites leave Egypt and then go into the wilderness. When Jesus, you know, goes into the desert when, when the Buddha goes off. And then every other great story with, you know, with Orpheus or Jason or Samson. All of these stories have people leaving the civilized world, going into the unknown, having a difficult experience and then coming back. And the moments of growth are always in the instability. That's what I'm saying is that we've over romanticized the stable parts of our lives and we fetishized unstable parts, right? We have to grit and grind and resilience our way through. This is really unfortunate, okay? Because it's in those in unstable periods, in the wilderness of our own lives, in the sense of doubt and confusion and uncertainty, that’s where the growth comes.
And so what Stepto is talking about, and the reason it's the smartest thing I read on work though, it has nothing to do with work, is that there are these traditional ascending narratives and descending narratives, narratives of ascent and descent. But the greatest ones have both. And the story of work, this goes back to the very beginning, and you're right, is rags to riches up by your bootstraps, higher floor, bigger salary, greater benefits, better view. That's the only story because that's the traditional straight, white male story. And when you broaden the number of people who are telling work stories, it turns out they're telling different kinds of stories and the people who are happiest don't climb, dig. You have to go into yourself. You have to do who is my who and what is my what and where is my, where and when is my when? Before you do, how is your how? If there's one thing you take away from this conversation or that you people get out of the idea of the searches, you can tell your own story, but you have to do the work to figure out what is the story you want to tell. If not, you're chasing someone else's dream and you're going to be happy. You don't have to chase someone else's dream. You can chase your own dream and in the process, you can write the most important story you're ever gonna write, which is, what is the story of success that you want to tell? Who do you want to be and how can you go forward and write that story beginning today?
ELISE: Beautiful. Thank you. That was so fun.
BRUCE: Thank you. You're a pleasure. I hope we get to meet in person someday soon.
For anyone listening who is struggling to understand their work story, Bruce’s book is a great place to start—it’s called The Search and we also talk about Life in the Transitions, another book of his that I loved that put context around that fact, for all of us, this idea of one or two disruptive events shaking us is a lie and he calls them life quakes, we will will experience life quakes all the time, whether it’s loss of health, loss of job, loss of a relationship, so on and so forth. And that that’s life. He was intimating this, that those are the opportunities when we get bigger, as scary and as unwanted as they may seem. In the end, he talks about the definition of the American dream, and he describes it this way: “Today, it contains four primary ingredients: Up, America’s the land of aspiration, ascension, ambition; Me, America’s the land of freedom, opportunity, individualism; Mine, America’s the land of prosperity, affluence, abundance; Win, America is the land of achievement, victory, success.” Per his research, “60% said should update the American dream, the idea needs to be revised for the 21st century to be more inclusive, more communal, less equistive, and less careerist.” And then he offers these four key themes: “One, success is not climbing, success is digging. Two, success is not individual, success is collective. Three, success is not means, success is meaning. Four, success is not status, success is story.” Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next time.”
