“It’s the story that stitches together past, present, and future.”

  If only there were a simple, easy-to-remember method to help all of us write better stories.

  There is.

  In April 1900, the English writer Rudyard Kipling, a few years shy of winning the Nobel Prize, published a short story in Ladies’ Home Journal called “The Elephant’s Child.” The story would later be included in Just So Stories, the collection of bedtime tales he composed for his daughter Justine, which earned its name because if Kipling misplaced a word, Justine would open her eyes and insist it be placed just so.

  “The Elephant’s Child” ends with a poem called “I Keep Six Honest Serving-Men.” It begins:

  I keep six honest serving-men;

  (They taught me all I knew)

  Their names are What and Why and When

  And How and Where and Who.

  These six questions, invoked as far back as antiquity, came to be called the Kipling questions and were soon being taught in writing classes around the world as the best way to construct a good story. In a surprising twist of personal archaeology: not until mentioning this rubric in my conversations did I recall that I had a poster from The New York Times on my bedroom wall as a teenager that featured these questions.

  What I found in asking people about how they navigated their biggest workquakes is that these were the questions people were already asking. And no wonder. Who, what, when, where, why, and how have helped storytellers craft better stories for centuries; they can help us today.

  The rest of this book explores how to use these questions to write the story of success you need. Each chapter is devoted to one question. In keeping with the structure of the meaning audit, each question is broken down into three subquestions: one about the past, one about the present, one about the future. The question about the future is posed in the form of a fill-in-the-blank answer: I want to be the kind of person who ____________, I want to do work that ____________, I’m at a moment in life when ____________, and so on. In the conclusion, we’ll put all these statements together to create a rough draft of your work story right now.

  The famed virologist Jonas Salk once observed that solutions come from asking the right questions, because the answer already exists. “You don’t invent the answer; you reveal the answer.”

  The same is true for the story of your work life.

  When you don’t know what to do, do this: these are the six questions to ask in a workquake.

  III

  THE SIX QUESTIONS TO ASK IN A WORKQUAKE

  Chapter 6

  Who Is Your Who?

  I Want to Be the Kind of Person Who ________________

  Ayad Akhtar is an American playwright and winner of the Pulitzer Prize who wrote a novel called Homeland Elegies about an American playwright named Ayad Akhtar who wins the Pulitzer Prize. The novel mixes fact and fiction—“It’s me, but it’s not me,” Akhtar the author has said of Akhtar the character—so it’s impossible to know for sure whether any particular scene is real or made-up. But the truth is, all of us face this ambiguity in the stories we tell, especially the ones about our upbringings.

  Which is why one scene in the novel is so affecting. Akhtar’s mother, trapped in a loveless marriage with a doctor who’s having an affair, finds refuge in books. “I never truly felt loved by her,” Akhtar writes. “I saw now that the source of my life’s work—reading, literature, theater—was in part the pursuit of something as simple as my mother’s gaze, a gaze she gave happily to books.”

  Surely it wasn’t a coincidence, he writes, that he, too, sought comfort in books. “Wasn’t I seeking her attention? Isn’t that what I really wanted as I would sidle up to her warm body on the couch as she read, a book of my own in hand?”

  The first reality we have to confront as we start to construct a healthy story about work is that we’re not the only characters in those stories. Each of us takes into consideration a wider array of whos than we think. Our dramatis personae, as playwrights call it, is amazingly complex. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, writes, “We like to think of ourselves as individuals, capable of making up our own minds about what we think is important.” But it’s never really that easy. “We rarely, if ever, make decisions completely independently and in isolation.”

  In the case of work, our scriptures teem with parents, grandparents, teachers, neighbors, coaches, bosses, lovers, spouses, exes, children, grandchildren, even pets. Like Horton, none of us hears a single who. We all live in a roaring Whoville.

  The first question to ask in a workquake is who are these whos, what are they trying to say to you, and which ones should you prioritize at this moment?

  Judy Cockerton spent her whole life surrounded by whos. Born into a sprawling ranching family in Walnut Creek, California, Judy grew up engulfed in aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. “Everyone invested in everyone else’s well-being.” Judy’s mother was a stay-at-home mom; her father trained firefighters. They passed on the family’s creed of caring for others. “Once, we were driving to Disneyland, and my dad saw a train that had caught on fire. He pulled to the side of the road, jumped out of the car, and ran to help the rescue team.”

  Judy’s biggest who, though, was her grandmother. “She was born in Bakersfield in 1892. When she was ten, her father got a covered wagon and moved all their sheep to a ranch near Sacramento. She raised nine children and two grandchildren.”

  When Judy was in junior high school, she met her next who: the little brother of her best friend had hearing loss. “I just wanted to learn everything about that world.” Judy enrolled at Lewis & Clark to study special education. She married a photojournalist named Arthur, moved to Boston, and started teaching.

  Then she gave birth to her own children, who redirected her life once more. With her roots in West Coast ranch country, Judy was appalled by all the plastic toys in East Coast suburbs. “I decided to open a specialty toy store and serve families that way.” She concentrated on high-quality products—Thomas the Tank Engine, Playmobil, Radio Flyer. “If my kids wanted anything from Toys ‘R’ Us, they went with Arthur. If they wanted quality, they came to me.”

  Her stores were named Best in Boston. Judy’s life was settled.

  Then a new who appeared—actually, two.

  “Arthur always brought home the most interesting articles because he was a newspaperman. One night he slides this article across the dinner table. ‘I think you should read this.’ It was about a five-month-old boy who was in foster care. In the middle of the day, the foster mom goes down the street to pick up her kindergartener. When she returns, the baby’s been kidnapped.”

  Judy’s own children were teenagers by this point; they were putting their dishes in the sink and heading out. “Guys, could you come back for a minute?” Judy said. “I think we need to have a family meeting.” By the time the meeting ended, the four of them had decided to become a foster family. Judy and Arthur went through a training program; when it was over, they were told to sit tight, they could be waiting for months.

  The next day the agency called. “I was in the store making the toys look pretty. The woman said, ‘I have two beautiful little sisters. They’re five months old and seventeen months old. Will you open your home for them?’ ”

  Judy was dumbstruck. “We didn’t have our certificate. We didn’t have supplies. Our extra bedroom was full of tools. I called Arthur in a panic. What should we do?”

  They accepted the offer. Judy was so desperate that she did the one thing she vowed never to do. “I drove directly to Toys ‘R’ Us. I found a saleswoman in the diapers aisle and told her I was going to become a mom of two infants in two hours. She looked at me. ‘You’re going to need another cart.’ ”

  Judy filled three carts with diapers, formula, car seats, and highchairs. “Three minutes after I got home, the social worker drove up; Arthur zoomed in to take pictures; and we started a new life.”

  But the thing about whos is, they don’t stop changing your life once you meet them.

  Judy was eager to learn everything she could about foster care. While rocking her babies to sleep, she started reading and quickly drew two conclusions. “One, how broken the system was. Two, how most Americans would like to help, but asking them to become parents is simply too much to ask.”

  Judy had an idea. She requested a meeting with the head of children and families for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “His name was Harry Spence. I didn’t know this at the time, but he was legendary.”

  Judy described her dream: she wanted to build an intergenerational community where young families who raised foster children would live alongside older adults who would provide additional love, talent, and wisdom. “Imagine how absurd this situation was. I own a toy store. I’ve been a foster parent for six weeks. I walk into this guy’s office and announce I want to reenvision foster care in America. I actually used that language! I was so naive.”

  Spence was not naive, though. He knew exactly how impossible her dream was.

  “And he leans across the table and says, ‘Yes, please.’ ”

  Harry Spence became Judy’s ultimate who.

  Judy sold her stores. She opened a nonprofit. She started driving around Massachusetts “finding out who was who.” She raised $15 million. And four years later she opened Treehouse in Easthampton, Massachusetts; it included a dozen town houses for families, four dozen elder cottages, and multiple playgrounds and playing fields, all built on a horseshoe-shaped road. Fifteen years later, two dozen communities across the United States were copying her model.

  The girl who had looked up to her grandmother for raising a multigenerational family had created a rubric for multiple generations to raise families together.

  “I was born on May 11,” Judy said, “which is often around Mother’s Day. When I was eight, we were at a huge park to celebrate my grandmother, because she was the matriarch. My sister turned to me. ‘Aren’t you unhappy that nobody’s paying attention to you?’ I said, ‘No, I want to be her.’ ”

  And what lesson did she most take away from her grandmother?

  “Never ask, Who’s paying attention to me? Always ask, Who needs me? We are here to serve.”

  Who needs you? Who inspires you? Who haunts you? Who drives you?

  Who brings you closer to who you want to be?

  Who is your who?

  The following three questions will help you find out.

  Past: What Were the Values of Work You Learned from Your Parents?

  The first place to start is with the first whos in your life and what they taught you about work.

  In a series of letters in the 1880s, the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov introduced what would become one of the more quoted principles in the history of theater: “If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then the pistol must fire in the last act.” While Chekhov’s gun is most often used as advice to writers of plays, it actually works even better in reverse as advice to writers of life stories.

  If a pistol fires in the last act, then someone must have hung it on the wall in the first act.

  The first question to ask in a workquake is, What were the values of work that your parents hung on your wall when you were young?

  Today, everyone accepts on some level that our earliest memories shape our later lives. Yet we rarely incorporate those memories into our work narratives. A central part of writing a constructive work story is to integrate your childhood suffering into your adult success. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald observed, the goal is “to turn our ghosts into ancestors.”

  In my conversations, I asked everyone two questions about their ancestors: First, What were the prominent values or virtues of work that you learned from your parents? Second, What were the prominent downsides or shadows of work you learned from your parents?

  The answers to the first question were instructive; the answers to the second, definitional.

  Let’s start with the first.

  Two thirds of people said that the primary value they learned from their parents was hard work. Dan Gallagher, the Catholic priest turned classics professor, said he admired the discipline of his middle-class father, who sold gasoline in Pittsburgh. “He basically worked nine to five and carried a briefcase. I thought that was pretty neat, so I got my own briefcase, basically a crayon box stuffed with paper. I decided that my office was the front yard, so I would carry my briefcase to the sycamore tree, open it up, and since I didn’t know what my dad did, just start drawing.”

  Andrew Gauthier, who went from being an indie filmmaker to the head of video at BuzzFeed to the creative director of the DNC, said he learned from his parents to always keep working. “My dad was an oil painter and an illustrator; he took two days off every year—Christmas and the Fourth of July. My memories of him were that he was always in front of an easel on deadline. What I took from that is you always work really, really hard, you make money wherever you can, and you never complain.”

  The next biggest group said that they learned from their parents to love what you do. Shelby Smith, the daughter of Iowa farmers who moved to Dublin to play pro basketball and landed a high-six-figure job trading equity derivatives for the National Bank of Canada, walked away to return home and raise crickets for roasting. What she learned from her parents was that work should be enjoyable. “If you love what you do, you don’t have to take a vacation. That’s why I left a well-paying job for self-employment. My grandmother started a successful company in her forties.”

  The final group said that they learned from their parents the importance of being true to yourself. Morgan Gold, the Connecticut-born aspiring comic book writer who became a financial services executive before opening a farm in Vermont, noted that both of his parents had changed professions. His father was a special ed teacher who became an HR professional; his mother was a nurse who became a drug and alcohol counselor. “They both were going down a path, then made a pivot. Looking in retrospect, I guess I’ve done something very similar.”

  What’s striking about these stories is that the values we learn from our parents are not static and they’re not gospel; we might take one lesson from our parents at a certain time in our lives, then another later. Which is why it’s so critical to revisit these questions in a workquake.

  The same is true for the downsides we learn from our parents, which, it turns out, we have a tendency to repeat.

  A third of people said that the biggest drawback they learned from their parents was the risk of overworking. Marcus Bridgewater was born in Orlando to immigrant parents. “The men in my family didn’t have a lot of time for emotions. They were strong and worked hard but were hurt by all the pressure to pay bills and put the family first. The downside for me was that I had to learn to take care of myself.” Trained as a set designer, Marcus today runs a wildly popular wellness platform under the name Garden Marcus where he posts videos about self-care through botany from his six-hundred-plant garden in North Houston to three hundred thousand Instagram followers and seven hundred thousand TikTok followers.

  Aaron Krause was raised in Philadelphia by parents who were “very well respected, extremely hardworking, and monster overachievers.” His father was a cardiac surgeon, his mother a pediatrician; his sister grew up to become a federal judge. “I was absolutely the black sheep. I liked sports, hanging out with friends, and couldn’t stand reading.” Aaron’s father was a stickler for money and made his son buy his own toys. “He gave me a list of things I could do for money. Clean your room—one dollar. Wash the car—ten dollars. My thirteenth birthday present was ‘Son, congratulations, from now on you buy your own underwear.’ ” His father also kept the house so cold that to avoid getting out of bed to turn off the lights, Aaron used casters, dental floss, and a pulley to jury-rig an over-the-ceiling switch.

  That tinkering paid off. Aaron went on to open a car-detailing company, which led him to realize that the pads people used to buff cars were inferior. So he patented and started manufacturing a buffing pad that he sold to 3M for tens of millions of dollars. Aaron then took some of the leftover materials in his shop and concocted a smiley-faced sponge with finger holes for eyes and a knife cleaner for a mouth. He called his invention Scrub Daddy. When it flopped on QVC, he launched it on Shark Tank. The company grew to half a billion dollars, making Aaron, well, a monster overachiever who mimicked the hardworking style of his parents.

  A quarter of people said the biggest downside they learned from their parents was the strain that working put on their family. Curtis Basina, a gas station owner and member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin, said he inherited a work ethic from his math teacher father that was so extreme that it “interfered” with his life. “My wife, until recently, went on vacations without me because she told me repeatedly that there really is more to life than work.” When Curtis and his wife finally took a trip together, they stopped at a roadside craft distillery for a drink; it was there he got the idea to open Copper Crow, a vodka and whiskey distillery on the shores of Lake Superior, the first Native-owned distillery in the country.

  Another quarter of people said that watching their parents do work that made them unhappy encouraged them to seek work that was meaningful. Jeff Cadry was raised in suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota, by a father who was a banker and a mother who was a schoolteacher. Because his mother had summers off, the family moved to the lake region, leaving his father with a three-hour commute. “What I took from that was you spend a lot of your life either working or commuting, so you better do something that you’re passionate about.” Today he’s the chief forester—and a part-time ski instructor—at the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana.