A nod to my own team that keeps me going, including Ben Sherwood, Joshua Ramo, Jeff Shumlin, Lauren Schneider, Sunny Bates, Jennifer Aaker, Leslie Blodgett, Campbell Brown, and so many more. And to the sharp eyes and warm hearts of Craig Jacobson, Mahdi Salehi, Alan Berger, Bruce Vinokur, and Katie Maloney.

  I have been fortunate to have David Black by my side for nearly thirty years of friendship, debate, and a shared passion for storytelling. For nearly ten years now, Scott Moyers has been my advocate, interlocutor, co-conspirator, cheerleader, and unflagging presence who always insists, above all, that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity, ideas, and good writing. Under Ann Godoff’s leadership, the entire team at Penguin Press has reimagined and published my work with the utmost care and commitment. Thank you to Matt Boyd, Sarah Hutson, Danielle Plafsky, Megan Buiocchi. And a special salute to Mia Council and the unflagging Helen Rouner. Also, my deepest gratitude to Karen Mayer.

  I’m an ABC for a reason—family is extremely important to me. I am blessed to have two thoughtful, lively, and loving ones—the Rottenbergs and the Feilers. We’ve all endured a few trying years and feel closer than ever. My brother, Andrew Feiler, continues to be the keenest reader and sharpest eye and makes every draft better.

  Linda Rottenberg has done more to reimagine work for more people in more places—especially in the more than forty countries where her organization, Endeavor, has helped find meaningful work for tens of millions of people—than anyone I know. A profound gift of this project has been the ongoing conversation we’ve been able to have and the deep wisdom she has gleaned from her own work that has in turn deepened mine.

  The work involved in this book coincided with years in which our daughters had their own first workquakes, and this book appears in the world just as they begin to venture forth into it. Tybee and Eden: As someone who once comforted your toothaches, I hope above all that you tap into any lingering pains from those or any other aspects of your childhood, take the upsides and downsides you learned from us, and listen to your yearnings wherever they come from as you find work that brings you meaning, purpose, and joy. And I also wish for you, as your parents both had, a never-ending stream of inspirational teachers, mentors, role models, and others who point you down a new path just as another seems to close. The reward is worth the search.

  One of those role models for me was a man who had deep seas of pain and turned them into oceans of beauty that touched millions around the world. I treasure the roads that Pat Conroy helped make seem possible for me and the shared walks we were able to enjoy toward the end of his remarkable life. For the indelible work he made—and the constellations of work he inspired—this book is dedicated to him.

  Further Reading

  In the many years I worked on this project, I read hundreds of books and more than five hundred academic studies. Any source I relied heavily on is mentioned in Sources. Instead of listing everything I consulted, I’ve opted to highlight selected recommended books for those interested in particular themes explored in the book.

  History of Career

  Mark Savickas has produced an extraordinary output of ideas and practical advice. I especially recommend his Career Counseling and Career Construction Counseling Manual. For more academic theory, I benefited from Career Counseling, edited by Mary McMahon and Wendy Patton.

  History of Success

  The literature of success is particularly rich. I thoroughly enjoyed Self-Help Messiah by Steven Watts, along with Richard Huber’s The American Idea of Success.

  History of Work

  Because this space is so large, I’m happy to endorse works that I believe are universally helpful. These include Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way; Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone; Nikil Saval, Cubed; Jamie McCallum, Worked Over.

  Psychology of Work

  Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber; The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett; Range, David Epstein.

  Nonfiction about Work

  The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre; Nomadland, Jessica Bruder; Six Degrees, Duncan Watts.

  Memoirs about Work

  The Hungry Ocean, Linda Greenlaw; Lab Girl, Hope Jahren; Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong; The Beauty in Breaking, Michele Harper; Old in Art School, Nell Painter.

  Fiction about Work

  Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong; Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar; Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi.

  Sources

  The bulk of this book is comprised of work stories I collected, along with data that I gleaned from those conversations. I also draw on the wide literature of narrative psychology, positive psychology, applied neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, economics, and other contemporary social sciences, along with history, philosophy, literature, and art history. In this chapter-by-chapter accounting, I offer sources for all the quotations and academic references included in the book.

  Epigraphs

  Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” from her 1990 collection, House of Light. Brian Eno, from Basic Income UK meetup, London, December 2015, available at YouTube, “Brian Eno Message—Don’t Get a Job.”

  Introduction: The Work Story Project

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly report of quit rates appears at bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm. For more on the history of narrative psychology, see my previous book, Life Is in the Transitions. The word workquake has appeared periodically over the years, including in Steve Cadigan’s 2022 book Workquake, which credits my use of the term lifequake with inspiring his adoption. The BLS data on most popular jobs is at bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.htm. Here’s my bingo card:

  The demographics of my participants were as follows: 50 percent women, 46 percent men, 4 percent nonbinary; 22 percent boomers, 37 percent Gen X, 41 percent millennials; 52 percent had income between zero and $99,000; 27 percent between $100,000 and $199,000; 20 percent over $200,000; 43 percent white, 27 percent Black, 13 percent Asian American, 11 percent Latinx, 6 percent Indigenous; 15 percent identified as having a minority religion; 14 percent as LGBTQ+, 12 percent as having a disability.

  “Minority workers have become the majority of new hires”: Washington Post, “For the First Time, Most New Working-Age Hires in the U.S. Are People of Color,” September 9, 2019. “Women now hold”: Time, “Women Are Now the Majority of the U.S. Workforce,” January 16, 2020. See also, “Women of Working Age,” U.S. Department of Labor, Data and Statistics, dol.gov.

  1. Lie #1: You Have a Career

  “95 percent of human history” from Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, p. 5. “Other ancient cultures” from Andrea Komolsky, Work, p. 8. “English word office” from Nikil Saval, Cubed, p. 13. “Ability to define” from Peter Bernstein, Against the Odds, p. 2. “Led by numbers” from Bernstein, Against the Odds, pp. 23–25. “Agricultural productivity” from Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, p. 79. “Rise of literacy” from Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, p. 90.

  For more on the origins of career, see Online Etymology Dictionary. “Factories quadrupled” from Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 368–70. My description of Frederick Winslow Taylor and management science relies on Robert Kanigel’s The One Best Way. “Those patents” from Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 368. “Population of urban areas” from Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 370. “Tenements” from Brian Hutchison, Spencer Niles, Jerry Trusty, “The Evolution of Career Counseling in Schools,” in Career Development in the Schools, edited by Grafton Eliason and John Patrick.

  My account of Frank Parsons and the rise of career counseling draws from Arthur Mann’s “Frank Parsons,” in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 37, no. 3; Mark Savickas, “Helping People Choose Jobs,” in International Handbook of Career Guidance, edited by James Athanasou and Raoul Van Esbroeck; Mark Savickas, “Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision,” The Career Development Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4; as well as Parsons’s own book, Choosing a Vocation.

  For “Da Vinci,” see Robbie Gonzalez, Gizmodo, February 7, 2015. “Worked in agriculture” from Donald Fisk, “American Labor in the 20th Century,” BLS, January 30, 2003. “The word economy” from Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists, pp. 111–12. “Term white collar” from Saval, Cubed, p. 7. “Phrase knowledge workers” from Saval, Cubed, p. 196. For more on personality tests, see Margaret Nauta, “The Development, Evolution, and Status of Holland’s Theory of Vocational Personalities,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 57, no. 1. “A third of corporations” from Saval, Cubed, p. 165; “employees’ wives” from Saval, Cubed, p. 171.

  “Pattern of work” from Monique Valcour, Lotte Bailyn, Maria Alejandra Quijada, “Customized Careers,” in Handbook of Career Studies, edited by Hugh Gunz and Maury Peiperl. My history of the résumé, including the quotations, the journalistic references, and the advice manuals comes from the extraordinary work of Sam Hoffman DeKay in his unpublished PhD thesis, “The Historical Evolution of a Written Genre,” Fordham University, 2003. “Factory workers” from Charles Heckscher, White Collar Blues, p. 3. “White-collar workers” from Savil, Cubed, p. 240.

  “A little over one hundred fifty years” from Guido Caldarelli, Michele Catanzaro, Networks, p. 53. “Satellite in the sky” from Harry Baker, “How Many Satellites Orbit Earth?” Live Science, November 14, 2021. “Terabits” from “Internet Speed Record Shattered,” New Atlas, August 20, 2020. “Grand narratives” from Umberto Eco, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, p. 1.

  2. Lie #2: You Have a Path

  For more on my data about lifequakes see my book Life Is in the Transitions, pp. 75–95. BLS data on job changes can be found at bls.gov/news.release/nlsoy.nr0.htm. “Follow your bliss” appears in Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth. “Butterfly effect” first appears in Edward Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” presented before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1972. Jeff Goldblum Butterfly Effect scene appears on YouTube as “Jurassic Park (1993)—Chaos Theory Scene (2/10).”

  “32 percent lower” from Jing Hu, Jacob Hirsh, “Accepting Lower Salaries for Meaningful Work,” Frontiers in Psychology, September 2017. “Nine out of ten” from Shawn Achor, Andrew Reece, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Alexi Robichaux, “9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work,” Harvard Business Review, November 2018.

  3. Lie #3: You Have a Job

  For more on Richard Scarry, see richardscarry.com, famousauthors.com. “Raised their own food” from John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird, p. 38. “Only since the nineteenth century” from Anatoly Liberman, “The Word ‘Job’ and Its Low-Class Kin,” The Oxford Etymologist, December 13, 2017. “Keynes,” “Shaw,” and “Asimov” from Bregman, Utopia for Realists, pp. 128, 130, 185.

  For detailed statistics on American working hours, see Jamie McCallum, Worked Over, pp. 4–25, along with Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 61–87. “Work performed for money” is discussed in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, p. 193ff. For “Even by this definition,” see The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., unabridged. For “Feminist scholars,” see Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.

  “Work performed on a fixed schedule” from Hudson Sessions, “Comforted by Role of Community or Refreshed by Role Variety,” unpublished PhD thesis, Arizona State University, 2019, p. 13. “Jobless jobs” from Mark Savickas, “New Questions for Vocational Psychology,” Journal of Career Assessment, vol. 19, no. 3. For “Half of us,” see “Only 47% of Working Age Americans Have Full Time Jobs,” Business Insider, January 24, 2011.

  For “moonlighting,” see Online Etymology Dictionary and Andrew Gibson, The Strong Spirit, p. 227. For “side hustle,” see “The Origins of ‘Side-Hustle,’ meriam-webster.com, September 2022. “Employees happier” from Sessions, “Comforted by Role of Community,” p. 16; “entrepreneurship,” from Sessions, “Comforted by Role of Community,” p. 15.

  “Hope job” first appears in Kathleen Kuehn, Thomas Corrigan, “Hope Labor,” in The Political Economy of Communication, vol. 1, no. 1. Her bio appears on kmkuehn.com, as does her description of the origin of the term “Hope Labor as, well, hope labor.”

  “Primary breadwinners” from “More than Half of Women Are Primary Breadwinners,” Dallas Business Journals, December 17, 2018. “Parts of parenting” from “8 Facts About American Dads,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2019. “Thirty million Americans” from “Caregiver Statistics,” caregiver.org/resource.

  “Negative, untelegenic” from Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings, p. 55. “American optimism” from Hong, Minor Feelings, p. 56. “Prove myself” from Hong, Minor Feelings, p. 9. “Reality is distinct” from Hong, Minor Feelings, p. 18. “Remain silent” from Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 41. For “Brewster,” see Harold Sack, “David Brewster and the Invention of the Kaleidoscope,” SciHi Blog, July 10, 2021.

  4. We All Need Another Hero

  My review of the history of success draws from a wonderful collection of books, including Richard Huber, The American Idea of Success; Steven Watts, Self-Help Messiah; Peter Lyon, Success Story; and Gary Scharnhorst, Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. “Best clothes” from Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, p. 25. “Dominant visual” from Harold Bloom, The American Dream, p. 27; “rags to riches” from Bloom, The American Dream, p. 23.

  “Timeless” from Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, p. ix; “leisure” from Rodgers, Work Ethic, p. 7. “Made a fortune” from Huber, American Idea of Success, p. 15. “Industrious” is available at d.lib.rochester.edu/cinderella/text/alger-ragged-dick-plot-summary. “Collectively selling” from Scharnhorst, Bales, Lost Life, p. 149; “so ‘excited’ ” from Scharnhorst, Bales, Lost Life, p. 77. “Abominable” and “wish him” from Scharnhorst, Bales, Lost Life, p. 2.

  “Change the thought” from Rodgers, Work Ethic, p. 38. “Most popular” from Huber, American Idea of Success, p. 164. “Sit down” from Watts, Self-Help Messiah, p. 48. “No faith” from Watts, Self-Help Messiah, p. 6. “Harmonic” from Watts, Self-Help Messiah, p. 50. “Shout” and “Really feel” from Watts, Self-Help Messiah, p. 51.

  For more on David Jepsen, “Career as story,” see Ten Ideas That Changed Career Development, edited by Mark Savickas. All quotes from Savickas come from my conversation with him, January 2022.

  5. The Meaning Audit

  “Very conservative” from Maggie Bullock, “The Changeling,” Elle, June 23, 2009. “Really frustrated” from Lauren Tegtmeyer, “Jessica Alba Shares How She Handles the Big Parenting Conversations,” March 24, 2021. For the story of Alba’s business, I relied on Derek Blasberg, “How Jessica Alba Built a Billion-Dollar Business Empire,” Vanity Fair, December 1, 2015. “Hospitalized several times” from Jessica Alba, The Honest Life, p. xiv. “america’s richest” from “Jessica Alba,” Forbes, December 12, 2016. “Understand yourself” from David Artavia, “Jessica Alba Regrets Not Starting Therapy Earlier in Life,” Yahoo!, February 7, 2022.

  “Narrative of ascent” from Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil, p. 164. Seamus Heaney, “Digging” in Death of a Naturalist.

  I discuss the original research behind the ABCs of Meaning in Life Is in the Transitions, pp. 104–5.

  “Present-oriented” from Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, Emily Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life” in The Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 8, no. 6, p. 510. “Elephant’s Child” from Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories. “Invent” from Ryan Babineaux, Fail Fast, Fail Often, p. 106.

  6. Who Is Your Who?

  “It’s me” from Isaac Butler, “The Blurred Boundaries of Memoir and Fiction in Homeland Elegies,” Slate, December 7, 2020. “Loved by her” from Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies, p. 216. “Ourselves as individuals” from Duncan Watts, Six Degrees, p. 217. For more on Chekhov’s gun, see Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov. “Ghosts into ancestors” from Stephen Mitchell, “From Ghosts to Ancestors” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 8, no. 6, p. 825.

  7. What Is Your What?

  My father’s thesis is unpublished but remains in our family’s archives. “Cheaper in Beaufort” from Matt Schudel, The Washington Post, March 6, 2016. My account of Merton draws from Gerald Horton, “Robert K. Merton,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 148, no. 4. “Partial” from Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. “Ephemeral” from Julie Andrews, Home Work, p. 315.

  “House of hope” from Amy Wrzesniewski, Jane Dutton, “Crafting a Job,” in The Academy of Management Review, vol. 26, no. 2. “Burn off” from “Crafting Your Job into a Calling,” president.yale.edu/president/yale-talk/crafting-your-job-calling.

  8. When Is Your When?

  “Fishing commercially” from Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean, p. xi. “Female captain” from Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean, p. 58. “Nine-to-five” from Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean, p. 15. “Whacked” and this account draw on Elizabeth Hightower Allen’s “The Story Behind ‘The Perfect Storm,’ ” in outsideonline.com, October 27, 2021. “Course correct” from Janet Ungless’s “Becoming a Mother at 46,” Prevention, May 20, 2013.