On self-care, Kelly Lively, who started out as a secretary at the Idaho National Labs and worked her way up to department manager, said her ghost job was “lack of self-confidence.” Karen Noel, a bank manager for over thirty years who became a long-haul truck driver, said her ghost job was worrying—“about getting into an accident, about damaging the truck, about a bad ice storm.” Wendy Chisholm, the accessibility director at Microsoft, said her ghost job was sobriety. “Having the energy to remain in a recovery program, while also being a sponsor, going to meetings, daily journaling.”

  On money, Cornell Thomas, who lost his police officer father in New Jersey to cancer when he was four, grew up watching his dental assistant mother struggle to support her family. “Once, in sixth grade, I asked if we could order pizza; Mom gave me a look that said, No. Don’t ask again.” After his dream of playing pro basketball in Europe was cut short by injury, Cornell coached community college, opened a youth academy, and gave motivational speeches. “I was an adult before I realized I had a horrible relationship with money. I would cry rather than ask people to pay me.”

  Laura Delarato, the Vox creative director, said that even in her thirties she stressed about earning enough to support her parents in the future. “I worry that my dad, who I barely speak to, will need me to take care of him. The same with my mother. And my brother.” Laura spends ten hours a week working side jobs and surfing Zillow trying to prepare for buying a house large enough for her entire family.

  Everyone sees ghosts from time to time. While the details for dealing with them may differ, one treatment has been shown to be effective against all of them: We must normalize their existence. We must bring them out of the shadows. We must see them for what they are: obstacles that prevent us from feeling whole.

  “You are never a whole person if you remain silent,” writes the poet Audre Lorde. “What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

  We must break the silence.

  Above all, we must accept that ghost jobs are part of a complex assortment of jobs that each of us tries to make sense of every day. A 360-degree circle of work composed of fractals of time and fragments of responsibility, each of which brings us flickers of joy and glimmers of purpose but also eats away at our confidence and undermines our dignity.

  What do people do all day? They try to find meaning through all that they do.

  What’s the best way to do that in a world where all the old truths lie broken and shattered on the ground?

  Fortunately, there is a way.

  Two hundred years ago, just as the world of work was first splintering, the Scottish optician David Brewster invented a method of rearranging broken pieces of glass into brilliant patterns of color. Each arrangement would be unique, transitory, breathtaking. Brewster named his invention the kaleidoscope, from the Greek words meaning observer of beautiful shapes.

  Today we need a similar new way of observing beautiful shapes. We need a tool that can help us reassemble the shattered shards of success into dazzling new arrangements that reflect our changing dreams. We need to move beyond the three lies about work.

  We need one new truth.

  II

  THE ONE TRUTH ABOUT WORK

  Chapter 4

  We All Need Another Hero

  Who Gets to Be the Face of Success?

  On a cold, Sunday dawn in October 1723, an awkward seventeen-year-old runaway from Boston, just off a rowboat on the Delaware River, walked up Market Street in Philadelphia. Dirty, bedraggled, his “best clothes” sullied by “rowing and want of rest,” his pockets “stuffed out with shirts and stockings,” and under his arms, not the three-penny loaf he couldn’t afford but “three great puffy rolls,” this “ignorant” boy-man made “a most ridiculous appearance.”

  That boy was Benjamin Franklin. And that moment, described in meticulous, mouthwatering detail in the opening pages of his Autobiography, is, in the words of legendary literary critic Harold Bloom, “the dominant visual scene in all American literature.”

  The reason, Bloom writes, is that when paired with another scene at the book’s end, when Franklin—thirty years later, now a wealthy printer, assembly member, and confidant of George Washington—departs Philadelphia as the officers of his regiment “drew their Swords” in a manner “only proper to Princes of the Blood Royal,” Franklin gives us the ultimate example of look at me then, look at me now.

  In that juxtaposition, Bloom writes, “Franklin gave us the definitive formulation of the American Dream.” It’s the archetype of an individual’s rise “from helplessness to power,” “from log-cabin birth to self-made man,” “from rags to riches.”

  In other words, Benjamin Franklin is the ultimate American success story.

  And that, as the salty-tongued founding father might have said, is a damned shame.

  What we’ve learned about work today is that it’s in a massive state of upheaval. We face heightened instability, deeper uncertainty, and greater demands on our time but also have more freedom, more opportunity, and more options. We also have limited sources of support. Employers can’t be expected to help employees find work elsewhere; elected officials have nothing to say; most of our peers are equally confused. Who should you turn to for answers?

  Yourself.

  The one truth about work today is that only you can provide the help you want and the direction you need.

  The rest of this book is devoted to showing you how to do that. We begin with two foundational steps. The first, in this chapter, is to grapple with what we might call the Ben Franklin Problem: What is a success story anyway? The second, in the next chapter, is to ask, How do you decide what success means to you? In that discussion, I’ll introduce three tools that can make that process more effective.

  But first, let’s explore a story that’s rarely told and that goes back to that Sunday morning in 1723: the collective trauma of the American success story and how we all can escape its long shadow of pain.

  What Is a Success Story? Part I: Character Is Destiny

  Who gets to decide what’s a success story? Does Chris Donovan count?

  Chris was born into an Irish Catholic family in Weston, Massachusetts. His father never made much money; his mother became ill with encephalitis when Chris was six. “They always instilled in us that you go out and get a good, stable job. The happiness quotient was never part of it.”

  Chris found that stability. After high school, he spent a decade working as a waiter and bartender, before joining the telephone company at twenty-nine as an operator. “This was before cell phones, call centers, or 911,” he said. “I was the only man in a roomful of women. When you picked up the phone and dialed zero, that was me. I fielded calls from businessmen placing long-distance calls, drunks looking for a cab, people who were shot and needed an ambulance.”

  He stayed at the company for the next twenty-five years. Chris switched roles every few years, working as a home repairman, a computer installer, a pole climber. He volunteered at a suicide hotline and earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. And all along, he nurtured a secret hobby.

  “When I was in humanities class in high school, a girl walked in wearing sky-high platforms. I couldn’t believe she could walk in them. They were like a piece of art.”

  Chris pulled out his notebook and started sketching.

  “It was one of those moments in your life that lights a flame. I started drawing women’s shoes on the back of notebooks, on envelopes, on paper napkins in restaurants. I knew there was nothing I could do with this obsession—my friends all teased me, thinking it was a fetish—so I just drew for the next thirty-five years.”

  He really couldn’t find anything to do with his passion?

  “I didn’t know where to begin. My parents never taught me about saving and investing. All the shoe factories in New England had closed by then. At one point I threw all my designs in the trash. I was dating a guy at the time, and he flipped out. ‘You have to save those. They’re important!’ ”

  One night Chris went to dinner with a group of men in Provincetown. “They were from all over the world. One was a tie-dye artist named Steve. He had done work with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I thought, I work for the friggin’ phone company.”

  Chris and Steve started dating, and, with Steve’s encouragement, Chris took night courses in welding and drawing. “Then a fashion course popped up. I was the first in line. Everyone was young, tall, beautiful. I’m the short, fat, hairy guy. The teacher says, ‘You must be looking for photography. That’s next door.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m looking for fashion.’ And she starts laughing.”

  Chris thrived in class, but the teacher had no experience with footwear. Then Chris was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which required treatment. Finally, he built up enough confidence to sign up for a two-day shoe course in Manhattan. The instructor, the acclaimed designer Aki Choklat, asked everyone to draw their best shoe in sixty seconds. Afterward, he called Chris to his desk.

  “Everybody else drew pastel things that looked like a potato. You did something that looked like it belongs on the runway.”

  Aki encouraged Chris to get a master’s degree in Italy. “Steve and I were married by then. The entire train ride back home, I kept thinking, We have a house, we have a dog, how would we even pull this off? But without a moment’s hesitation, Steve said, ‘We’ll sell the house if we have to.’ ”

  Chris put in his retirement papers, he got his first passport, and after his visa was rejected by the Italian government (“You’re too old”), he eventually secured papers. At fifty-five he enrolled in Polimoda, a fashion design school in Florence.

  And he bombed. Aki told him he was worried. Chris feared he was in over his head. Finally, his teacher came to his desk. “See all your classmates, those fashion vixens who worked at Saatchi? You’re not them. Who were you before you came here?”

  “A telephone repairman.”

  “Great. Be that.”

  And it clicked. Chris started designing shoes with fiber-optic cable, blocks of wood salvaged from construction sites, glass insulators from old telephone poles. “You can spot a Versace. You can spot a Gucci. I want you to be able to spot a Donovan.”

  He graduated at the top of his class.

  Back home, though, no one would hire him. So Chris did what he always did: he started drawing. He entered—and won—competitions. He was invited to appear on Project Runway. AARP made a documentary about him. And ultimately he opened a direct-to-consumer brand, Chris Donovan Footwear. Four years later, he had three collections and twenty different styles, though he still hadn’t paid himself a salary.

  “No matter what happens, I’ve succeeded,” Chris said. “Because, my God, I chased my freaking dream. I quit my job. I went to Italy. I started my own company. I’m just a success, I am.”

  Let’s begin our discussion of the American success story by drawing a distinction between work and success: Work, as we’ve seen, is the combination of what you do and how you feel about what you do. It’s the balance between time, effort, and money on one hand, and meaning, purpose, and happiness on the other.

  WORK = NUMBERS + WORDS

  Success is how that balance interacts with the rest of your life. It’s how your work fulfills your overall vision of yourself; how it reflects your deepest values; how it upholds the ethos of your family, your community, your country.

  SUCCESS = WORK × LIFE

  If the history of work has been hamstrung by our over-reliance on numbers and our under-reliance on words, the history of success has an even worse problem: We’ve over-indexed on valuing work for work’s sake (the work ethic), and under-indexed on acknowledging that the priorities we hold in life shape the priorities we hold in work. Are you primarily motivated by money, for example, or by self-expression, impact, or happiness?

  Two towering figures in American mythology are largely responsible for this problem.

  The first is Franklin.

  The great historian of American ideas, Daniel Rodgers, reminds us that “the notion of a timeless ‘American work ethic’ is a myth.” For large swaths of our history, work was considered toilsome while leisure was considered preferable. All that changed in the nineteenth century as getting workers to show up at factories became a national imperative. As Rodgers puts it, “the elevation of work over leisure involved not an isolated choice but an ethos that permeated life and manners.” This “doctrine of the industrious life,” as Rodgers calls it, pervaded churches, political speeches, children’s storybooks.

  The patron saint of that doctrine was the bespectacled uncle of American industriousness, Poor Richard. First introduced in 1732, Poor Richard was the alter ego that Franklin used to issue an endless stream of maxims, witticisms, and wordplays, first in an annual almanac, then in the perennial bestseller The Way to Wealth. And make no mistake: wealth was the point. As Richard Huber writes in The American Idea of Success, Franklin “made a fortune in his own lifetime—then expanded it by telling others how he did it.”

  Above all, Franklin took the position that success was measured in money, and money was achieved by virtue. Many of the aphorisms he quoted most often reinforce the same point: Your success is determined by who you are. The values that are most important are industry (“Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”) and frugality (“A fat kitchen makes a lean will”), while the ones you should most avoid are idleness (“Laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes it”) and extravagance (“Waste neither time nor money”).

  Franklin severely narrowed the American ideal of work to the dubious proposition that character is destiny. The only way to achieve success is to have exemplary character; those without such character are doomed to failure. Both of those declarations, as we all now know, are questionable at best. On top of that, Franklin introduced a number of myths that soon became inseparable from American identity: Success is self-made, self-aggrandizing, self-justifying. And those limitations are before we ask the troublesome question of who was entitled to Franklin’s vision of success: in his mind, certainly not female Americans, Native Americans, or, for most of his life, enslaved Americans.

  As harmful as Franklin’s contributions were, the second prince of success was far worse.

  Horatio Alger is one of the more odious figures in American letters. Hardly self-made, he was the descendant of three pilgrims, a Revolutionary War general, and a member of the Constitutional Convention. His father was a Unitarian minister. After graduating from Harvard in 1852, Alger tried and failed at writing, taught in boarding schools, used illness to get out of serving in the Civil War, and eventually sought security as a pastor at a Unitarian church on Cape Cod. He abruptly left two years later, fleeing to New York at a moment when robber barons ruled and wharfs teemed with sixty thousand homeless “street urchins.” Alger eagerly befriended those boys; his interest “was excited,” he wrote.

  In 1868, Alger published Ragged Dick about one of those boys, an “industrious,” “generous,” “honest” fourteen-year-old, in the words of the back cover, with an “aristocratic” face, who, after being bullied and robbed, still dives into the East River to save a young lad, prompting a “wealthy industrialist” to give him a “well-paying job,” thus lifting him “from rags to riches.” It was an instant bestseller. Alger went on to write a hundred more.

  While widely read in his lifetime, Alger’s books exploded in popularity in the twentieth century, when the term Horatio Alger story became synonymous with success. After collectively selling eight hundred thousand copies in their first thirty years, Alger’s novels sold a million copies every year for the thirty years after that.

  What no one knew during that span was the real reason Alger fled Cape Cod—and likely the reason he was so “excited” to meet those street urchins in New York to begin with. In 1864, a thirteen-year-old boy at Alger’s church told his parents that the new pastor had molested him. An investigation soon found that his wasn’t an isolated case. Facing charges of “the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys,” Alger asked his father to intervene. The elder Alger wrote a letter begging for leniency: “I wish him to be able to enter upon the new life on which he has resolved with as little possible to prevent his success.”

  The letter succeeded. Alger’s crime was covered up, and he found redemption in New York as, of all things, a novelist of children’s literature. If we need a symbol of the warped story of success we’ve all been sold, I can think of no better example than a disgraced pedophile whose name embodies the American Dream and who got off scot-free for heinous crimes because of the timely intervention of Daddy.

  No wonder in the early twentieth century character was displaced as the sole arbiter of success. The new ideal, though, was hardly better.

  Personality.

  What Is a Success Story? Part II: The Cult of Personality

  Who gets to be the face of success? Why not Alicia Rodis?

  Alicia was the youngest of three girls of a Greek immigrant carpenter in suburban Cleveland and his much younger wife, a paralegal. “I grew up with my dad telling all sorts of stories about the Depression—sleeping in potato stacks and stealing watermelons to feed his family.”