As much as we love advice, we often don’t need it. The answer already lies within us.

  I asked everyone a number of questions about the how of how they navigated their biggest workquake. The first questions focused on advice. Was there someone who gave you advice during this period that was helpful? If so, who was it and what did they say?

  The answer to that first part was yes, 83 percent received advice they found helpful. No surprise. People like advice! Indeed, many of the people who hadn’t sought input from others said they wished they had. Their advice to themselves: Seek advice from others.

  As to whose advice people found most helpful, here the answers contained a surprise. Colleagues were by far the most popular advice givers: one in three participants gave this answer. The second most popular group was professionals—therapists, life coaches, religious leaders, teachers. The third most popular group was friends, with family clocking in a distant fourth. A mere one in six people said that they received helpful advice from a family member during their biggest work crisis, which, I dare say, is far fewer than the number of people who actually sought that advice, or received it unsolicited. Family members either give bad advice or go unremembered for the good advice they give.

  As to what advice people found most helpful, these answers were even more revealing. The top two categories, each with 37 percent, were affirmation (You’re on the right track! I believe in you!) and go for it (Make the leap! Take the risk!). The next two categories, each with 11 percent, were reframing (Maybe you should look at the problem this way) and a helpful tip (I think you should do this one specific thing). To tally those numbers up: three quarters of people said that the advice they found most constructive was to continue in the direction they were already heading. They didn’t need a punch to the gut; they needed a pat on the back.

  They needed to hear, Trust thyself.

  Among the people who said they heard affirmation, Issa Spatrisano, the refugee coordinator in Alaska, said she felt crippling self-doubt before taking on the role of statewide chief, so she called her mentor and former colleague. “Karen, how do I do this? I’m in way over my head. I have no idea how to manage a multimillion-dollar budget.” Karen told her, “Managing a million dollars is the same as managing a hundred dollars. Stop worrying. The staff already respects you because you’ve spent years earning their respect. Just be you.”

  Dominique Turrentine, who left a stable job at the Hewlett Foundation for a provisional role at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, felt the experiment was backfiring, so she called her old boss. “I can be very intense and frenetic, and he knew exactly what to say. ‘I think you’re doing well. It may not pan out exactly how you want, but if you shoot for the moon, at least you’ll end up among the stars. If not, they’re not the only game in town.’ ” Dominique earned a permanent position as manager of strategic initiatives.

  Among those who said the best advice they got was to go for it was Chris Donovan. When he was considering leaving his long-standing job at the phone company to become a women’s shoe designer, he went to the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center. The adviser he was assigned to was a former CEO and business school professor who later in life became a professional mentor. “He was my greatest cheerleader. He gave me lots of practical tips and tricks, but the most valuable advice he gave me was, ‘Shoot, then aim. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing. You’ll figure it out.’ ”

  Deniese Davis, the Las Vegas native who moved to New York to pursue television and then to Los Angeles to attend film school, was fretting over whether to take the traditional, but slow, path of working her way up in Hollywood by starting as an assistant or to continue the path she was on of seeking subsistence jobs producing YouTube videos. “In college I had an unpaid summer internship with a woman named Connie Orlando who was an EVP at Black Entertainment Television. At our final meeting, she gave me her card and said, ‘You’re going to need me someday. Reach out.’ ”

  Deniese kept the card.

  “I emailed her, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you remember me, I was an intern with you years ago. Here’s a photo of me. I’m about to graduate from film school and am looking for mentors.’ ” Connie invited her to a meeting. “I was so nervous, I started rambling. I told her I wanted to be a producer; I talked about my ambitions—and she interrupted me. ‘Stop telling people you want to be a producer; start telling people you are a producer. You’re already doing the work; own it.’ ” Two weeks later Deniese met the rising superstar Issa Rae, and her life as a producer took off.

  One of the more moving advice stories I heard came from Alicia Rodis, the actor turned bartender turned intimacy coordinator. When Alicia was in her twenties, her acting dried up as her drinking ramped up. “I felt like I was in free fall. Finally, I crashed to the rocks.” At twenty-nine, she turned to AA. Five years later, when she found herself in the maelstrom of #MeToo and the birth of intimacy training in Hollywood, Alicia drew on an unlikely source to help get her through her work storm: her AA sponsor.

  “He always told me, ‘When you don’t know what to do, do the next right action.’ So many times in those early months, things were happening so fast that I just wanted them to stop. That’s when I remembered his advice: It’s not about you. It’s about something larger than you. Whenever you don’t know how to respond, be humble, look at what’s in front of you, and just do the next right action.” Alicia became the industry leader in an industry that was just being born.

  We all want advice; we all need advice. As I learned in my first round of interviews, seeking wisdom from others is an essential part of any life transition. But as I learned in this round, much of that wisdom merely reinforces instincts we already have. So the next time you’re inclined to seek direction from others, by all means do it. But when you don’t have the opportunity or the time to reach out to someone else, start by determining what direction you’re already headed in.

  Then keep walking.

  Present: How Do You Give Yourself Permission to Change?

  Lots of people quit their jobs. But few have done so in quite so colorful a way as the postmaster of the University of Mississippi in 1924. Born in New Albany in 1897, the oldest son of a railroad family, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, matriculated at Ole Miss, and then dropped out after three semesters and, through a patron, was hired to run the post office. He was epically bad at his job. He opened when he wanted to, closed when he wanted to, played cards, drank, tossed circulars in the trash, threw bulletins in the corner, and was generally considered, even by his patron, as “the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen.”

  “Let us imagine,” Eudora Welty wrote, “that here and now, we’re all in the old university post office and living in the ’20’s. We’ve come up to the stamp window to buy a two-cent stamp, but we see nobody there.” We knock and pound, she continued; we harangue and holler. Finally, he appears. “We interrupted him. . . . When he should have been putting up the mail and selling stamps at the window up front, he was out of sight in the back writing lyric poems.”

  The situation got so bad that a postal service inspector was sent to investigate. Sensing his demise was near, the postmaster submitted the following letter:

  As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.

  This, sir, is my resignation.

  The letter was signed: William Faulkner.

  Sixty-three years later—nearly half a century after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and a quarter century after he died—the failed postmaster of zip code 38677 was honored by his former employer with a commemorative stamp. Its amount: twenty-two cents.

  How do you get from where you are now to where you want to be? You can try the Faulkner approach, or you can be more adroit.

  I asked everyone two questions to tease out what steps they found most constructive. The first question was practical: Of the hundred things you did during your transitions, which single one was the most valuable? The top three categories involved people, planning, and personal development.

  On the people front, Andrew Gauthier, after abandoning his dream of being an indie filmmaker and turning instead to digital media, embraced a strategy my wife has long trumpeted for entrepreneurs: stalking. He followed industry leaders on social media, where he discovered that BuzzFeed was opening a video arm. He landed an interview, sent in a budget, and waited. “Then I learned on Twitter that the editor in chief was going to be on a panel at the 92nd Street Y. So I put on a blazer, went to the venue, and lingered outside the theater door until he came out. ‘Oh, wow. You’re here!’ I said, as if I had planned to go all along.” Andrew landed the job of head of the new department.

  Meroë Park knew when she ended three decades at the CIA that she didn’t want to follow the traditional revolving door of becoming a defense contractor or lobbyist. “I needed to build out my network, so I made the goal of having three breakfasts, coffees, or meetings every day. I literally ate and drank my way through learning about different sectors. Turns out there are a lot of Starbucks! Also turns out people really enjoy telling you why they like their jobs or don’t like their jobs. And since these meetings were just informational—I wasn’t asking them for anything—I was able to learn so much.”

  By the end, Meroë had completed two hundred fifty conversations. “I made a giant family tree that showed each person, what they did, and who they connected me to. Since every person said, Keep in touch, I’d check in from time to time.” Six months into her journey, one of the people she met early on had a job opening. Meroë became the executive vice president of the Partnership for Public Service; two years later she became the deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the Smithsonian.

  On the planning front, Curtis Basina, after deciding to sell his gas station and open a distillery, traveled to Washington State to take a course from a master distiller, Rusty Figgins. “After the first class, he pulled me aside. ‘Curt, you’re from Wisconsin. You guys are the dairy state. Look into making spirits from whey.’ I said, ‘Whoa, that wasn’t necessarily my first choice, but I accept your challenge.’ ” Copper Crow Distillery now sells vodka made from wheat, rum made from cane, and gin and vodka made from whey, “an eco-conscious, sustainable by-product of the Wisconsin cheese industry.”

  Tim Pierpont, when he left his banking job in the Bay Area to open Pierpont Painting, made two business plans. “The first contained all the customary metrics—strategy, marketing, budget. The second was an emotional business plan: What are the good outcomes? What are the bad outcomes? What happens if the business succeeds? What happens if it doesn’t succeed? So much of starting a new venture is the fear of the unknown. Being specific allowed me to reduce those anxieties.”

  On the personal development front, Lauren Nichols, when she came down with long COVID and decided to supplement her main job as a defense analyst with a side job as a medium, had to boost her self-confidence. “I called it my awakening. First, I had to let my guard down and learn to be vulnerable. Next, I needed to be OK with failure and rejection. Finally, I had to learn to be vocal. It’s one thing to write in a journal that I wanted to use my gift; it’s something else to let the whole world know.” With clients growing more comfortable having consultations over Zoom, her business soared.

  Leah Smart, the LinkedIn sales executive who wanted to pivot to employee well-being, visualized her quest. “I made a pie chart on Excel called ‘What I Would Be Doing in My Life If I Were Doing What I Really Wanted.’ The slices were writing, podcasting, coaching, and speaking. I gave percentages to each one. Every time I faced a decision—Do I go to this conference? Do I seek out this opportunity—I would check the chart and see if it got me closer to my ultimate goal.” Once, using this method, she attended a conference she otherwise would have skipped; LinkedIn’s VP of learning was on a panel. “I sat in the front row, went up to him afterward, and introduced myself. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he responded.” He asked her to write her ideal job description and two weeks later offered her a position on his team. Instead of leaving the company, she was able to redefine her role within it.

  The second question I asked homed in even more on the emotional aspects of how people navigated their transition. The question was, How did you give yourself permission to make a change?

  The most popular answer was to draw strength from the past—I’ve done this before; I can do it again. Nygil Likely, the student affairs dean in Michigan who felt called into ministry, drew on the messages of confidence he received from his creator. “When I listened to the pastor at my church preach from Jeremiah, I heard the message that even with all my brokenness, I was still being called to help shape and mold people. God reminded me that I have always struggled with Am I good enough to be doing this work? and he always showed me: You will bring forth what I want you to bring.”

  The next most popular answer was to draw confidence from the present—I’m doing well now; I can build on that momentum. Daphne Jones, the tech executive who walked away from prestige jobs at IBM and Johnson & Johnson because she thought she could do better over the long run, said, “I do things that are risky. I’m a boxer. I’m a scuba diver. I drive a Porsche 911. Leaving my husband was not traditional, but I was the one in power. Leaving IBM was not traditional, but I was not getting what I wanted. I was not always this confident of a person, but I became this confident of a person. I evolved from someone who used to ask permission into someone who gives myself permission.” After a stint at a pharmaceutical company, Daphne was recruited to lead GE Healthcare Global Services, a $13 billion division.

  The third most popular answer was to draw inspiration from the future—It’s not going to get easier; I might as well act now. Sonali Dev, the tech journalist who got inspired to write women’s fiction after her husband accidentally brought home a romance novel, was frustrated by her inability to sell her first book. “I had been sending query letter after query letter and received fifty rejections. Finally, I went to a convention of the Romance Writers of America. I identified my dream publisher and went to a session run by one of its editors. You basically have a roomful of hungry authors all trying to sell their books.

  “By this point I was pretty cynical, but also pretty confident,” Sonali continued. “The guy said, ‘We’re always looking for something different.’ My eyes rolled, and I raised my hand. ‘When you say different what would you think if someone came to you with a Bollywood romance?’

  “ ‘I’d think that’d be great,’ he said.

  “ ‘Well, would you be willing to look at one after this meeting?’

  “By now, there was complete silence in the room. Every woman was looking at me like, How the hell is it OK for you to do this? I was so nervous I sweat through my clothes. I had to change before going to see him.”

  In their meeting, the editor asked to see the manuscript but warned her not to send it before she was completely happy with it. Six months later, she sent the book. Two days later, he responded. Sonali was too nervous to open the email. Finally she asked her husband to do it for her.

  It said, “When’s a good time to call?”

  “I’m sobbing,” Sonali said. “I’m lying on the kitchen floor crying for a good fifteen minutes.”

  The following year, Kensington published Sonali’s first novel, A Bollywood Affair. NPR named it a best book of the year. She’s since published nine more.

  “All because I was a badass in that meeting.”

  All because she gave herself permission to be a badass.

  Because giving yourself permission might be the hardest part of how.

  Future: The Best Advice I Have for Myself Right Now Is ____________

  The final question of How is your how?—indeed, the final entry of all the Kipling questions we’ve been asking—is in many ways the question we began with: Because the answer you’ve been looking for is already inside you, what is the answer? How would you complete this sentence?

  The best advice I have for myself right now is ____________.

  For Ebony Peay Ramirez, the answer was to take the plunge. After working as an executive assistant at Goldman Sachs and Oculus, then as a consultant for Facebook and Apple, Ebony was debating between getting an MBA or joining a team starting a venture capital fund. “I cold-called a number of women entrepreneurs for input. One of them ran a billion-dollar company. ‘Don’t go back to school if you don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It won’t teach you what you need to know. The space is very welcoming.’ Her advice to me was that there’s a kind of sisterhood in the tech world and that I should embrace it. So I channeled that advice and told myself, Dive in.”

  For Colin Bedell, the advice was to take ownership of his life. Colin is the Long Island native who walked away from studying prelaw after being confronted by his brother; five years later, when faced with another inflection point after losing his job in the fashion world and considering starting an astrology brand, Colin hosted a candle-lighting ceremony with a friend. “I told her—and the god of my understanding—that I wanted to be an astrologer, I wanted to write books, I wanted to have a life with meaning. Basically the ritual was my way of putting my intentions into the world.” Six months later, on the day Colin’s unemployment ran out, an editor at Cleis Press read an interview Colin did with Refinery29 and offered him a book contract.

  But the most universal self-advice comes from Aaron Quinn. Aaron was born to union loyalists in Wisconsin who relocated to Oakland. Aaron’s father was a firefighter, his mother a schoolteacher. As a boy, Aaron battled dyslexia and barely spoke before he was six; he didn’t learn to read until he was twelve. “People could never understand what I was saying, so I constantly had to reframe things. That may be why I ended up so interested in storytelling.”