What is your why?

  What is the message you need to hear?

  The wound you need to heal?

  The call you need to heed?

  The following three questions will help you find out.

  Past: What Was Your Toothache as a Child?

  Some years before starting this project, I wrote a book about Adam and Eve. I got to visit some of the world’s more remote places—from the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates in Iraq to the Galápagos in Ecuador—and study some of the world’s more enduring works of art—from the Sistine Chapel to Frankenstein. One of those works of art was Paradise Lost.

  In book 2, Satan convenes a council of fallen angels to discuss whether to wage a counteroffensive against heaven. One angel, Moloch, says yes, they should stage a frontal assault, “turning our tortures into horrid arms.” Another angel, Mammon, says no, goodness can prevail in even the darkest places. We should find strength in our own hurts; we should “seek our own good from ourselves.” He then utters one of the more quoted lines in the ten-thousand-line poem.

  “Our torments also may in length of time / Become our Elements. . . .”

  A question for all of us at some point in our lives is, Do we do what our lesser angels want and turn our tortures into horrid arms, or do we do what our better angels want and turn our torments into our essential elements?

  Andersen provided his answer in “Auntie Toothache,” explaining, “I have to make something of the torments that are inflicted on me.” Freud offered his answer in the form of narrative therapy, saying that the act of self-examination turns our external pains into internal strengths. Alfred Adler suggested his answer in holistic psychotherapy, stating that our goal should be to turn our felt minus into our perceived plus.

  Our job as tellers of our own work stories is to identify the painful patterns we keep repeating, then unrepeat them. An effective first step is to ask yourself, What was your toothache as a child?

  If, as I believe, any question is only as good as the answer it elicits, this question may be the most effective I’ve asked in three decades of posing questions professionally. The answers were simply breathtaking. If you could ask yourself only one question in your workquake, I recommend this one.

  The answers fell into five categories: injustice, helplessness, escape, identity, and money. Nearly half the answers were in the top category—injustice—while only 3 percent were in the bottom category—money. These numbers provide more evidence that (a) doing work that is personally meaningful is not some passing fancy but a conviction that many people settle on when they’re young, and (b) the American success story is becoming less focused on accumulating wealth as the leading metric of accomplishment and more focused on caring for oneself and for others.

  Let’s look more closely at people’s answers. One in six said their toothache was escape—escaping their homes, escaping discrimination, escaping poverty. Laura Spaulding said her toothache was fleeing her toxic family in Florida. “I was compelled to just get out of that environment. It was terribly negative and extremely depressing.” After being run out of the military, Laura became a police officer, returned to Florida, and opened Spaulding Decon to help other families clean up their toxic homes.

  Kirby Metoxen was the first member of his family not born on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin. Using a VA loan, Kirby’s parents purchased a home in Milwaukee, where his father worked as an auto-body mechanic for twenty-five years. “I didn’t want to be like my father—that was my toothache. And I ended up being like my father. I ended up drinking beer and being an abuser.” Today Kirby lives on the reservation, where he serves on the tribal council and works as a youth alcoholism counselor.

  One in three people said their toothache was helplessness. They wanted to take control of their lives, assert their autonomy, fulfill their destiny. Alton White said he felt suffocated as a child in Cincinnati. “I am a survivor of constant bullying, of abuse, and of rape. I was a very shy kid, too, and never thought I would find the courage to perform in front of anybody.” Alton went on to perform in front of millions with roles in The Lion King and Miss Saigon on Broadway and on Law & Order and Bull on television.

  Larry Quinlan was raised in the Caribbean with the expectation that he would take over his father’s gas stations, poultry farm, or real estate business. “My toothache was that it quickly became apparent to me that I didn’t want to work in my father’s businesses. I liked to fix them. I would go into his office, see all the typing and retyping, and think, This is very untidy. There must be a better way. Once I took a rudimentary computer and hacked together a system to make files more accessible. Over time, that interest became the itch I needed to scratch: How can I use technology to avoid drudgery?” Larry earned an MBA from Baruch College in New York City and spent thirty years at Deloitte, the last eleven as global chief information officer for the 350,000-employee firm.

  By far the biggest category was injustice, with one in two mentioning this pain as their primary toothache. They craved helping others, improving society, making the world a better place. Brian O’Loughlin was born to Irish immigrants who worked their way into the middle class. His father was a psychologist; his mother was a risk assessment analyst at J.P. Morgan; they dreamed that their son would follow them into a white-collar profession. But Brian had other ideas. “As a kid, I spent time in Harlem and the South Bronx, places where you see the worst of humanity. I was able to articulate early on that I wanted to leave every room I entered a little bit cleaner and earth a little bit better.” Brian became an emergency nurse for North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, a helicopter rescue specialist with the Combat Aviation Brigade of the army’s First Armored Division, and a law enforcement officer with the Nevada State Police.

  Ken Tang escaped Vietnam at age six with his mother, blind father, and two younger siblings. Their refugee boat was robbed by pirates and abandoned for a week in the South China Sea. After being rescued by the US Navy, the Tangs were resettled in Glendale, Arizona, where Ken said his toothache was feeling left alone. “I wanted to have someone take care of me, because my mom was always working and my dad needed someone to take care of him. I’m the one who had to help my siblings in elementary school do their homework because my parents weren’t able to.”

  Ken became an elementary school teacher.

  “My parents were against this idea. We had all these arguments, because, If you’re Asian, you’re supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer. They thought being a teacher was a kind of failure. But I really wanted to be a teacher so I could be the kind of adult in my students’ lives that I’d lacked as a child.”

  But Ken’s toothache wasn’t cured by his time in the classroom. After twenty-three years in the school system of Alhambra, California, he felt called to run for the board of education. Before he even announced his candidacy, he received some unexpected support.

  “Some former students reached out to me. They said, ‘Mr. Tang, we heard you were interested in running for school board. We remember in your class how you used to say that you wanted to be a voice for your students. Well, we want to be your voice. We want to knock on doors for you.”

  Ken Tang won his race by thirty thousand votes, garnering 60 percent of the electorate. He was the first Vietnamese immigrant elected to any office in the city of Alhambra, California.

  There’s a drama in these stories. And a poetry. Many of them feel like fairy tales themselves. The idea that our childhood pains might be salved, even indirectly, through our adult lives is an idea so old-fashioned that it seems utterly removed from the modern discourse about work, obsessed as it is with aptitudes, assessments, productivities, and efficiencies. If you want to find meaning at work, however, a simple step is to reconnect with this mythic quality of healing.

  Find the balm to your toothache.

  Find your why.

  Present: What Kinds of Stories Do You Like?

  A big reason we sometimes forget our why is that we forget that we’re actually telling a story about who we are through our decisions about what we do. That story, at its heart, involves a tension. It’s the tension between the narrative we inherit about what it means to be successful and the narrative we write about what it means to be successful.

  That earlier story is what I’ve been referring to in this book as a script. Coined by Princeton professor Silvan Tomkins in the 1950s, script theory suggests that we all have mental constructs that shape our lives. A restaurant script, for example, guides us in how to act when we go out to eat—we find a table, place our order, eat our food, pay our bill, etc. No one ever teaches us this script; it’s imprinted onto us by our upbringing and experiences.

  A work script performs a similar role. It shapes our decisions about what we want to do, where we want to do it, when we want to do it, and so on. Again, rarely does someone explicitly convey that script; it’s handed down to us through generations of expectations and guideposts.

  As valuable as that script can be, it also has consequences. As the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed, scripts usually end up restricting us because they “inhibit spontaneity and limit flexibility.” We’re so busy trying to live up to the script we’ve been given that we don’t recognize when we’ve actually outgrown it.

  What I’ve been calling in this book our work scripture is our reaction to that script. It’s the personal story that each of us writes that both includes the expectations that we absorb from our upbringings, and then layers on top of them a host of individual ingredients that we adopt from our role models, learn from our environments, glean from our toothaches, and so on.

  While our script is unchanging, our scripture is ever changing.

  Our script is what we should do; our scripture is what we want to do.

  Perhaps the primary reason to ask yourself the six Kipling questions is to separate your scripture from your script. It’s to isolate who you want to be as opposed to who those around you want you to be, what you want to do as opposed to what others want you to do, and on down the line.

  When it comes to the why in that story, a great way to identify what kind of story you’d like to tell is to ask yourself what kind of story you like to consume. These stories can be from books, movies, television, YouTube, TikTok, manga, or wherever. Someone who binges This Old House versus someone who binges Star Trek versus someone who binges Law & Order versus someone who binges Bridgerton are all saying something different about their internal scripture. The same goes for someone who gorges on travel videos versus Civil War videos versus cooking videos versus investment videos.

  I asked everyone the open-ended question, What types of stories do you like? This question is a why question because the answers capture the prisms through which we view the world. The stories we consume become the templates for the stories we tell.

  My answer to this question, for example, would be nine-hundred-page biographies of consequential lives (William James, Vincent van Gogh), novels by new voices (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tommy Orange), and hardship memoirs. My wife, Linda, meanwhile, who works with high-growth entrepreneurs and high-net-worth investors, enjoys high-stakes TV dramas like Succession and Game of Thrones, juicy tell-alls about boardroom intrigue (Uber, WeWork), and prestige fiction. As you can see, we have entirely different taste in stories that reflect our different work lives.

  The answers I heard reflect a similar diversity. The top four categories were wisdom stories, heroic stories, life stories, and suspense stories.

  Among those who said suspense stories, Isiah Warner, the LSU chemistry professor, said he likes “intriguing mysteries. It’s the same element I like in chemistry—trying to figure out solutions to difficult problems, like being a detective.” Daphne Jones, the tech CEO from Chicago, said, “I like espionage movies—the FBI, the CIA, James Bond. Stories that involve money, spies, enemies of the state. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a woman in corporate America—you never know who you can trust, there’s some collateral damage along the way, but the good guy always wins.”

  Among those who said life stories, Jodi Mansbach, the art historian turned urban developer in Atlanta, said, “I like memoirs written by strong women—Madeleine Albright, Katharine Graham, Michelle Obama.” Aaron Krause, the Philadelphia-area inventor and entrepreneur behind Scrub Daddy, said he enjoys listening to audiobooks of inventors and entrepreneurs. “I like biographies—Benjamin Franklin was way ahead of his time, as was Phil Knight, who created Nike. My God, there were points in Shoe Dog where he was talking directly to me.”

  Jasminne Mendez, the Houston schoolteacher who came down with a chronic illness and became a full-time writer, said, “I like stories that delve into real human experience. I was drawn to memoir for a long time, like Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. But now I like children’s literature because there’s an honest simplicity when writing for that audience. I really love The Moon Within, by Aida Salazar, about the ancestral ritual that Mexican girls go through when they have their first periods.” Jasminne started writing poetry but now concentrates on YA.

  Many of the stories people are drawn to fit the classic hero’s journey of triumphing over adversity; they’re heroic stories. Joey Clift, the Hollywood comedy writer, said, “Growing up in a low-income household that was split by divorce, I was definitely beaten up a ton. So I’m always excited about stories from the perspective of the bullied, the marginalized, the underdogs who earn their day in the sun.”

  Wendy Chisholm, who grew up feeling emotionally abused and went on to run AI for Accessibility for Microsoft, said her favorite story was The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White. “It’s one of those cool, almost divine, works of art. The main character, Louis, based on Louis Armstrong, is a trumpeter swan who doesn’t have a voice. So his father steals a trumpet so the instrument can be his voice. For me, the story highlighted one of the blessings of my upbringing, which is that I really had to fight for my health and for my agency. That inspired me to fight to make it easier for other people to get the same kind of agency.”

  The largest category was people who said they like wisdom stories, stories that teach them lessons about life. Cathy Heying, the social worker and founder of Lift Garage, said, “I like redemption stories, but not too cheesy. I prefer stories that are funny and dark. Harold and Maude is my all-time favorite movie, for example. I have a tattoo on my arm of the two of them—the young man who rejects his upbringing then falls in love with a seventy-nine-year-old Holocaust survivor who teaches him how to live.”

  Ben Conniff, the teenage doughnut maker turned foodie, cofounded Luke’s Lobster in his twenties and helped lead it through stratospheric expansion. But when the company experienced growing pains, Ben, whose true love was food, not supply chains and debt vehicles, was slowly pushed out by his cofounder. Heartbroken, he left New York City for Maine and turned to building a sustainable seafood ecosystem. “I like funny-sad stories,” he said. “They don’t have to have a happy ending, but they have to have a beautiful ending, like Brideshead Revisited, every Vonnegut novel, or It’s a Wonderful Life. These stories remind you that in general you don’t get everything you want out of life.”

  Teju Ravilochan was born in Ohio to hard-charging parents who pushed him to attend medical school like his neurosurgeon father. But Teju was more interested in alleviating suffering and asked his parents if there was a “medical school of poverty.” Teju grew up to become cofounder and CEO of Uncharted, a nonprofit that raised over $150 million to help scale social-impact startups. “I like stories that involve kindness, where the characters are wrestling with how to be good. Beloved is a good example, as is Anna Karenina.

  “But the best example is Moses,” he continued. “He learns that he’s not the prince of Egypt, as he wanted to be; but he’s not a slave, either, as he should be. He has to find the faith and courage to do the right thing when everyone around him is scared and worried. Then he has to write an entirely new kind of story. Of course, that’s the story we’re all telling today.”

  The stories we consume are not just recreation. They’re actually a form of re-creation, helping us to create new molds into which we pour the details of our own, ever-changing lives. These molds, in turn, begin to mold our actions.

  In 2012, Geoff Kaufman of Dartmouth College and Lisa Libby of Ohio State published a study showing that the more we relate to our favorite stories the more we adopt the worldview of their characters. Through a process they call experience-taking, we assume the identity of those characters, adopting their thoughts and actions. We enter our heroes’ lives as if they were our own lives, simulating their decision-making and moral outlook. The more we untangle why they do what they do, the closer we come to untangling why we do what we do.

  To unpack your why, try unpacking the why in the stories you love.

  Future: My Purpose Right Now Is ____________

  Once you’ve identified the why of your childhood and the why of your favorite stories today, you’re ready to home in on the why you want to embrace going forward.

  My purpose right now is ____________.

  Kirsten Green, the criminology professor in Alabama who became a doula after the daughter of a relative became pregnant, said her purpose was helping others. “I now have the chance to make another kind of impact. The maternal mortality rate in my community is through the roof. If I can help change that number in any form, if I can make sure that all the people using my services go home with a healthy baby, that will be meaningful. My purpose right now is to help other families navigate the kinds of waters my family had to navigate.”