Among those who mentioned charisma, Dan Gallagher, the Pennsylvania boy who carried a briefcase like his father, looked up to Indiana Jones, for his “stoic character and interest in ancient history.” Dan became a priest and classicist. Nathaniel Peterson, as a boy in Ohio, was enthralled with Jaws. “I appreciated the shark, as well as Spielberg’s dramatic filmmaking.” Nate became the TV host and YouTuber Coyote Peterson, making videos in which he allows himself to be stung by tarantulas, bullet ants, and executioner wasps. His channel, Brave Wilderness, has 20 million subscribers and 4.5 billion views.

  The stories we inherit from our parents are part of our script; we write them from characters we had no choice in creating. The stories we compose about our role models are part of our scripture; we write them from characters we alone choose and from characteristics we alone elect to admire. When you’re going through a workquake later in life, one of the most efficient ways to reconnect with your childhood dreams about work before they were corrupted by adult anxieties is to reconnect with your role models.

  To diagnose What is your what? today, start with What was your what? back then.

  Present: What’s the Best Thing and Worst Thing about Your Work Today?

  Then turn to What is your what? right now.

  Dame Julie Andrews went through a lot of whats in her seventy-five years of work. She was a vaudevillian, a singer, a radio actor, stage actor, a television actor, a movie actor, and a writer; she won six Golden Globes, three Grammys, two Emmys, one Tony, and one Academy Award; she starred in some of Hollywood’s most iconic films, including The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.

  In her seventies, Andrews began writing a two-volume autobiography. The first volume, Home, details her harrowing childhood involving war, poverty, drunkenness, even sexual advances from her stepfather, who twice tried to take her to bed. The second volume, Home Work, includes gut-wrenching descriptions of her self-doubts and depression; candid details of the drug problems of her second husband, the director Blake Edwards; and gossipy accounts of her most famous movies, including her being knocked to the ground nine times by a helicopter while filming the song “The Sound of Music.”

  At the end of Home Work, Andrews includes a brief epilogue. It begins with this thought: “I am often asked how I feel about the success I have enjoyed.” But what is success? she asks. Is it the pleasure in doing the work, or the way the work is received?

  Her answer: “The latter is ephemeral. The doing is everything.”

  For Julie Andrews, her what is the work.

  What is your what right now? Not six years ago. Not six months ago. Today.

  In 2001, Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski, two psychologists at the University of Michigan, published a milestone study that introduced the idea that became a foundation of narrative career construction. The idea was called job crafting. For too long, scholars focused almost exclusively on the passive, top-down model of a job, the authors wrote, in which tasks are assigned to a worker. Those scholars overlooked the worker’s active, bottom-up role in choosing their own tasks and then arranging them into a meaningful narrative.

  Job crafting is the process by which a worker takes the objective raw materials of a job and converts them into subjective psychological constructs that give the worker a sense of purpose. Line cooks view themselves as masters of cuisine, hairdressers as purveyors of self-worth.

  Builders as shelterers.

  These rhetorical flourishes, far from incidental, are core to a person’s ability to define who they are and why their work matters. Those who job craft most effectively are much happier at work. Dutton and Wrzesniewski offered the memorable example of Candice Walker, a hospital cleaner who viewed her job emptying bed pans and disposing of needles not as dehumanizing but as healing, and who described her workplace not as a sick ward but as a house of hope.

  Reflecting on their work decades later, the two researchers added an important amplification. As the pace of work has quickened and the ability of workers to assemble a collection of multiple jobs has grown, the new world of work has put “more and more responsibility on the individual” to craft their own stories. The workers who are most successful, Wrzesniewski said, are the ones who don’t focus on the prestige of the firm or the status of the position, both of which “burn off pretty quickly,” but on “the kind of work you’ll be doing every day because the work itself is engaging and because you feel that work matters.”

  In other words, know What is your what today? because only that knowledge will sustain you in the future.

  I asked people two questions to understand what attributes they most value in what they do. The first was, What are the top three emotions you feel during work?

  Forty-five percent listed three positive emotions. Ariel Daunay, the body healer, said empathy, peace, and gratitude. Chely Wright, the country music singer, said empathy, joy, and curiosity. Derrick Ray, the Alaska deep-sea fisherman turned Hawaii coffee farmer, said joy, appreciation, and bliss.

  Another 45 percent listed two positive emotions and one negative. Trevor Boffone, the TikTok Spanish teacher, said enjoyment, annoyance, and creativity. Sang Kim, the Goldman Sachs lawyer turned interior designer, said panic, satisfaction, and pride. Laura Spaulding, the crime scene cleanup specialist, said excitement, exhaustion, and ambition.

  The final 10 percent gave two negative emotions and one positive. Courtland Savage, the founder of Fly for the Culture, said stress, sadness, and joy. Wendy Chisholm, the Microsoft executive, said curiosity, frustration, and grief.

  The most important takeaway from these answers is that a majority of people mentioned at least one negative emotion. And these are people who love what they do! This finding is a reminder that experiencing some adverse feelings in your work is not enough of a reason to seek new work. Even the happiest people at work are unhappy with certain aspects of their work.

  So what does constitute a reason to make a change?

  The second question I asked offers some clues. That question was, What’s the best thing about your work today and what’s the worst thing?

  The worst things people mentioned largely paralleled their negative emotions and were more or less what you’d expect. The top answers were stress, dealing with difficult people, too much grunt work, and long hours.

  But the best things people mentioned were more enlightening. Ten percent said that the best thing about their work was the freedom. Karen Noel, the Kansas native who left her thirty-year job as a bank manager to become a long-haul truck driver, said that what she liked best about her work was that she could set her own hours. “I can drive when I want to drive, eat when I want to eat, and sleep when I want to sleep. I could make $30,000 a month if I really wanted to.” Nishita Kothary, an interventional radiologist at Stanford University Medical Center who’s both a clinician and a professor, said that the best thing about her work was the flexibility in her schedule. “If my cases are done, I can go home. I don’t have to be at work for work’s sake. Plus, I tend to be fast, which means I can be with my family when I need.”

  Eighteen percent of people were like Julie Andrews: They valued the work itself. Nate Venturelli, the steelworker in Indiana who performed country music gigs on the weekend, said, “I would wake up and weld every day if I could. I’ve always been interested in welding, and I enjoy it. I realize not many people feel that way, but I do.” Wynne Nowland, the Long Island insurance executive, said, “The best part is strategizing. Coming up with different techniques to propel the company forward, whether it’s a new sales procedure we’re instituting or looking for a strategic acquisition.”

  The vast majority, though—72 percent—said that what they liked best about their work was the people. Not the work, not the money, not the accolades.

  The people.

  But which people? For some it was their colleagues. Dominique Turrentine, a Bay Area native and LSU alumna who works as a program officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said, “I get to work with some of the dopest people I’ve ever met, like people I consider family. As much as I complain about this place, they help me feel passionate about it.”

  Joey Clift, an aspiring comedian who went to Washington State University to become a weatherman because he “didn’t see any Native American comedians on television,” eventually cracked the comedy world. He landed eighty-two gigs in his first ten years, including Looney Tunes and Nickelodeon. (He also created the LA Underground Cat Network, a thirteen-thousand-member Facebook group for Los Angeles comedians to share pictures of their cats.) Today, Joey works at Netflix on “the first-ever animated TV show about Native American people, created by Native American people, in the one-hundred-and-fifty-year history of animation.” The best thing about his work? “I love to make my colleagues laugh. There’s something cool about being in a writers room, saying a dumb idea, and watching everybody get the joke.”

  But the single most popular quality people like in their work is the people whose lives they improve. Fifty-two percent of people mentioned this attribute as their favorite. Cassie Barrett was the executive assistant to a bank president in North Carolina when the death of her stepmother spurred her to follow her passion of becoming a green funeral director. She now heads operations at Carolina Memorial Sanctuary in Asheville. “What I like best is holding space for the families we serve. We meet people when they’re in pain; our job is to reduce that pain. There’s a Buddhist practice called tonglen, which means ‘giving and taking.’ We take people’s suffering and give them love in return.”

  Alexandra Herold, a child of fashion entrepreneurs in New Jersey, lost her mother, Patti, to a brain tumor when she was a teenager. She also grew up close to her cousin Ricky, who used a wheelchair.

  As a child, Alex felt plagued by insecurities because of dyslexia, ADHD, and an undiagnosed auditory processing disorder. “My mom really empowered me to embrace my disability, to self-advocate.” When Alex was transitioning to ninth grade, her middle school put all the students with disabilities on a bus and took them to the high school. “It was a terrible, terrible experience. Many of the students started crying because they didn’t know they were different. Then once we arrived, all the high schoolers knew exactly who to pick on. I got back from that trip, walked into the principal’s office, and said, ‘Tell me you’ll never do it again.’ ”

  In college, Alex volunteered at an organization that matched disabled students with mentors and then went to work for them full time after graduating. She quit to follow her boyfriend to Denver and sank into depression. Alex was scrolling through Pinterest one day looking for a way to “manifest my future,” when she came across a shirt with magnetic fasteners instead of buttons.

  “Both my parents were salespeople. I see this shirt—it’s ugly; it’s boxy; it’s poorly designed—and I think, Holy shit! This is brilliant. It’s a button-down shirt you don’t have to button.”

  Alex immediately tracked down the woman who made it. Her name was Maura Horton, and her husband, a college football coach, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s and was humiliated he couldn’t button his shirt in front of his players in the locker room. “I asked her if anyone had reached out to her about bringing companies like hers together.”

  When she said no, Alex said, “I will.” Today her adaptive fashion online marketplace, Patti + Ricky, includes one hundred brands selling five thousand products ranging from unicorn eye patches to leopard-skin canes to camouflaged tracheotomy covers.

  “I believe I was born to do what I’m doing,” Alex said. “The best part of my work is when I speak with customers and help them find products that can change their lives.”

  What is her what?

  “Bringing people together.”

  The common element in many of these answers is that helping others is the sleeper motivation of modern work. It’s not a requirement to be happy, but if you’re looking for the most popular what, it’s the one on top.

  Future: I Want to Do Work That ____________

  That brings us to the future and your answer to the question What is your what? going forward.

  At this moment in my life, I want to do work that ____________.

  For Ninah Davis, the answer was independence. Ninah grew up in Chicago and was sixteen when her father had congestive heart failure. “In the Black home, when the dad isn’t working, the first thought is, Oh no, are we going to be homeless?” So Ninah dropped out of high school, worked two jobs, and attended night classes. “I learned that work was not hard for me and that I could enjoy it. But I never want to be beholden to somebody else.” Today she’s an intuitive energy healer, an interfaith minister, and the creator of the personal development startup Natal+Home. “I want to do work that helps others be free.”

  For Ericka Rodriguez, the answer was purpose. Ericka, who is a third-generation descendant of California farm workers and whose childhood role model was the primatologist and animal activist Jane Goodall, worked in the legal marijuana business, sold time-shares, and ultimately concluded she preferred work that served her passion for veganism. “I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and it was life changing. I was always an animal lover, and I was shocked to discover that all the makeup I owned was tested on lab animals. The book encouraged me to start formulating my own natural lipstick, even though I have no background in chemistry.”

  With her fiancé, Ericka moved to Bali for a year, because “it’s a big entrepreneurial hub,” then to Bend, Oregon, “because it has a big mountain biking culture.” The two lived in an Airbnb while Ericka launched Axiology, a “100 percent vegan, cruelty-free, affordable makeup line.” In its first year, Axiology did $150,000 of sales. “I realized I wanted to do work that aligns with my values.”

  For Kelly Lively, the answer was pride. Kelly grew up in “a little cornfield in Iowa. There were two hundred people in my entire school, K through twelve.” Her parents leased and managed service stations, with her father serving as mechanic and her mother running the office. “My mother was very much the dominant personality. It never occurred to me that there were men things and women things to do.”

  Kelly’s parents moved to Idaho three weeks after she graduated from high school. “My sister and I bawled the entire way. She, because she was popular; me, because I didn’t even know if Idaho had indoor plumbing.” Kelly went to work at the local Ace Hardware, then at an auto parts store, before landing a job as a secretary at Idaho National Laboratory, the country’s largest nuclear research facility.

  “I worked with a bunch of engineers who were overhauling the refueling systems of nuclear submarine reactors. They would write step-by-step procedures, and I would type them up.”

  Kelly progressed through a series of jobs, each with greater security clearance, each with more responsibility. “I learned about quality assurance and dimensional lab inspection. I learned about magnetic particle testing and liquid penetrant testing.” But she knew she was trapped. “I was making a glorious fifteen dollars an hour. That was good change back then, but I saw the writing on the wall. I needed to go to college.” Kelly was married by then and eager to have children. “My academic clock and my biological clock rang at the same time.” Over the next five years, she had two children while earning a degree in electrical engineering. She also faced a nonwork workquake.

  “My marriage was not my happy place. My husband grew up in the South and had traditional values. How he ended up falling in love with a woman as independent as I am, I have no idea. I thought having children would help our marriage; it did just the opposite. It made me realize how much I valued myself. I had to make a choice between staying home to make him happy or going back to work and making myself proud.”

  Kelly chose the latter. As the manager of radioisotope power systems and the chief liaison with NASA for all space missions, Kelly became the highest-ranking woman in her office. For the launch of NASA’s Perseverance land rover on a mission to Mars, Kelly was “the first woman and the only woman” chosen to escort two thermonuclear power generators from Idaho to Cape Canaveral.

  “When my assignment was announced, I got a few phone calls. How can a woman have the stamina to perform this mission? How can she travel alone with all these men? That was ridiculous. Frankly, it made me even more determined to prove them wrong.”

  The generator arrived on time and unharmed.

  “What I discovered about myself is that there always are going to be challenges, but I’m capable of meeting them. Especially as a woman, I may not always have the self-confidence. If anything, I have to put my competence over my confidence. But I’ve learned that at the end of the day, I care far less about what other people think and care far more about what makes me proud.”

  Independence. Purpose. Pride.

  For Ninah, for Ericka, for Kelly—for most of us—What is your what? rarely comes down to what you do. More often it comes down to what you make of what you do. What words you assign to the numbers in your control. What story you tell about the actions you take that makes you proud of who you are.

  Chapter 8

  When Is Your When?

  I’m at a Moment in My Life When ____________

  I have been fishing commercially for seventeen years, and up until the summer of 1997, nobody cared.”

  That tantalizing sentence opens Linda Greenlaw’s 1999 bestseller, The Hungry Ocean. Greenlaw, a Connecticut native who spent summers in Maine, paid her way through college by working on a swordfishing boat. After college, she went to work on the boat full time and was eventually named captain of the Gloria Dawn, making her the first and only female captain of a swordfishing vessel in the Americas.