By this point, Troy was feeling buried. “I had been running around for almost twenty years. I was worried I was becoming an absolute dick, and I wanted to make sure my children knew me before they went to college.” So he walked away from the corporate world entirely. Recalling a boyhood passion for graphic design, he opened an art gallery with friends in Atlanta that specialized in underrepresented artists telling narrative stories. “I want to be a custodian for cultures that are about to be lost.”

  So what advice would Troy give his younger self facing that long line of desks?

  “On my first trip to the United States, in 1969, I watched the moon landing from my aunt’s apartment. Twenty years later, I was designing satellites for NASA. Did I experience difficulty? Tell me about it. But one thing you find among immigrants is the mentality that yeah, this is the land of milk and honey, but you have to earn it. So I would tell my younger self what Lloyd told me: Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do. This is your story; own it.”

  Why I Wrote This Book

  I never intended to write this book.

  When I was nine, I was summoned to a family ritual. Awakened by my mother on a Saturday morning, I dressed in baby-blue corduroys and a white dress shirt, stepped through the sliding glass door in back of our home in Savannah, Georgia, and walked the few steps to my grandparents’ house. My grandmother prepared her signature breakfast: one scrambled egg, one plate of hand-cut french fries, one glass of milk, and one Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut.

  Afterward, I climbed into my grandfather’s Ford, and he drove seven miles per hour through a dozen stoplights to a one-story, white brick building downtown. Inside, behind a giant oak desk, I learned to file, type, and keep ledgers as tenants delivered monthly rent payments of eighteen or twenty-two dollars. Look them in the eye. Ask about their family. Thank them. All while my grandfather, in his suspenders and brown oxfords, kept his hand on my shoulder and his eye on my work.

  At exactly noon, we would get back into the car, and Papa would tell stories—about the first car he drove in Mississippi, the first airplane he rode in Florida, the first air conditioner he enjoyed in Georgia. The message in those mornings could not have been clearer.

  Son, the most important thing in life is work.

  Not family, not faith, not love.

  Work.

  And work in a way that was part of a long line of traditions. Of building things and making sacrifices, of handshakes and hair tonic, of masculinity and industriousness.

  But while I was listening to those stories and hearing those messages, I was harboring a misgiving. I didn’t dream of doing that kind of work. I didn’t want to tell that kind of story.

  Instead, there was another place in that one-story building that contained an alternative script of my life. It was a walk-in bank vault from the Mosler Safe Company in Hamilton, Ohio. Inside was a file with my name on it kept by my father. It contained programs from my piano recitals, stacks of letters from summer camp (Who writes twelve-page letters home from camp? I did!), and stapled collections of every poem I ever wrote.

  Every Saturday of my childhood I would walk through that sliding glass door, endure those long drives, and try to detangle those conflicting strands of my identity. The earnest, dutiful, expected life; the risky, alternative, creative one. The life at the desk or the one in the vault.

  The linear path or the nonlinear one.

  But just as my string of Saturdays ended, I received a chilling warning. Six weeks before I graduated from high school, my grandfather, soon after learning he had a chronic disease, scribbled a note—I cannot live a sick man—took a pistol, and shot himself.

  He might as well have said, If I cannot work, I cannot live.

  For me, the impact of that moment was that all those straight lines I had been raised to follow became a crypt I was determined to avoid. Three months later, I boarded a train for college and took one last trip on an old-fashioned, industrial line that my grandfather would have loved into a newfangled, postindustrial world he never would have understood, where all the lines are crooked and all the sources of meaning are scrambled.

  A world where work is no longer defined by giant oak desks and well-polished oxfords.

  But by countless personal vaults storing vats of untapped dreams.

  A world where success cannot be written for you.

  Success can be written only by you.

  For years I believed those tensions were unique to me. After graduating from college, I resisted pressure to go to law school or Wall Street and instead moved to Japan to teach junior high school. Two years later, I sold a memoir about that experience. In the three decades since, I’ve written books, made television, given speeches. I’ve also survived waves of changes in the various industries where I work and endured countless moments of fear and doubt.

  But I’ve never written about these themes. If anything, I’ve been drawn to topics—family, health, spirituality, meaning—that seemed far removed from the modern workplace. In the unspoken divisions of contemporary life, work involves hard skills; I specialize in soft skills.

  But something meaningful shifted in the last few years. The world of work moved in my direction. With more women in the workplace and more men in the family space, once rigid divisions between work and life became more porous. The widespread adoption of work from anywhere blew those divisions to smithereens. Suddenly topics like happiness, purpose, balance, and joy became inseparable from topics like salary, benefits, productivity, and success.

  Suddenly everybody went soft.

  As that confluence was happening, another seismic shift was erupting in the workplace: a movement to ask, Who gets to be the face of success in the first place? With the lifting of long-held compacts of silence, generations of frustration came pouring into view. More and more people were finally asserting, I want a seat at the table. I want to share my story.

  Everyone, it seems, was battling demons. Everyone had wings they wanted to spread.

  These frustrations resonated with me. I was raised Jewish in the American South at a time when antisemitism was not abstract and hidden but tangible and open. I have visceral memories of my grandfather driving me around town, saying, That bank won’t lend to you; that club won’t admit you; that company won’t hire you. Also, following decades of building a professional identity around being a traveler and a walker, I suddenly lost the ability to walk for a few years in my forties and developed a long-term disability when bone cancer ravaged my left femur and thigh. After having my leg rebuilt with titanium, a transplanted fibula, and screws in my knee and pelvis, I also had to rebuild my work life.

  Although my internal narrative may include these challenges, I’ve come to appreciate in recent years that my external narrative does not. I’ve become much more aware of—and more grateful for—my blessings.

  Still, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned in decades of writing about other people and cultures is the honor you pay another person by looking them in the eye, saying, Please tell me your story. I had just completed a massive undertaking of that nature when all these forces were converging.

  Spurred by a raft of personal crises—illness, near bankruptcy, a string of suicide attempts by my father—I crisscrossed the country a few years ago collecting life stories of hundreds of Americans who’d been through wrenching life changes. I called this effort the Life Story Project.

  The book I wrote about that experience, Life Is in the Transitions, was published just as the tsunami of change was reaching the shore. Seemingly overnight, the entire world was in a life transition. Shorn from their routines, tens of millions of people began questioning their most basic assumptions—about their relationships, their values, their beliefs. No arena of life was more disrupted than work, as unheard-of numbers of Americans started to rethink what they were doing, where they were doing it, why they were doing it, and with whom they were doing it.

  Suddenly, the dominant conversation touched on all the questions I had been immersed in since those Saturday mornings with my grandfather.

  Do I want to be a bit character in someone else’s story, or do I want to be the hero of my own?

  My story had finally merged with everyone else’s.

  I wanted to do something to help.

  “My Friends Thought I Was Insane”

  Meroë Park grew up about as far removed from the epicenters of American power as possible—on a farm in Jasper, Oregon. Her father, a Korean immigrant, was a physics professor, her mother a musician. “I grew up in a time of assimilation. My father’s greatest desire was that I wouldn’t stand out in any way. For my sixteenth birthday, he gave me the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.”

  Meroë had other priorities. Her parents split when she was six, and her primary focus was holding the family together. “As a child of divorce, I always felt like a peacemaker.” For college, she followed that instinct to Washington, DC, enrolling at Georgetown. After graduating, she took the foreign service exam and “went with the brand name.”

  She joined the CIA.

  “I was worried what my dad would think. Not many people who grew up outside the United States have a great association with the CIA. But it fit with his goal of not wanting a lot of attention.”

  Meroë’s first assignment was the agency’s most coveted: a seat on the Soviet desk. She analyzed science and technology, wrote classified reports, briefed policy makers. And she hated it. “I thought, I don’t want to do this for thirty years.”

  So she did something no one thought was a good idea: she switched to management. “There are three jobs in the CIA: the spies, the analysts, and the support people. I became a support person. My friends thought I was insane. You’re leaving the most prestigious part of the agency for the least prestigious?”

  Meroë thought she could make both parts better, though. She became special assistant to the deputy director; she joined working groups; she was asked to be the chief aide to the director. Meroë faced pushback. “Many times, I’d go to a meeting with my chief of staff, who was a white man, and everyone would immediately go shake his hand, assuming he was senior.” But she also experienced accommodation. When the director asked her to join his team, Meroë was pregnant with her first child.

  “I told him, ‘I’d love to take this job, but I have to take care of myself, too.’ He told me, ‘Do what you need to do.’ So every afternoon, I’d go into the dining room, lie on the couch, and sleep for thirty minutes. Then I’d get up and go back to work.”

  No sooner did Meroë reach that pinnacle than she again appeared to sabotage herself. After a stint overseas, she returned and took over . . . payroll. “Now everyone knew I was idiotic.” Her next job was even less illustrious: she ran HR. “I hadn’t really managed a team that size.”

  But her next job proved that her unconventional choices could yield conventional results: Meroë was appointed executive director and chief operating officer of the CIA, the highest civil servant position in the agency. “I’ve never been a vertical person; I’ve always been a horizontal person. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t ambitious or didn’t care about doing well. But I was more interested in doing whatever I was doing well than in reaching for the next big thing.”

  Which may be why she reached the biggest thing of all. In January 2017, in the middle of one of the most tumultuous moments in the agency’s history, Meroë Park became acting director of the CIA, the first minority woman to hold that position. By trying not to have a career, Meroë ended up with one of the more distinguished careers in the history of American intelligence.

  By trying not to draw attention to herself, Meroë drew the attention of the world.

  “When I talk to young people, the first thing I tell them is: ‘There’s an updated version of the American Dream. You can be a success even if you’re not the typical poster child of success.’

  “The next thing I tell them is: ‘Don’t always focus on moving up. Look for opportunities to raise your hand—join a working group, take an unexpected position, do something that scares you.’

  “The final thing I tell them is: ‘You don’t have to do what your parents want. You don’t have to do what your colleagues want. You only have to do what you want.’

  “You can be you.”

  The Work Story Interview

  What I did was create the Work Story Project. Over the next two years, I collected the work stories of scores of Americans of all walks of life. In keeping with current trends in both popular and academic writing, I set out to assemble as widespread and diverse a population of subjects as possible.

  My primary focus was on the type of work people do. Using Department of Labor statistics, I made a bingo card of popular jobs. The card had five groupings—life, creative, industrial, knowledge, and world—and twenty-five categories, including health, education, arts, construction, energy, and first responders. In the end, I had equal distribution among all the categories. I also sought out people in a wide array of organizations—from Fortune 500 companies to startups, multinationals to mom-and-pops—as well as in a cross section of roles—from CEOs to line workers, entrepreneurs to activists.

  My final list included teachers, bankers, marketers, managers, nuns, novelists, firefighters, fitness instructors, truck drivers, sex workers, safecrackers, welders, brewers, doctors, farmers, comedians, mediums, nuclear physicists, and TikTok plantfluencers.

  My next focus was on demographic diversity. The individuals you’ll meet in these pages come from forty states and five generations. They are evenly female and male, with a handful of nonbinary individuals. They range from high school dropouts to PhDs, with two thirds having at least some higher education. On income, while many overcame extreme poverty and others were born into privilege, as a rule I steered away from the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich and concentrated on people who are part of the broad middle class. (For detailed demographics, see sources.)

  Finally, guided by government data showing that minority workers have become the majority of new hires, as well as larger shifts in the culture that have seen Americans embrace workers of a wide spectrum of identities, beliefs, and abilities, I aimed to speak with as many people as possible from underrepresented backgrounds. These backgrounds include race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as physical and mental disabilities.

  My goal in assembling these individuals was to create not just a more well-rounded portrait of the workplace than is common in similar accounts but also a more accurate window into where that workplace is headed in the future. In addition, my hope was that by speaking with such a wide cross section of workers in a broad spectrum of fields in all corners of the country, I might uncover clues to many of the pressing issues around work today that are normally discussed using only limited populations, from how to avoid burnout to how to master transitions to how to find your true purpose.

  One more note about these individuals: They love what they do. There are paeans to people who don’t like their work, and poems bemoaning drudgery. This project focuses on the opposite end of the spectrum. Just as positive psychology looks at individuals who are well-adjusted to see what they can teach the rest of us, this book looks at people who enjoy their work to see what they can teach those of us who aspire to do the same.

  What I did with these people is something I call the Work Story Interview. What scholars term life stories—or, in the case of this project, work stories—differ in meaningful ways from typical journalistic interviews. They’re more sweeping, more structured, and more intimate. They’re also more time-consuming. Most scholarship in the field of narrative psychology includes anywhere from a handful of subjects up to a few dozen. For this book I did 155 interviews. The total number of hours was 500. Combined with the interviews I did for the Life Story Project, I have now collected in four years nearly 400 life stories, totaling 1,500 hours, whose transcripts together run more than 10,000 pages.

  Each interview had three sections. The first covered the person’s work history, including the values they learned from their parents, the qualities they admired in their role models, and every workquake they experienced. The second focused on their work today—from how many jobs they have to what aspect of their work they find most meaningful. The third drilled down to how these individuals navigated their biggest workquake, including the best question they asked and the best advice they received. I concluded by asking everyone what their story says about the American Dream.

  Next I hired a team of ten people, and we spent a year coding these stories for 153 variables, creating a massive database of every imaginable question about work. Altogether we generated three times the amount of data I had from the Life Story Project.

  My priority throughout was simple: How can I help people find more meaning through work?

  “Sometimes Life Has Other Plans for You”

  Trevor Boffone was the youngest of three born into a “run-of-the-mill, middle-class family” in New Orleans. His father ran a company that ferried oil along the Gulf Coast; his mother taught school. “My parents were doing well financially, but right when I was born, there was an oil crisis, and they lost everything. I grew up learning that sometimes life has other plans for you.”

  Trevor attended a Christian day school, where he ran track and played tennis, then enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study film. But again, life had other plans for him. When Hurricane Katrina decimated his family’s business yet again, Trevor gave up his dream of directing, returned home, and finished his degree at Loyola University in Spanish and French.