Even accepting that consensus, I still believe that we underestimate the breadth, scope, and pace of that fluidity. I believe that because when I asked everyone I interviewed to count the number of workquakes they’d been through, every single person was aghast. Many were embarrassed, even apologetic.

  They shouldn’t have been.

  The workquake is the signature unit of work today. It’s the atom of the atomized work life. I started using the term workquake because it grows out of the expression lifequake I used in the Life Story Project, the first round of stories I collected that focused on the full spectrum of disruptive life events, from medical emergencies to losing a loved one. Like lifequake, workquake is value neutral. Some workquakes are voluntary (we take a new job, go back to school), others are involuntary (we lose a job, come down with an illness); some are personal (the birth of a child), others are collective (a pandemic); some begin outside the workplace (a recession), others in our heads (we get antsy and want a change).

  A workquake is a moment of disruption, inflection, or reevaluation that redirects our work in a meaningful way. I collected data on three thousand such events. The two biggest takeaways: (1) workquakes are more plentiful, more varied, start earlier, run later, last longer, and touch us more deeply than most people expect; and (2) as destabilizing and scary as workquakes feel when we’re in one, they’re also invitations to reexamine our priorities and opportunities for growth and renewal. Above all, workquakes are de-storying events that summon us to re-story our lives.

  We’re going to work our way through all these topics, but let’s start with some basic facts.

  People usually have their first workquake long before they enter the workforce. I asked everyone, When was the first time you imagined that something you were interested in might become something that you do? The average age was 16.2. For people with at least one diversity marker, the answer was a full 2 years earlier than those with none—15.8 versus 17.8—suggesting what would become a theme of my conversations: The work lives of those from underrepresented communities are more volatile than their peers from more conventional communities.

  Once those workquakes start, they rarely slow. The average person experiences a workquake every 2.85 years—that’s 2 years and 10 months. Women go through workquakes every 2.75 years, which is 22 percent more frequently than men.

  The number of workquakes also escalates by generation. Gen Xers go through workquakes 15 percent more frequently than boomers; millennials 45 percent more frequently than Gen Xers. The frequency at which millennials experience workquakes is 67 percent faster than their boomer parents—every 2.24 years compared with 3.74 years.

  A number of explanations might account for this acceleration. People’s work lives might become more stable over time; the Labor Department, for example, says that half of our jobs occur before age twenty-four. But even the department’s data show that younger people are staying in jobs for shorter and shorter periods of time. Another reason might be that younger people are more comfortable with change and the growing nonlinear nature of life; data I collected from the Life Story Project indicate that people under forty change residences more frequently and change their religious beliefs more often.

  Whatever the mix of reasons, the net effect is the same: the frequency of workquakes is likely to grow as the American economy becomes more dominated by workers who are younger, more female, and more diverse.

  How many workquakes do we have in total? If you start the clock at sixteen and stop at, say, seventy-two, which accommodates our longer work lives, the average answer is twenty. For millennials, it’s twenty-five. To put those figures into perspective: there are 234 million Americans between sixteen and seventy-two; 82 million of them are going through a workquake at any one time.

  That’s 35 percent of the country.

  The bright, blinking warning in all these figures is that we simply must begin to think about our work lives as more unsettled and serpentine than we already do. There is no standard path anymore; we’re all on a path less traveled. To master this new terrain, we need to say goodbye to some of our more beloved platitudes. That process begins with debunking the four worst pieces of advice about work.

  Follow Your Bliss

  Surely the most hallowed piece of wisdom about work over the last generation has been follow your bliss. Coined in the 1970s by Joseph Campbell, who specialized in applying lessons from mythology to contemporary life, the phrase has become a watchword of the happiness movement.

  Decide what brings you joy, then go for it with single-minded determination.

  The problem: This advice applies to almost no one who is happy at work and helps almost no one who wants to be. A mere one in ten people in my conversations said they followed their bliss. The rest said they took another route entirely. And yet, they still ended up happy.

  Todd Krause grew up in a family of small business owners in southeastern Wisconsin. His uncles ran restaurants; his father hauled milk for a dairy; his brother started a siding company. “After being handed a sledgehammer when I was a boy and told to crawl under the hood of a truck and pound out a steering kingpin, I said no way do I want to do this for a living. It’s greasy; it’s dirty; you touch the wrong thing, you get burned. I wanted to sit in an office somewhere that was clean, cool, and dry.”

  Todd enrolled at Marquette University on a naval ROTC scholarship. He dropped the program, switched to physics, and then graduated with a degree in finance. “There was definitely a grieving process of letting go of some of those earlier dreams, but ultimately I ended up back where I started—in business.”

  Todd married his college sweetheart, moved to Chicago, and went to work as a pension analyst at Mercer, the largest employee benefit firm in the US. “I’d be handed a set of facts about somebody’s life, read through their pension plan, then calculate what benefits they were eligible for.” He was told to leave his personal life at the door. “It was 100 percent business, business, business.”

  He left after a few years, worked in a family office, and then jumped to an investment company that managed $100 billion in assets. He stayed for the next decade, helping assemble a management team, rebuilding their fund operations, and earning master’s degrees in business and accounting. “By then I started to get bored.”

  After Todd and his wife adopted two children from Korea, he felt even more pressure to make money. “As the sole breadwinner, I had to provide all our income and all our health benefits.” He went to work at an investment firm, but it collapsed after 9/11; he became COO of a $2 billion hedge fund management operation, but he had a falling-out with his partner; he became vice president of a Bank of America division that managed $14 billion, but he lost interest in the work.

  There was a pattern to Todd’s seemingly patternless work life. He’d go to a place with an impressive name on the door (Zacks Investment Management, NAV Consulting, Cortland Capital Market Services), play an increasingly impressive role (controller, director of administration, chief of operations), and then grow increasingly disaffected with the work itself.

  “I got to the point where not only did I stop unpacking all my photos and personal belongings in my office, but I started taking less and less of me to the office to begin with. I was always protecting myself from becoming too committed. Work became less about making an impact and more about earning a paycheck.”

  Finally, when the pandemic forced him to take a break from his routine, Todd made an emotional break, too. He contacted some business brokers he knew, secured financing, and bought a residential cleaning company in northeast Indiana.

  “It was a real adjustment for me—and a real improvement. I no longer work seventy hours a week; I work thirty-five. I have people from eight different countries on my team, and I gave all of them a raise. Every day, I touch the lives of forty employees, six hundred customers, and dozens of vendors and local partners—along with their families, it totals five thousand people. Instead of measuring my impact in billions of dollars, now I measure it in thousands of daily interactions.”

  Considering the indirect route he took back to where he started—running a small business—I asked Todd whether he followed his bliss, discovered his bliss, or made his bliss?

  “For a long time I didn’t think about bliss. I was an accountant, and being happy wasn’t how I thought about work; I was a provider. But what I discovered is that being unhappy at work began to affect my health. I finally got to the point where I realized I needed to make my own happiness, or I would be unhappy forever.”

  I asked everyone I interviewed a series of questions about the wisdom of identifying what brings you happiness and then pursuing that objective with all your might. Few supported the premise.

  For starters, most people begin working as teenagers, when they have little idea of their passion. Using my bingo card for categorization, the most common first jobs were in food and beverage, followed by retail, childcare, and education. Only 11 percent of these people were working in the same field when I spoke with them.

  That pattern changes little as people enter young adulthood. I asked everyone, Is what you’re doing today something that you dreamed of doing as a child, a teenager, or a young adult? Only 38 percent said yes. Sixty percent said no. Meroë Park had no idea she was going to run payroll when she joined the CIA; Brijette Peña had no clue she would start a plant seed company. One of the main reasons follow your passion is bad advice is that what your passion is today is unlikely to be what your passion is in the future.

  Finally, I asked everyone directly what I asked Todd Krause: Did you follow your bliss, discover your bliss, or make your bliss? Only 12 percent said follow. Eighty-eight percent chose another option. Of those, make was most popular, as how Eric Vélez-Villar had to keep making new dreams as he moved through different roles at the FBI, then Disney, before stepping down to work on his mental health; followed by discover, as how Issa Spatrisano discovered a passion for helping refugees after her first love, European studies, was foreclosed to her. Some people chose a combination, but even including those answers, the number of people who said they followed their bliss was still only 16 percent.

  By even the most generous interpretation, only one in six people who self-identify as being happy at work said they followed their bliss to get there; the vast majority took another route entirely.

  Make a Ten-Year Plan

  OK, so you don’t need to follow your bliss, but you definitely need to follow your plan. Everybody knows that advice is true.

  Not so fast.

  Some people do make plans and follow them, of course. They set out to become doctors, or astronauts, or center fielders for the New York Yankees, and they succeed! But for far more people, even the best plans go awry. Unannounced events pop up, unforeseen figures appear, unanticipated changes occur. I call these experiences—and the life-changing workquakes they trigger—butterflies. They’re both the heroes of the nonlinear work life and the enemies of the ten-year plan.

  Cathy Heying grew up in a large Catholic family in a small Iowa town. “I’m the youngest of seven; my dad was the oldest of thirteen. I have eighty-three first cousins.” Cathy’s father drove a gas truck for Amoco; her mother became a disability activist after her first child, born with Down syndrome, was denied Communion. “What I took from her is that it doesn’t matter if you’re raising six other kids; if there’s a fight to be had, you have the fight.”

  After earning a social work degree, Cathy moved to Kentucky to work with the Christian Appalachian Project. Feeling unwelcome, she and her girlfriend decided to relocate to Denver, but they couldn’t afford a car, so they bummed a couch for a few months in Minneapolis. Looking for work, Cathy stopped into Saint Stephen’s Catholic church.

  “The first thing I saw was a rainbow sticker, and I burst into tears.”

  She stayed for the next nine years. Cathy loved the church’s inclusive politics, but the diocese didn’t, so the church had to spin off its social justice arm. Cathy followed, working at a residence for Indigenous women and a shelter for single men. She earned a master’s in ministry and bought a motorcycle. Her life was finally stable.

  That’s when her butterfly appeared.

  “One thing that happens at churches all over the world is that people show up and ask for money. But I had people in my office who all told some version of the same story. I work on this side of town. I have a second shift on the other side of town. I don’t get off until eleven o’clock at night and there’s no bus service. But my car is broken down and I can’t afford to repair it.”

  One night, Cathy was smoking outside the shelter when a man named Sidney came up to her. He pointed to his car and asked her to help him push it to a new parking spot. “It was his residence,” she said. “When he filled out forms, he listed his address as 1994 Nissan Maxima Drive.” Sidney made $203 a month on government support; fixing his car cost $50 an hour. “That might as well be a million dollars,” he said.

  “I kept thinking, Minnesota is joked about as being the land of ten thousand nonprofits. We are generous and hardy souls. Somebody needs to do something about this.

  “That’s when it hit me,” she continued. “This was my burning bush moment. Just total clarity that that somebody was me.”

  Yet Cathy had a problem: she knew nothing about car repair. But she is her mother’s daughter, after all, so Cathy, in her late thirties and already with two degrees, enrolled in a two-year, $18,000-a-year, full-time program at Dunwoody College of Technology to earn an associate’s degree in automobile maintenance.

  “I had no business being there on a number of levels,” Cathy said. “For starters, I was a middle-aged lesbian in a classroom of fourteen eighteen-year-old boys. I had no idea what to do with eighteen-year-old boys when I was an eighteen-year-old girl, much less twenty years later.”

  Also, her background was in social services. “Does the carburetor really want to change?” she joked.

  Cathy struggled. She cried on a few occasions and cursed on a few more. But a teacher took her under his wing, and two years later, Cathy marched across the stage. Then she scraped together funding, formed a board, and opened Lift Garage, which provided automotive repair for needy residents at $15 an hour. In its first ten years, Lift served 1,300 customers, completed 3,000 repairs, and saved customers more than $1.1 million. Cathy was named a CNN Hero.

  All because of her butterfly.

  “His name was Sidney. He lived on Nissan Maxima Drive. And he’s why I’m here right now.”

  The Magna Carta of the nonlinear age is an obscure academic paper written in 1972 by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz’s butterfly had appeared ten years earlier when he observed the uneven movement of clouds outside his office window. Unable to identify their pattern, he started running calculations and crystallized the idea that not everything in life is regular and periodic; many things are irregular and nonperiodic. A friend recommended the title “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

  The name stuck, and by the time Jeff Goldblum uttered it two decades later in Jurassic Park, the butterfly effect had gone mainstream.

  But does such irregularity apply to work, perhaps the preeminent arena of life that has long been in the thrall of long-term thinking, org charts, multiyear plans, and hierarchical rows of desks?

  The answer is yes.

  I asked everybody in my interviews who the butterfly was in their story. Who or what triggered the moment when your work veered from the expected path to the unexpected? Everyone had an answer.

  Half said a person—a teacher, a coworker, a neighbor, “a random guy in a restaurant who handed me his business card.” Alton White, the only boy in a Cincinnati home filled with girls, had just performed in the church choir at age twelve when a woman approached him: “Alton, oh my God, you have a gift.” He rode her encouragement to a ten-year run as Mufasa in Broadway’s The Lion King. Dan Gallagher had two butterflies. The first was being called by God in his twenties to enter the priesthood; the second, twenty years later, while working in the Vatican as the pope’s chief Latinist, was falling in love with a colleague, which led him to leave the priesthood, start a family, and become a classics professor at Cornell.

  A quarter of people said their butterfly was an experience—the death of a loved one, a class they took in college, a diagnosis. Lauren Nichols was nine years old when one of her neighbors in the Florida Everglades murdered his wife and mother-in-law and then turned the gun on himself. “I always wondered what would bring someone to end another life. I knew I needed to work in a field that allowed me to help protect others.” Lauren went on to work in national security at the Department of Transportation.

  Ben Chancey was running a thriving windshield repair company in Houston with twenty-eight employees when the pandemic forced him to shutter his operation. “Feeling like a houseplant” at home, he reevaluated his life. “I realized how complacent I’d become, how I didn’t find the work fulfilling anymore.” Ben enrolled in a six-month renewable energy training program and doubled his income as a wind turbine repair specialist at MFG Texas.

  The final group said their butterfly was a thing—a movie, lecture, a snapping turtle. Sonali Dev was a technical writer for a pharmaceutical company in Illinois who loved dissecting Bollywood movies with her best friend. When she came down with tuberculosis and was holed up at home with a 102-degree fever, Sonali asked her husband to pick up a book from the library. He came home with Rosehaven by Catherine Coulter, “an old-style medieval romance.”