“Once I was in New York, my whole life changed. I could fill out my body; I could grow out my hair; I could even walk down the street and put my wrist in the air in a way that I would have died rather than do at home.” After four years, Jordan left TED to start VideoOut, an organization that amplifies LGBTQ+ narratives.

  The final way changing work led to a changing sense of place was the amount of travel involved. Judy Cockerton, when she sold her toy stores and started her foster care community on the far side of Massachusetts, went through five cars. Karen Noel, when she stopped being a bank manager in Kansas to become a long-haul trucker alongside her husband, had to adjust to new habits. “Living on the road is very different. I usually sleep when my husband drives and vice versa. Food is probably the hardest thing. I put a small fridge in the back, and before I leave home, I try to stock up on fruits and vegetables.” The one advantage? “At truck stops, there are usually a hundred men waiting for the bathroom and only one woman.”

  But the most poignant example I heard of how the places we choose to work reflect the values we hold most dear was Cathy Heying, the social worker who started the car repair shop. Cathy had always been motivated by place. After growing up in Iowa, she moved to Appalachia to volunteer with a charity, then relocated to Minneapolis and worked in community improvement. When Cathy started Lift Garage, she set up shop in the heart of the neediest neighborhood. Seven years later, that neighborhood became the epicenter of global attention. A few blocks away was the site where George Floyd was murdered. Within hours, protests filled the streets; on night three, protestors set fire to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct headquarters, which is just steps from Lift Garage.

  Cathy hurried to the facility.

  “Protestors were approaching our building with baseball bats and flamethrowers. This one group of young men was getting close. I was far back and didn’t want to yell at them, because I didn’t want to escalate. But I was worried they were going to break our windows. As they approached the front, I called out, ‘May I help you?’ One of them looked at me. ‘Is this your building?’ He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. Then he shouted to his buddies. ‘Wait, wait, wait! There’s a peace sign in this window, we can’t break it.’ Then he said, ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ and ran off.”

  A thousand businesses were destroyed that night. Lift Garage was not one of them.

  “I had a roof inspector out the next week because the winds were blowing cinders everywhere,” Cathy said. “There wasn’t an ounce of damage to our building.”

  Where you work matters. Where you work gives you meaning. Where you work makes a statement about who you are. But all of those qualities are fluid. When weighing where you want to work now, don’t forget that where you want to work in the future might be completely different, and pick a place that at least is telling the kind of story you can be proud of.

  Future: I Want to Be in a Place Where ____________

  Which brings us to the final step of knowing Where is your where? Putting what you’ve learned about your sense of location into a declaration of the kind of location you want to be in.

  I want to be in a place where ____________.

  For some that place is where they can set a good example. Benjamin Chancey, the wind turbine repairman in Houston, grew up on a honeybee farm in East Texas. “At times that was a cool life; my father was actually the president of the national beekeepers association. But there were dark times, too, like when there was a honey spill and money would literally flow out the door.” Ben’s favorite places were outdoors. “I loved being on a six-wheeler, following trails, building a treehouse.” But when Ben’s parents divorced, he moved to the city with his mother and ended up in a string of indoor jobs—bartending, managing a Verizon store, building a windshield repair business.

  When the COVID-19 quarantine torpedoed his business, Ben plunged into depression. He told his wife and two sons he wanted to return to his love of the outdoors. “Turns out my phone was listening all along.” It sent him a targeted Facebook ad for the Northwest Renewable Energy Institute in Vancouver, Washington. “I clicked on the link and saw a guy hanging off a blade two hundred feet in the air. The scene reminded me of my dad—of the type of dad I wanted to be. I was in a place where I wanted my boys to see me excited to go to work again.” After earning his certification, Ben was again doing projects outdoors.

  For some that place is what’s best for their family—and they adapt. Jodi Mansbach spent much of her life putting other people’s dreams before her own. Her father put himself through college, became an accountant, and ran a family tire business in New Jersey. Jodi pushed herself to live up to his exacting standards. She was the first female valedictorian in her high school’s one-hundred-fifty-year history; she went to the Ivy League; she landed a coveted internship on Wall Street.

  She quit after two days. “I already had this vision that this was not my identity.”

  Her first job out of college was at the Department of Education, but again she left before her two-year commitment was up. She returned to her first love, art history, earned a master’s degree, and went to work for Acoustiguide, the Chicago company that designs interactive guides for art museums. “I enjoyed the work, but it didn’t feel like my forever role. Then it hit me: I’m a mom of two children traveling three weeks a month.”

  Again she prioritized someone else’s needs. Jodi and her husband, Ross, decided to relocate to Atlanta “because of its kinder, gentler lifestyle.” At the closing of their new home, the owner said, “By the way, I was the editor of the neighborhood association newsletter, and I left the archives in the upstairs bedroom. Would you mind taking them back to the president?” Ross said, “Oh, Jodi would be really good with helping with that.”

  “So the next thing I know,” Jodi said, “I’m in charge of all the communication for the neighborhood.”

  And she loved it. She started meeting people, getting involved in the city, working with elected officials. “And it all just kind of clicked. All the stuff I liked—art, history, built environments—came together.” She wanted to make a change but was afraid to tell her father. “When I did, my mom said, ‘Your dad started something new when he was forty!’ ” Jodi earned a second master’s degree in urban planning, worked at various firms, and then started a company called Living Playgrounds, which designs custom-made children’s spaces.

  “I was finally in a place in my life where I was willing to create my own narrative. Not my father’s narrative, my husband’s narrative, or my children’s narrative. Mine.”

  For others that place is wherever they can be alone. As a child in Philadelphia, Charlie Santore stuttered, which led to anxiety, stress, and rebellion. “I never got along well with others. I guess you could say I had an authority problem.” When Charlie was nine, his grandfather gave him a safe. “It was a brand-new, closed-vault safe. I kept toys in it.” The next year, Charlie’s uncle made him a birthday card. Beware, Charlie. Guard your safe! The New York safecracking gang is coming down to burglarize you.

  “What I’m getting at,” Charlie said, “is that there’s always been a subtext in my life. I’ve been fascinated with collecting objects that are symbolic of keeping things locked away. I tend to be very secretive. Even my parents don’t know me well.”

  Charlie drifted through early adulthood. He painted houses, gambled, moved to LA, and became a struggling character actor. “I was just emotionally crushed.” One day he went to an auction house to make a few bucks on an old item and stood in line next to a locksmith. “I’d never met a locksmith, but I told him I’d always been interested in safes. It was the first time I ever felt genuinely enthused about something involving work.” Charlie called the guy the next day and by the following week had his first gig.

  Today, Charlie is LA’s leading safecracker, not in the criminal sense, but in the somebody-gets-locked-out-of-their-vault sense. He does twenty jobs a week; he has a collection of blueprints, plans, and schematics going back to the 1930s; and he’s got a garage full of cystoscopes, borescopes, and fiber-optic light sources that “would rival most hospitals.”

  And he has a 100 percent success rate.

  “My father always said find something you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. It sounds trite, but when you’re living it, it’s true. I find myself on my knees in front of a diabolical lockout, and I just laugh. I’m laughing because I know I’m going to be there for hours, I know we’re going to have to call riggers just to move the safe a few inches, but I also know that when that door swings open, it’s better than sex.

  “My only regret,” Charlie continued, “is that I didn’t start this work twenty years earlier. But after so many years of running from myself, I guess I finally realized that I couldn’t be myself until I was working in a place all by myself.”

  What all these stories share is what all good stories share: an arc. A journey from a place where we feel uncomfortable to a place where we feel like ourselves.

  A journey home.

  In 1990, Rudine Sims Bishop, a professor of children’s literature at Ohio State, wrote a much-quoted essay called “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” The best children’s stories, she wrote, combine all three of these elements. They’re windows into a world we might never have known; they’re mirrors that allow us to see ourselves in a new light; they’re sliding glass doors that invite us to enter a new realm.

  The best work stories, I’ve come to believe, combine all three of these elements. They’re mirrors that allow us to look back at where we came from, they’re windows that allow us to appreciate where we are, and they’re sliding glass doors that allow us to transport ourselves into new plateaus where we long to go.

  Place may be the lowliest angel of storytelling, but perhaps it’s the angel we most need to heed in order to reach our loftiest selves.

  Chapter 10

  Why Is Your Why?

  My Purpose Right Now Is ____________

  In 1872, Hans Christian Andersen, the nearly seventy-year-old, moody Danish writer of novels, poems, and travelogues, published his most personal story. It was called “Auntie Toothache” and is considered the last of his 156 fairy tales, an unrivaled collection that includes “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Ugly Duckling,” and “Thumbelina.”

  In the story, a young boy, who’s clearly a stand-in for Andersen, describes a beloved auntie who spoils him with sweets. She also tells him repeatedly that he has a way with words. “You’re a poet! Perhaps the greatest we have.” When the boy leaves home and describes to her his new lodgings, she raves, “You’re a poet! Just write down your story, and you’ll be just as good as Dickens.”

  Each of us is born with a gift, the boy muses, but that gift comes with a burden. In his case, that burden is that he suffers from toothaches. They “squashed and crushed me,” he says.

  “I know what that’s like,” Auntie says, for she, too, suffers from toothaches.

  One evening, during a terrible snowstorm, the boy escorts Auntie home from the theater and is forced to bring her back to his boardinghouse. That night, as the boy tries to sleep, his teeth flare. “It was as if a red-hot awl went through my cheekbone.” As he squirms, the boy is visited in a dream by a ghastly, ghostly woman, whom he calls Auntie Toothache.

  You have “an excellent set of teeth” for a poet, she assures. “A keyboard of pain.”

  “Every great poet has a great toothache.”

  I love this line. I encountered it when I first began the Work Story Project, and it quickly became a kind of Rosetta stone, the key that helped me unlock the question that people said was the most valuable they asked in a workquake: Why is your why?

  What is your underlying motivation? What’s the obsession you’ve been wrestling with since childhood? The problem you’ve been trying to solve? The dilemma you’ve been trying to resolve? “Every good writer or filmmaker,” Bruce Springsteen once said, “has something eating at them that they can’t quite get off their back.”

  What’s eating at you?

  What’s your toothache?

  Mary Robinson knew exactly what her toothache was, though it took her half of her life to finally connect it to her work. Mary was adopted as a newborn into a family that had already adopted an older boy. “I had wonderful, wonderful parents, and a wonderful, wonderful childhood—until my dad got sick with cancer when I was twelve. Then, everything changed.”

  Mary’s mother was a stay-at-home mom; her father, a chemical engineer, had just left his job to branch out on his own. “That meant my dad had no health insurance. Overnight we were wiped out financially. We lived in this lovely town of Madison, New Jersey, where the pharmacy kept providing the medication my dad needed and the electric company kept the lights on, even though we could afford neither. People we didn’t know would drop off envelopes of cash so we could buy groceries.”

  Two years into her father’s illness, Mary’s mother called the children into the bedroom. “It will take a miracle for Daddy to come home from the hospital.”

  “In those days, kids weren’t encouraged to go to the hospital,” Mary said, “so I had no idea how sick he was. I thought, OK, we’ll get a miracle!”

  A few weeks later, Mary was filling out a get-well card for her dad at a friend’s house when her friend’s mom shouted upstairs. “ ‘Your mom called. She’s on her way to pick you up.’ I got in the car, and my mother said, ‘Mary, Daddy has died.’ I just started to cry.”

  Mary had never been to a burial. “I walked into the funeral home, saw my dad in the casket, and just backed out of the room. Like I had been pushed back by the energy.” Her friends came to the service, but Mary was inconsolable. “I gave the funeral director the finger. I thought, You don’t give a shit, but you’re acting like you do. So, fuck you.”

  She skipped the wake and wept in her room.

  In the months that followed, Mary spiraled downward. With her mother scrambling to earn a living in real estate, Mary started skipping school, she quit the track team, her grades plummeted. “All through high school, I felt uncomfortable with my peers. All through college, I isolated myself and became quite depressed. I developed bulimia and became promiscuous.”

  The one thing that kept Mary going was her fascination with human psychology. “I always loved the human drama that happens in airports—the hellos and goodbyes.” So she followed a boyfriend to Florida, went to work at an airline, and got engaged. A year later, she canceled the wedding and quit the airline. She slumped back to New Jersey and went to work at Prudential.

  “I did well in that job; I got promoted; I had benefits and a nice office. But I wasn’t happy, and I couldn’t figure out why.”

  The why was that she didn’t know her why.

  “I kept thinking back on my childhood,” Mary said. “My parents were all about service—volunteering, giving to charity. I remembered that when my dad was sick, I volunteered as a candy striper at the hospital so I could sneak in and see him.”

  Mary started volunteering at hospice. “I would go into people’s homes and provide respite for caretakers, then I’d talk to the person who was dying. I did it specifically because I never had the chance to talk with my dad when he was dying.”

  Her story was so moving to her employer that she won a $50,000 grant for her hospice through Prudential’s employee giving program, then was recruited to run the division that gives out those grants. “A few months later, a woman approached me at church and asked what I did. When I told her I gave out community grants for Prudential, she said, ‘Do you know about Rainbows? We’d love to apply.’ ”

  Rainbows for All Children is an international nonprofit that provides grief services for children who lost a loved one. “I attended the meeting, and my heart melted,” Mary said. She started volunteering; within months she joined the local board; within a year she was in a workquake.

  “I was driving into Newark every day after work. I would go to Sacred Heart cathedral, sit in the chapel, and do centering prayer. Afterward, I’d go to mass. On Ash Wednesday, the sermon was from Matthew: When you give to the needy, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. I kept thinking, What we do at Prudential is the exact opposite. When we do good, we let everybody know.”

  So after thirteen years, Mary quit the company. She sold her house to reduce expenses. She freelanced as a florist and an event planner. And a year later, when the job of executive director of Rainbows New Jersey opened up, Mary applied for the job. Under her leadership, the chapter quickly became the most successful in the country. Four years later, itching to have more impact, she left to start her own organization to build resilience among families suffering from grief. Seven years after that, she launched an even more ambitious initiative, Imagine: A Center for Coping with Loss, which provides free, year-round counseling to more than five hundred bereaved children, teens, and families.

  The child who never properly grieved now provides grief services for hundreds of children.

  Mary Robinson had found her why.

  “I actually found it in my childhood bedroom,” she said. “It was while I was still at Prudential. One day I was having a difficult conversation with my mom—we were going through a challenging time in our relationship—and I went upstairs to cry. By the bed, I found this book I had bought and forgotten about. It said, We can’t heal from the wounds of our parents unless we forgive them.

  “That’s when I realized my why,” she continued. “I wanted to work for an organization that was about changing lives not charging profits. I wanted to say to any child in pain what I wish someone had said to me: Mary, you had the best dad for fourteen years. Many people don’t get that. He gave you his love; he gave you his values. You’re going to be OK. Your whole life is ahead of you, and your dad will be by your side the whole way. Don’t forget to grieve. But don’t forget to live, either.”