How to Pivot Your Life Multiple Times | Bruce Feiler

[00:00:05] For the past 20 or 30 years, I've probably had eight full, completely different careers. A dozen or so passions, hobbies that I was eventually able to monetize. I went from being a software guy to working in the entertainment industry,

[00:00:23] to working in finance, to writing, to writing much more personal stuff and kind of getting in the self-help space and on and on and on doing stand-up comedy, doing so many different things. And I always thought, A, sometimes I wondered if something was wrong with me,

[00:00:40] like I was going to be a jack of all trades master of none. But other times, I really felt and this had been verified for me by my own experiences, I really felt that this was a good way to live life.

[00:00:52] And I always wrote and encouraged other people to pursue, not in a cliche way, pursue their passions, but really think about what they want to do right now. I wrote Skip Blind about this, all the different ways you can pursue your dreams

[00:01:07] and the things that you've been interested in all along, instead of just doing the straight and narrow path of one career. But I never really knew how to put it fully into words. But this next guest, Bruce Filer, he writes specifically about this.

[00:01:23] He's interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people who have made incredible, incredible transitions in their lives and done amazing, amazing things that basically anybody can do. And he kind of gives this guide, this map to how you can get on, you can switch paths easily.

[00:01:41] Something that never was done before. And he describes all these amazing ways people have switched their life journeys multiple times. Well, I'll let Bruce tell us himself, but we have a great conversation. I hope you listen. If you like it, please share it with someone else.

[00:01:57] I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years and said, you know, this concept of pursuing what you love has changed my life. Hopefully this episode can do that for people as well.

[00:02:10] So please share it, please subscribe, please like me, all of the above. Thanks. I arranged them for many years by book, for lack of a better way of putting it. Like these were all like the family books and these were all the transition books

[00:02:50] and these were all the workbooks and these were all the such-and-such books. And I've decided that no longer works. And then like I'm constantly like, when did I buy that? When did I read that? And so I'm unifying them.

[00:03:02] So I took everything from half a dozen books off, stacked them on the floor, which I will not show my camera and now I'm placing them around and purging along the way. So wait, how are you organizing? You're not organizing them by subject or category?

[00:03:17] No, I'm organizing them by last name, but then within the last name, I don't alphabetize, right? So that whatever. I don't know who are two different people. And you get the point. All the G's are together, but the G's are not.

[00:03:36] I don't do every book within it is the answer. My children upstairs do it. My now departed children have identical twin daughters that just started at college last week. They do it by color, which is just, you know, poisonous and I almost can't go in the room.

[00:03:53] You know what? I was going to say, I've always sworn never to organize by color. Uh-oh, uh-oh. This is going to end. Well, I recently moved.

[00:04:01] I took one of my rooms that have books in it and I did organize by color and I actually find books much more easily because I visually remember what the, when I'm looking for a book, I remember what it was just a red book.

[00:04:16] Was it a blue book? And then it's easier for me to find. Okay. Well, let's just talk about body keeps the score, for example, right? Iconic cover. What color is the spine of body keeps the score? I don't know. But I know the search is white.

[00:04:31] White? Well, I'll say that. Well done. The answer is the cover is blue but it's a penguin book so it's orange, right? So you've got this, you know, tension between sometimes the spine matches the cover and sometimes it doesn't. I usually remember that.

[00:04:46] That's the one thing like, because like let's say, you know, like the classics books are all published by, I forget who, but they all have like a black spine. That's penguin. That's penguin classics. Like, old booty. Yeah, penguin classics.

[00:04:59] So I just kind of remember that and like books in categories I'm interested in always have a similar look and feel. You know, I read a lot of books about chess, for instance, and they all have a similar look and feel.

[00:05:12] So I know what that look is for per publisher. That's interesting. So how, how severely did you purge during this move? I had purged a few years ago. I got rid of 100% of my books and moved everything to Kindle.

[00:05:26] So I've been actually re accumulating and now I've got, now I've got three rooms filled with books. That's an interesting choice.

[00:05:35] I had, this is the painful thing that I did this morning, which is that for a long time, like in the previous place where my wife and I lived and we were like, oh, and somebody, we had to redo the main thing.

[00:05:49] We had to redo with the main floor because we had twins and it had to be twinified. And the architecture did is like, you guys are book people, right? So you should have books, right?

[00:05:57] When people walked in and we had a whole thing of books by friends of ours, right? Or like people we know who wrote books and those don't survive the test of time. And finally today I was like, we finally got a purge some of these books by friends.

[00:06:12] And that was the most traumatic part of it. Yeah. I know what you mean. It was, but I've done the complete purge though. I'm like all or nothing. Like I'm either going to do the complete purge or not really purge at all.

[00:06:26] So, but listen, I want to talk about the search because it was fascinating and it goes along with a lot of what I've been thinking about work and the life of work, particularly, I mean, really for the past 15 years,

[00:06:43] but it's been accelerated during the pandemic, which is that exactly what you say in the book. People don't really want to have the traditional career anymore.

[00:06:53] The traditional career, I don't want to say it's a bad idea, but it's not the way people, particularly younger people are thinking these days. And maybe you can describe that a little bit more. Yeah.

[00:07:04] I think that the most important thing about that is to begin right where you say, which is that the idea of the career itself is a historic aberration. But let me actually just take a step back and say I'm delighted to talk to you about this.

[00:07:17] In fact, yes, you have been out there far earlier than most people talking about we don't have to follow the old scripts just because they are the old scripts. Right. And in the case of the career, the script, I think is like deeply harmful.

[00:07:31] So I think to go back in the story a little bit, you know, for most of human history, there was no idea of the career because people didn't need it. They lived where they worked and they worked where they lived.

[00:07:41] You know, it took 90% of the people, 90% of their waking hours just to survive or to find sustenance and people did everything. They worked, they gardened, they made candles, they educated their young, they cared for their sick like everybody did everything.

[00:07:58] And now only was there no idea of career. There wasn't an idea of a job. There wasn't an idea of a workplace. None of these existed until relatively recently. How recently?

[00:08:09] When the Industrial Revolution sort of reaches its peak in the 19th century, an enormous number of people become dislocated. I was on a TV show recently and someone said 5,000 people lost their jobs last month to AI. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

[00:08:27] Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding. I'm like, you know, I'm in the middle of a lot of jobs and the Industrial Revolution, a third of the United States were dislocated.

[00:08:38] You mentioned in the book, I didn't know that she mentioned in books, maybe like 3 or 4 million people a month quit their jobs right now. Today, yes, the number of people who quit the jobs. over the last year has been north of 4 million.

[00:08:53] That's 50 million people quit a job in the last year in a workplace of 160 million people. That's a third of the workplace quit their job. Now, it doesn't mean they go unemployed. They just, they quit their jobs and in many cases take another job.

[00:09:08] Well, different people quit for different reasons. Some people quit and never come back. Some people quit and they make a change. Some people quit and then then set out to move or relocate. But one of the reasons that people quit their jobs

[00:09:20] is there's no more stigma against it because the career has died. These two topics are completely synced up, right? So to go back to the career story for a second, that idea was invented in 1909 by a guy named Frank Parsons in Boston

[00:09:32] and because you had a third of the workplace coming to the city and all these, a third of the country and all these people coming from overseas, there's nothing for them to do and you have all these new companies. So he invents the idea of a career

[00:09:43] which is once in your life, if you're a male in your early 20s, we're gonna ask you a series of questions, get you a job and then we're gonna be done with you and go on to somebody else. And that dominates for the next 100 plus years

[00:09:57] more or less until today when there is no idea of a career anymore and as a result, there's no stigma with leaving a job, right? So in the interviews I've been doing, like if you just wanted to sort of set the stage here,

[00:10:09] I've spent the last now six years collecting and analyzing 400 life stories of Americans of all ages, all walks of life, all income levels, all 50 states. Your book reminds me and you referenced the book in your book, Studs Turkle's book, Working, written in the early 70s

[00:10:27] where he interviews like hundreds of workers. Yeah, exactly. And that is very similar. The big difference is the big data component. So we then coded these and looked for patterns of how we navigate our lives and our various work transitions.

[00:10:43] And I would say that the signature piece of data is that we go through 20 of what I call work quakes in the course of our lives. That's every 2.85 years. And what's interesting is that women go through them more than men, exers more than boomers, millennials more than exers,

[00:10:59] zeers more than millennials, diverse workers more than non-diverse workers and you add all that up, it just means that the piece of this change is quickening and this gets to the heart of what you're saying which is there when there's no career, when there's no path,

[00:11:14] there's no stigma or penalty or consequence to getting off the path, right? So if you think about, you know, you and I are of the same generation, women of our generation were told if you got off, if you got off the path to focus on your family,

[00:11:27] for example, you're never gonna get back on the escalator or whatever it was called. That squandered enormous amounts of human potential. Why can't you get back on it? And now that's what's breaking on. So you, and you're right exactly

[00:11:40] in what you said at the outset of this conversation which is the pandemic has only supercharged this, right? So we said 50 million people quit a job, another 50 million are saying, I don't wanna commute, right? I don't wanna go to the office five days a week, right?

[00:11:54] I mean we've been reading all these headlines in recent weeks about come back to the office, Google is saying, but only three days a week. Like Facebook, we insist, but only three days a week. Nobody in a white collar office, you know,

[00:12:06] knowledge job is gonna work on a Friday anymore in the office. It's just not happening because what's going on is in the power struggle between employers or employees, employees have much more power than they've had in the past and that's what's pushing this change all across the workspace.

[00:12:24] Yeah, you mentioned before the pandemic only 4% of people work from home. And what's it now? Like you had the peak of the pandemic, I think you mentioned 43%, but what is it roughly now? So I think I'd have to look at the numbers off the top of my head,

[00:12:53] but the answer is I think in terms of work from home exclusively, I'm sure that's under 20%, but work from home partially in, you have to qualify here, you know, in a white collar job, right? In an office job, that number, I can't imagine is less than 50% right now.

[00:13:12] But you've got to look at the overall, many people in blue collar jobs or must be in places and so that would lower the overall number, but in the white collar space, it's far north, it's far north of 50%. So, and then, you know,

[00:13:27] it's interesting because it's almost like how I've shaped my career, like quote unquote career. Like I've always, and I've had about maybe six or seven completely different careers since I left college. And it almost, it brings up a whole other issue

[00:13:48] which is what is the point of college? Cause that traditionally was to prepare you for a career, but I've done everything from software to working in the entertainment industry to working in finance to what you then refer to in a more extreme way

[00:14:03] as like hope jobs where I just had to find my passion and then monetize that if possible, which is a whole different kind of skill set. So I think that that's the second half of this, right? The first half of this is what I call the three lies

[00:14:18] about work, line number one, you have a career, line number two, you have a path, we were just discussing that and what's interesting, and I think your life and your public persona and the things you've been talking about, get to this a lot, right?

[00:14:32] Half of all, 45% of workquakes begin inside the workplace, conflict with the boss, right? The company gets shut down. You choose to leave for another job, but that means more than half 55% occur outside of the workplace in your home.

[00:14:48] You get sick as I did as a 43 year old man. Like I was like the walking guy, I was traveling around the world writing books, adventure books and making television and suddenly at 43, I got a nine, I was diagnosed with a nine inch osteogenic sarcoma

[00:15:02] in my left femur and I couldn't walk for two years, right? So I'm the walking guy who can't walk. So this is a workquake, but it has nothing to do with work. It begins in my life, okay? And that forces us to adjust.

[00:15:15] And so the third lie you mentioned just, been passing all address before getting into I think is the heart of your question, which is the third lies that we have a job, only half of us even have a main job anymore. We have up to five,

[00:15:26] only half of us even have a main job. We have care jobs like caring for children or aging relatives or, but then we have these other, we have side jobs that's in the news all the time, but 86% of us have what I call a hope job,

[00:15:39] which is something that they're doing that they hope leads to something else, right? Starting a podcast, writing a screenplay, having pickles that you sell at the farmer's market and for most of these hope jobs, and this is a term that I sort of coined

[00:15:52] just by listening to people, we pay out of pocket for the privilege or the idea that someday they may bring us money. And then we have what I call these ghost jobs, which are invisible time sucks that feel like jobs like battling discrimination or self-doubt

[00:16:08] or worries about how to manage money or these kinds of things that take up 12 hours a week of our time. And so all of these things are shuffled, right? There's this incredible fluidity that's everything we've been talking about and you've embodied it.

[00:16:23] So that leads to the one truth, which is only you can write your own story, only you can figure out what you want to do and that you have the opportunity to revisit that 20 times in your work life. Forget this Frank Parsons, make a decision at 22.

[00:16:41] You can revisit it anytime just for something as simple as you want to revisit the question of what you wanna do. Yeah, so it's very interesting because sometimes these work wakes, you don't know what they can be inspired by. Like you said, you had this career

[00:16:55] and then you had a medical condition where it forced you to change your interests or change your careers or explore something else. Sometimes I might read a book that excites me so much, it changes my whole career. Or sometimes I start a podcast as like a hobby

[00:17:12] and then now I'm on 1500 podcasts later, this is probably the longest stretch of doing anything but this is one of among five different things that I do, like you mentioned, now many people have multiple things that they do. Almost everybody has multiple things that they do

[00:17:27] and so okay, so this is the situation, right? The situation is you can read a book, you can get a diagnosis, a natural disaster could take your roof off and you decide finally you're gonna move, there could be a pandemic and you say I don't wanna commute anymore

[00:17:41] so that's the moment that we're in how do we respond to the moment? And the answer is when this happens to you, when you either choose to, what is a work quick? A work quick is a jolt or a disruption

[00:17:54] when you either choose to or are forced to rethink what you do. What do you do when you're in that situation? You don't go running for the next job, right? You don't start climbing looking for something that's on the traditional narrative.

[00:18:09] The people who are happiest and most fulfilled in what they do, they don't climb, they dig. They do what I call a meaning audit like they do personal archeology. Like what's the story I've been trying to tell my whole life?

[00:18:24] Like where am I today that might be different from where I was six months or six years or 16 years ago? What do I wanna be going forward? Where do I wanna be? What do I wanna be doing? Who do I wanna be helping?

[00:18:35] And that is the essence of what came out of these conversations is giving people the tools to decide who do I wanna be at this moment in time? And that's the great opportunity and that's what's been missing from the workspace,

[00:18:51] which is sort of the toolkit to help you figure out what the heck you wanna do and what is it that brings you meaning at this point in your life? Yeah, and you really expand on this in the book. Like I've written a little on this topic

[00:19:04] which is I basically say very simple things. I simplistically say when you go into much greater detail and better detail on which I say go to the bookstore and if there's any section where you're willing to read every single book in that section, then that's probably a direction

[00:19:20] for your career. Oh I love that. That's so good. There's one of my questions, which is what kinds of stories do you like to consume and tell? My wife who works with entrepreneurs around me, she loves books about the collapse of WeWork

[00:19:36] or Uber, she likes these inside corporate things. I like long biographies. I just literally finished one last night about Dittoro and the creation of the Encyclopedia, spectacular book by the way. So I like these long stories of people who were thinkers over time, right?

[00:19:55] And that's exactly right, it's pointing you into what I have in the book is like 21 different questions to ask yourself. I mean, just I'll give you an example. This is like this is maybe my favorite question is talking to someone who, questioner to questioner here.

[00:20:09] Right when I started this project, James, I read this fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, right? It's the last one of like the 146 he wrote or whatever the number is. It's called Auntie Toothache about a young boy

[00:20:23] who has a way with words and his aunt keeps saying to him, kiddo you got away with words, you're gonna be a great poet. And one night this kid, who also has a lot of toothaches is in a toothachey delirious dream and he's visited by this older woman

[00:20:36] who says to him every great poet has a great toothache. I crazy love this. There's like a, there's a Bruce Springston quote that very similar like every great artist, has something aching inside of them. What is your toothache? And when I asked people, it was heart-rending.

[00:20:56] It was, I felt trapped. I needed to get out of my home or I wanted a place where money because my parents were rubbing nickels together or I wanted to escape or I didn't wanna work for somebody else cause I watched my parent get laid off,

[00:21:08] when they were 50 and worked for the same company. What was your toothache as a child? Is a spectacularly good question to tap into some story you've been trying to tell for decades. Yeah, the second thing I tell people is exactly that

[00:21:26] which is what do you love when you were 12 years old? And what does that love having grown up? So for instance, if you love basketball at the age of 12, it doesn't mean and you're 43 now or whatever you are, doesn't mean you should be a professional basketball player

[00:21:43] but maybe you could write about basketball, do a podcast about basketball, collect statistics about, do fantasy sports about basketball or gamble. There's a million different things you can do. And the way to get at that, right? One of my questions is,

[00:21:57] who was your childhood role model other than family? And the question is not who but what did you admire about them? So the question about basketball is not, as you say, can you be a basketball player at 45 years old for the New York Knicks?

[00:22:12] No, but the question is, what did you like about the basketball? Is it the teamwork? Is it the strategy? Is it the competition? So if you get at these things that you like, what was it that you liked? And that's a great way to point you

[00:22:24] to what you should do. And there's a difference. One of the questions I asked people was what were the upsides and downsides you worked from your parents? You can't choose your parents. And by the way, that question alone, James, I think I love this.

[00:22:39] I was looking at it recently in the search. The number one thing people learn from their parents, the value of hard work. So this idea that millennials and Gen Z, that's bunk, people want to work hard. And frankly when I was asking people this question,

[00:22:53] I was sort of annoyed like everyone was saying the same thing. And I was like, let me just flip it. I said, so what were the downsides of work you learned from their parents? Damn it, that wasn't when it got interesting. Number one answer, overwork.

[00:23:05] Number two, strain on the family. Number three, unhappiness. Those were all at a third. That is the story of work in a nutshell. People want to work hard, but they are not prepared to overwork. They are not prepared to strain on their families, even dads these days.

[00:23:21] And they are not prepared to be unhappy. And that is what's driving people to quit. That is what's driving people to walk away from what I call the should train. What I would say to someone now, I've got kids, we were talking about this,

[00:23:34] I don't know if that made it into the top of the podcast. I just dropped identical twin daughters at college last weekend. And someone said to me recently, well what did you tell them about work? I'm like, don't listen to me.

[00:23:43] Don't do it because you think I want you to do it because person after person told me they chased some dream that their parents wanted, that their culture wanted, that their country wanted, that their religion wanted. Get off the should train and get on the want train.

[00:24:01] And that seems to be for whatever reason, incredibly difficult for people. Yeah, I think it's because, and you refer to this theory about we're all living these scripts. So we're told, I remember being four years old and going my first day of nursery school

[00:24:19] and I clearly remember asking my dad, is this just for today or this week? Like what's going on? And he's like, no, we're gonna go to nursery school. Then you're gonna spend a year in kindergarten, then 12 years in grade school, four years in college,

[00:24:32] about three to five years in graduate school. And then for the next 40 years approximately, you're gonna have a job and then when you're your age of your grandfather, you're gonna finally retire. And I remember starting to cry, like this did not sound fun.

[00:24:49] And fortunately that did not happen to me and according to your book, it doesn't happen to a lot of people but this is very important to ask yourselves these questions like my daughter is of that age, she's about to graduate college

[00:25:03] and she said, I have no idea what I'm gonna do in my life. And I said, that is a good thing because you're gonna do any things, you shouldn't be on a specific path right now unless you're totally driven by something, which you're not.

[00:25:17] And that's why follow your passion is such a lame idea because people change their passion, right? When I ask people, did you follow your passion, discover your passion or make your passion, right? Only 10% follow their passion because you can't anticipate what your passion is going to be, right?

[00:25:33] You're gonna discover new things, right? Technology will create as many jobs as it destroys and most people today will be doing things or a huge amount of percentage of people will be doing things that haven't even been invented yet. Okay, and so it's not about passion,

[00:25:51] it's about discovering the story you want to tell and ask yourself, here's a very simple question. I'm in a moment in my life when blank? It might be you're at a moment in your life when you need to make money to pay off student loans, right?

[00:26:07] In my case, to send two kids to college. It might be in a moment where you say, I wanna climb, I wanna make a name for myself and I wanna stick with this company right now and finish this project and meet my potential

[00:26:22] or it might be I've done the same thing for 20 years and I wanna change and I'm in a moment in my life where I don't wanna work for the boss, I wanna work for myself or I wanna give back or I wanna fight climate change.

[00:26:33] I love the story of my book of Wei Teng Huok who was the head of an ad company, the leading Silicon Valley to China ad tech company and his wife against his will drags him to see an inconvenient truth. Like there's this movie playing at the multiplex

[00:26:51] by Al Gore and he said by the end of the movie I was in a full on work week and I would shave every morning and look myself in the mirror and say, what am I doing today to make the planet better?

[00:27:04] Time for my kids to grow up and do it. I gotta do it. And I'm sitting there arguing about the shape, the number of pixels in an app design and he walks away from being the CEO to being a foot soldier to fight climate change.

[00:27:18] And even that wasn't enough and he did what he swore he would never do as a kid. He runs for office in his community in California. Half of all people, we talked about the quitters at the top of this conversation James,

[00:27:29] half of all people who change a job change an occupation. This story you just told reminds me of, I just read an autobiography of James Patterson, the thriller writer and I had no idea he was like a major player in the advertising industry.

[00:27:43] He was like the CEO of, I forget if it was Satya Satya or something like, oh yeah, J. Walton Thompson, right. And so it's one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He's, and he was the CEO. That was his career.

[00:27:54] And then nobody knows him as that. Like an entire industry knew him as that. And now, and then he's like, oh I wanna write novels. So we, for various reasons, he left that position and focused full time on his hope job, which was vaguely making money.

[00:28:10] And he is a superstar now. Well, I think that the, you know, one of the things, so the way that I sort of encourage people to go through this process, right, is kind of the basics of storytelling, right? Who, what, when, where, why and how, right?

[00:28:25] So who, who, who are your, who would you learn from your parents? That's a who question. Like who are your role models? That's a what question because it's what did you admire about them? And I put how last, right? And I think that part of the issue

[00:28:38] is that people put how too soon. So they lose a job or they decide they're losing interest in a job or they want to move or they're in a change of life or whatever it might be. You're in one of these work weeks

[00:28:51] that happens every two and a half years and you decide you make, you want to make a change. And the, in some ways, the worst thing you can do is go to how too quickly because odds are you'll find a job but you'll be miserable

[00:29:04] and you'll be back where you were in, in two and a half years. That's why you put the other ones first. But when you are ready to get to how, you know, there are some interesting things that people do.

[00:29:13] Like one of the, let's talk about a when question, so this is a question that plagues a lot of people. Should I stay or should I leave? The easiest way to answer that question is which pain is greater? When the pain of staying becomes greater

[00:29:34] than the pain of leaving, like then you for sure know that now is a good time to change. But yet at the same time, you talk about hope jobs. A lot of what happens is people use time in interesting ways. They like, I'll give myself a buffer.

[00:29:48] Like I'm gonna give myself 18 months, right? Or a year to see if I can make this work before they commit. And then what happens with hope jobs is often you have a main job, okay? So maybe I'm at a moment where I need the main job

[00:30:05] because I need salary and benefits, but I wanna start this thing on the side. So you start the thing on the side and it becomes the side job or the hope job. But then there gets a point where maybe that's working

[00:30:15] and this is how most entrepreneurial enterprises begin. And then people leave the main job and they go to the hope job, but maybe they're still not making enough money. I'll give you an example, right? I talked to this, a guy who was a first generation Korean immigrant.

[00:30:32] He grew up in Queens sharing a bedroom and a bathroom with his three sisters. He did exactly as we were just hearing with your producer. His Asian American parents said, you should become a doctor or a lawyer or something predictable. He became a lawyer,

[00:30:51] but on the side he starts helping his friends redecorate what their bedrooms and bathrooms because that was his pain point as a kid until he gets to the point where he makes the jump and he opens his own interior design place, but he's not yet ready.

[00:31:08] So we take some legal clients on the side. By the way, he was working for Goldman Sachs as a lawyer when before he makes his jump. So there is a kind of fluidity when you don't have a path, when you don't have a job,

[00:31:18] there's just much more non-linearity in the system and that's what gives people both the opportunities to do more of what they want, but it ends up sort of putting pressure on people at the same time because people get sort of writer's block

[00:31:34] writing the story of their work life in this case. But the truth is ultimately the opportunities are far greater because the stigma from making these kinds of changes, even the stigma of failing is much smaller than it ever been. Yeah, I think that's true.

[00:31:48] I think you could for instance, leave your job at an investment bank to do stand-up comedy and I've known people who do this and no one's gonna crucify you if you don't succeed at stand-up comedy. Like you're allowed to do it and then not do it.

[00:32:05] Yeah, I collected the story of a guy named Brian Wecht. Brian Wecht was a tenured nuclear physicist in London, actually he grew up in Pennsylvania, I got his PhD in California and moved to London and he's got this weird quirky side job slash hope job

[00:32:27] as one of a YouTube comedy duo called Ninja Sex Party. And he's the one who doesn't speak. It's sort of like Penn and Teller, like one speaks and one doesn't and he's the one who never speaks. And out of nowhere, this thing takes off

[00:32:45] and he is tortured like should he go chase this crazy dream of being a YouTube comedy musician or should he stay in his tenured physics professorship and he calls his PhD advisor who says to him, you can quit this job, you're the only one of my students

[00:33:05] who ever got a job in his intended profession. But he says to me, and I love this story, it's both in my last book, Life is in the Transitions and referenced in the search, he said, the pain of staying was greater than the pain of leaving.

[00:33:20] So he leaves and boom, they're playing huge venues in Las Vegas and across the world. And I had these millennials on my team. I was born in the last year of the baby boom in 1964, but I have these millennials and Jen Sears, like this is their favorite story

[00:33:36] because no one I know has ever heard of Ninja Sex Party, but they're like rabid fans of them and like they're like, oh my God, I get to learn about Brian Wecht. He just released a soft jazz album, check it out. You know, that's an interesting thing too

[00:33:51] is that there's all these, and you talk about this in the book, this definition of success has changed. Like it's rare now for someone to be famous to everyone. Like the world's now divided up into That's interesting. Thousands and thousands of subcultures.

[00:34:09] So for instance, this guy is famous for doing Ninja Sex Parties. Maybe it's the most popular YouTube show for a certain subculture. And I've never heard of him, but other people love it. And it's related to Kevin Kelly's concept

[00:34:25] of you can make a living if you have 1000 true fans, like fans who love everything you do, which means you probably have 10 to 100,000 pretty good fans. I mean, Kevin Kelly, by the way, is a graduate, I just did an event with Kevin Kelly at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

[00:34:40] He's a group, by the way, hope job of all hope jobs. While he's like telling the stories of Silicon Valley, he's traveling all over the world with his camera, taking pictures of spiritual moments around the world. It's an astonishing hope, and he publishes these things.

[00:34:56] I mean, he's a great example of someone who was onto this idea very early. You know, here's what I would say about that, James. And this again reminds me of your own life, at least the part of it that's public that we all know.

[00:35:12] Every story that I heard in one, and I've heard 400 of them in one way or another has a moment with a choice that seems ridiculous or at a minimum upset somebody. I tell this story that I crazy love of a woman named Maroy Park.

[00:35:32] Again, first generation Korean American. She's born in the Upper Northwest. Her 16th birthday person from her father is a chemistry textbook. I'm like, that'll tell you what he wanted her to do. And she's like, I wanted public service. And she goes to DC and she says,

[00:35:46] I went with a brand name and she joins the CIA. And she is assigned to the Soviet desk. Like the most prestigious, I know you know the story that's in the opening chapter, the Tamacha 11. And she says, I think I can help the agency in a better way.

[00:36:02] So she leaves the Soviet desk to do what? To run payroll, like the least sexy job in the United States government. Okay, I had a question about this story. Like it wasn't clear to me why she chose payroll. Because she said, I am better able to contribute.

[00:36:20] I'm an organized person. I think I can help everybody else be better. She's one of these people that is just, she like I'm like a logistical, one of my daughters this way, like just crazy conscientious and organized. And I can see the problems

[00:36:35] and there are people who can analyze whatever, sub marine tracks better than I can. My better, I can contribute more by helping the organization. So she runs payroll, then she runs human resources. And as you know from the story, she ends up running the CIA.

[00:36:51] And in this weird moment, when there was a turnover actually when Donald Trump first arrived, she is the director of the CIA for a very short window of time, the first Asian-American woman to do it. And her friends thought she was crazy.

[00:37:03] And she's like, this is who I am. Every story has a choice that is the unright choice. And the key is that the unright choice is not necessarily wrong. And the opportunity of all these crazy stories, the crazy way I've lived my life,

[00:37:19] going to college and going to Japan, I spent a year as a circus clown. I spent 15 years back and forth to the Middle East writing books. You spent a year as a circus clown? I spent a year as a circus clown. And the Kalei, can't you see like,

[00:37:30] you can see with our listeners can't, you can see me juggling on a camel, which is behind me, which is a combination of my circus life and the Kalei Betty Cold Brother Circus and my 15 years, doing walking the Bible in a series of books about,

[00:37:44] can we get along? And sort of the clash of civilizations in the early part of this century. And now I'm this life story and collecting and analyzing stories. Like every story has a twist to it that seems like the wrong story and disappoints somebody.

[00:38:02] You know when this came up in these conversations, there's a part of my book, I mean, by the way, you're an incredibly careful reader and recaller. And I hope your listeners appreciate that. Certainly people like me appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. But there's a moment that goes

[00:38:15] really quickly that you would have no reason to remember, which is when I ask people, what's the best advice they got? You know, did they get advice that was helpful in a transition? And if so, what was it and who gave it to you?

[00:38:27] And it's the who gave it to you that was really interesting because the number one answer was colleagues. Which kind of surprised me because you think if you were thinking about leaving a company, you wouldn't tell your colleagues and the bottom, the last answer was family.

[00:38:43] And I was surprised by it but I think the answer is something like this. Like the family or stakeholders in some way, like if it's a parent that may upset their vision, if it's a partner, like maybe the money will be less

[00:38:54] because half of people got less money after making a change that made them happier. So the people around us aren't necessarily the best people to help us because they have a stake. They want us to fulfill some dream of theirs or for their parent

[00:39:12] or they want us to be stable and rather than unstable if we're our partners and we're trying to raise a family together. But actually it's other people that give us better advice. I believe that because I kind of think your colleagues, you're not really talking to them

[00:39:30] about how great the job is. You're usually talking to them about how much you hate the job. That's good. That's really good. That's really good. Oh, this law sucks. So watch out for this guy stealing credit or whatever. You're usually talking about problems.

[00:39:43] By the way, there's a moment in my book that's Chris Donovan in that success chapter we were talking about earlier whenever I really dug into that. But he's 29 years as a telephone repairman and he leaves to become a woman's shoe designer. That story is just crazy, crazy wonderful.

[00:39:58] He tells me that when he goes to his colleagues, they're like, oh man, I always dreamed of that. I don't think that they dreamed of becoming a woman's shoe designer, but they're like, they also dreamed of like, walking out the door. So you're dead on.

[00:40:13] That's exactly the proper read. You know, there's a danger a little bit. Like I feel like I've dreamed too much about walking out the door at every stage of my life. Well, okay, well, dig into that. Why? So what is it that you think is bad about it?

[00:40:43] I feel I've become a jack of all trades master of none. So I become really, really good at lots of things. But never like the best in the world at one thing. So I think, okay, so the first question is exactly

[00:40:59] what is the thing that you're unhappy with? Okay, so the answer is you're unhappy without being the best at anything. So let me ask you then the question I asked you earlier, right, which is, I said people should ask themselves. I ask you who was your role model

[00:41:16] other than family, who was your role model as a kid? You know, it was funny when I was reading the book, and you had this chapter. I didn't really have a role model as a kid. I mean, I read lots of biographies.

[00:41:27] I would say the two closest categories of role models was I admired writers. So I really loved reading and I admired the writers who wrote the books I loved. And I admired billionaires. Like I read tons of biographies of like Howard Hughes and Rockefeller and whatever.

[00:41:47] But I don't know if I've never really thought of them as role models. Maybe later on I thought of writers as role models. So what did you admire about the writers and the billionaires? Freedom. So like in college, you would see the professors

[00:42:02] who were writers, they were sort of outside of the system a little bit. They weren't competing for tenure. Their main thing was the fact that they had a talent, they had a skill that they could take anywhere. They could write a book

[00:42:15] and they had fans of those books. And so they had a readership with or without their college professorship. So I saw that they lived a different life than the other professionals on campus that I was close to. Okay, so here's my response to this.

[00:42:31] Let me first of all say, because I didn't say this at the outset, you would have no reason to remember this, but you and I have met once to my knowledge, backstage at the world's largest family reunion where we were both speaking that day.

[00:42:46] And I remember this green room that we were in. And what I remember about you at that time, that's going, I mean, it was a tenure, it was probably wasn't 10 years ago, was that you were in the middle, as I recall,

[00:42:57] of one of these moments of throw caution to the wind and make a big change, okay? I think it was almost like a downsizing thing or put all my belongings in a box. I could have romanticized this, but this is a memory that I have of you.

[00:43:15] So if I am gonna, if I were trying to help you figure out what you wanted to do, what I would be doing in this conversation was repeating back to you the answers that you have given or dropped in.

[00:43:28] So what did you just say you admired about those people? What's the first, one of my philosophies of life is listen to the first thing people say. The first thing you said was freedom. Yeah. Is that they were not bound by structure.

[00:43:38] They were not bound by preexisting narratives. They didn't, it wasn't necessarily about being, the tenure was not the security, the tenure was the freedom to think what you want to think. And you said three or four minutes ago that we live in a world that is so bivocated

[00:43:53] in terms of the echo, the ecosystem of information that no one is known by anybody anymore, okay? And so the question that we're trying to get at here is what is it that brings you meaning? And there is a story, even though I've done,

[00:44:12] I'm the guest here and I've done most of the talking here, there is a story that you have been dropping in repeatedly about reading a book and changing your mind and how one thought triggers another thought and that leads you to do something else. There's something, you know,

[00:44:26] in the internet space, which I think belongs in the workspace. If you were doing the same thing today, you're doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. There was a moment of change that we're in and that is the moment that you embraced early

[00:44:38] and that you continue to embrace. And that idea, I would venture to say, is more meaningful to you, frankly, and to most of us than being the best single person at what you do. Nothing that you have said in this entire conversation

[00:44:53] is about one person, one source of excellence. You didn't admire Michael Jordan, who was the greatest person, okay? You didn't admire people who were the only person at the top. You admired people that did their own thing and that there's a moment in this book

[00:45:10] that I learned a lot and I called it guy named Mark Savikas and he's the sort of the dean of contemporary career construction is what this space is broadly called even though it's got that awful word career in it again.

[00:45:23] And he said to me, when I meet somebody, I usually know within five minutes what they should be doing, but it's not my job to tell them, it's my job to help them discover it. So I would say the answer is right before you,

[00:45:36] freedom, flexibility, novelty, chase something new, start a podcast on the side and let it become to something that actually is more meaningful to you than being the best at anything, but somehow you were haunted by the ghost of being the best at something because somewhere along the line,

[00:45:56] you absorbed that even though it doesn't characterize who you are. It is interesting how it all relates to stories and I can see how just so people know the way you constructed this book is all through storytelling. You tell hundreds of stories, it feels like hundreds of stories

[00:46:10] of all these different people who made these really amazing job situations and A, it's great that they should tell that through storytelling because it really drives the point home in a very real way, but also it kind of shows all that, all of these things are possible

[00:46:28] because you could just say, look, here's this person who did this amazing thing, went from being a telephone repairman to one of the leading shoe designers. Like, so it shows, it gives permission, it shows that it's possible.

[00:46:41] And the thing is the idea that our life is a story, right? This was the topic of my last book, Life is in the Transitions. That is not kind of a new idea at this point, it's been around for several decades

[00:46:51] and yet we haven't really transferred that to work. The idea that you have a work story with pivots and turns and conflict and resolution, that is not how we talk about work. And that is, I think a missing opportunity that we have,

[00:47:06] it makes me think of Tim Pierpont, who grew up in an adoptive family in Connecticut. He always wanted to work with his hands and his parents said, no, you gotta do something conventional. He graduates from college and he opens a painting company in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[00:47:24] It feels like, sorry, that's a blue color job and this is not a blue color town. So he goes to work under this pressure from his parents, he goes to work in corporate real estate in California and he stays for the next 22 years

[00:47:37] until the guy sitting next to him, boss says, you don't look very good. Why don't you go home and a year later he dies of cancer? And Tim Pierpont says, I don't want this to happen to me.

[00:47:46] And so he does one of these meaning audits as I call it. He goes to a Starbucks and he writes down, like what are the five things that I could be doing right now that would make me happier? He writes them down, in his Starbucks intentionally

[00:47:57] without even reading my book in which he is a character. And it's working with my hands, being outside, helping people. And he says, if I were running a painting company, I would be doing all that right now. So he leaves his white collar job,

[00:48:13] he opens Pierpont painting in Marin County and he's finally doing what he, by the way, he's got a whole bunch of new friends. He says, mine is the only, everyone's got Teslas in my neighborhood. And I'm the only one with a van

[00:48:26] with the company brand on the side of it, literally like this culture clash. And around this time, reconnects with his birth mother. And it turns out that she was an artist. And he said, my entire life suddenly made sense to me. We have this story inside of us

[00:48:44] that is there waiting, but for whatever reason, expectation, pressure on ourselves, a cultural narrative or script that we're adopted to, pressure from our parents, whatever it is, we have spent most of our lives not telling the story that we are trying to tell

[00:49:03] and to go back to the first thing we talked about in a world where there's no career, in a world where there's no path, in a world where there's no job, you have greater freedom today and less stigma that can, that will prevent you from doing

[00:49:16] what you've wanted to do along, which is tell the story of who you want to be. It might be what you wanted to do when you were 12 and that will give you some guidance, but it also may be what you wanna do at 32 or 52 or 68.

[00:49:30] You know what's interesting too is also that the rise in, this is an economic thing, but the rise in productivity created by things like the internet and now AI allows you to quickly ramp up in new careers, which didn't really exist before. Like in the 1950s,

[00:49:46] if you were an aerospace engineer, it probably wasn't as easy as now to switch careers, switch occupations and so on. Yeah, if for no other reason than self-education is much easier, right? If you want to start a podcast, you can watch seven YouTubes on how to do it

[00:50:04] and you could be up and running in 24 hours. That would have required going to the library and doing a bunch of stuff. So yes, the... You have to get any expensive equipment. You'd have to have a radio studio. Yes, exactly. So a lot of these things,

[00:50:16] and that's why most, that's why if this is appealing to you and yet you're thinking now is not the right time, I've got to support my family, right? Or I'm paying, as I said, paying off college debt or sending two kids to college, start a hope job, right?

[00:50:32] Start a side job. There are... Because what's not negotiable, and we haven't really frankly talked about this anywhere near enough in this conversation. So I'll jump in. The big lesson from all these hundreds of stories and all the coding I did and whatever

[00:50:47] is fewer people are searching merely for work, more people are searching for work with meaning. It's the meaning that's non-negotiable and how you make meaning is different from how I make meaning, how that person and she and he and anybody else listening to us makes meaning.

[00:51:03] The challenge is to figure out what makes you meaning. But if you have to do your main job and it doesn't give you meaning, you don't have to be miserable all the time or anymore. You could start a hope job or a side job

[00:51:14] or do other things that give you meaning. You can arbitrage the meaning between and among the different things and know if right now, the meaning is the side job, maybe the next time you go through one of these work breaks, the meaning can become the main job.

[00:51:29] Yeah, so what do you think? Like if you were to predict, you're slightly older than me, or a few years older, if you were to predict your next work break, because now, average lifespans, people are living into their 80s. So, you know, on average,

[00:51:45] you probably have another 30 years to go. So what do you think your next work break will be? Well, I have spent, I saw my first book 35 years ago. Well. And I've never held a job since. Anybody who is anywhere near the media business is in a work break.

[00:52:05] I mean, like the business models are in the process of collapsing all around us, right? As we take this conversation, there's an actor strike, there's a writer strike, there's a cable standoff between a content provider and a content distributor. Newspapers are in flux, magazines are in flux,

[00:52:23] books are in flux, podcasts are in flux. Like the entire information, like the good news is we've gone from a world where a small number of people have a microphone until we live in what I call a multi-microphone world. Microphone world, so anybody can tell a story,

[00:52:38] but the business of storytelling leaves us all in an actual real time work break. So like everybody else, and by the way, as I said, I just became an empty nester last week. I lost a parent 18 months ago. I'm in a life transition.

[00:52:53] I really would like to have somebody around my life who can help me navigate a life transition. Well, do you miss your kids? You know, yeah, more than missing my kids, and I do miss my kids, but more than missing my kids,

[00:53:09] and this is what surprised me about it, because we went from a, because we have twins. So we went from a full house to an empty house and empty nest in an afternoon. I missed that time, you know? They said the night before like,

[00:53:21] we don't want our childhood to be over. And I missed that being a dad was incredibly important to me. I'll still be a dad, they'll still be my kid, but I think I just missed that time. That's what feels like, oh wow,

[00:53:34] that 20 years when this was sort of the center of my life, we're pivoting to something else. Yeah, it's not every day now. Now you can literally count the number of thanksgivings and Christmases you'll spend with them, right? So let's say you're gonna live another 30 years,

[00:53:54] that might mean, and let's say they get married, so half a time they're in one family, half a time they're in the other. So that might mean 15 more thanksgivings, you'll see your kids. Not to depress you further, but... My wife has been quoting this statistic,

[00:54:08] which as a reporter, I'm like, we gotta fact check that before we say it out loud. But I don't wanna fact check it, which is like by the time you're 18, like your kids have spent something like 90% of the time they're gonna spend with you.

[00:54:19] But we also know people are bouncing back and we also know, yeah, so that's why this, I would say I missed the phase change, right? I missed the fact that that was a period of life that I enjoyed, that I felt I had some aptitude at

[00:54:33] and took meaning from, and that's not coming back. We'll figure out what comes next there and I think, look, this is what my work has been like, James for whatever, six, seven years now, which is we're going through change more frequently. We're going through life quakes,

[00:54:48] we're going through work quakes at a much faster pace. We spend half of our life in transition and we have to stop looking at transitions as periods of misery and unpleasantness and despair where we have to grit and grind and resilience our way through because they are challenging

[00:55:08] but they're also periods of growth and renewal and it's how to flip that script. You're gonna spend half your life in transition, if you just close your eyes and try to get through and hold your breath like passing a cemetery when we were kids, the young people

[00:55:21] wouldn't even know that reference. You're gonna miss half your life. We have to embrace the transition as a time to rethink and reimagine who we are and revisit and revise the story that we tell about ourselves. You ask a really interesting question

[00:55:39] that I never really thought about before. They're sort of alliterative to your questions like when is your when, what is your what, how is your how? But there was one question that I never thought of before which is where is your where?

[00:55:51] And I think because most of my life I spend or all of my adult life I spent in New York City until just very recently. And so it was never a question that my where was in New York City because New York City is one of those cities

[00:56:02] where you feel you're hypnotized and you're at least believing that there's only one where it's New York City. Why did you grow up? I grew up right outside of New York City. So, and then I went away for college and then after college and grad school

[00:56:17] I returned to New York City forever until just a couple years ago. But that is a very important question which I never really asked myself and I wish I had earlier. Like maybe I would have said, oh my where might be London for a while

[00:56:30] or LA or Oklahoma City or whatever. And there's, before I comment on this, another question. So what places were you most drawn to as a, what environments were you most drawn to as a child? Only New York City. No, no, no, I'm talking about spaces.

[00:56:46] Was it the library? Was it the ball field? Was it the honky tonk? Was it the ballet stage? Yeah, it was the- Was it the garage where you were tinkering with your base guitar? It was the library and the mall. Because the- The library and the mall!

[00:57:04] Okay, that is the thing your most embarrassed to have ever admitted in 1400 podcast. Well, the mall had- The record store, but maybe- The record store at the mall. Like that's a cool place at the mall. For me it was the bookstores and the arcade.

[00:57:19] Okay, fine, okay, that's fair enough. The arcade makes a lot of sense for you. Okay, so I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, right? Five generations of Jews in the South. Like where dominated my life? Like when you grew up in the South

[00:57:30] like where is important because it's like not a place that's called to be from, right? Or it's- In Savannah in particular, 80% of the buildings that were standing in 1800 are still standing today. It was the birthplace in a lot of ways of their modern historic preservation movement.

[00:57:44] So I grew up surrounded by where and in a world where narrative and identity was grounded in where. And I grew up Jewish, which is also a big where story because the story of the Hebrew Bible and the story of Jews is deeply connected to

[00:58:02] where you could be and the ghetto where you could not be, right? Freedom, the lack of freedom. So I'm a where person. And I think that when I set out to do this, I felt like where was the underappreciated stepchild

[00:58:15] at the lesser angel if you will of work stories. And in fact, I finished the first half of this project with transitions back before the pandemic. The biggest single thing that the pandemic changed was where. So where in a lot of ways is the one,

[00:58:32] if you were doing it in that statistical trick you play of like the fastest growing, I would say where is the fastest growing? Because it gets to work from anywhere and how many days a week you wanna be in the office

[00:58:44] if you wanna be in an office at all. It gets to commute, okay? Do you wanna commute? Why should I waste an hour and a half every morning and an hour and a half to every afternoon when I could be with my family or exercising or gardening

[00:58:56] or volunteering or whatever. So and then the other question is then the extreme work from anywhere, which is why is San Francisco hollowed out? Because those people have moved to Puerto Rico to chase crypto or whatever it might be.

[00:59:12] So where is the thing that feels the most fluid now? And therefore I think you're not alone in now asking the question of where do I wanna be and thinking that's not what people would have asked 20 years ago. Yeah, without the pandemic, I never would have asked where.

[00:59:31] And I would still be in New York City today, which there's nothing wrong with that either. But I mean, I moved from New York City to Florida, we'll keep a scheme Florida, which I never thought I would do. And then to bring things full circle,

[00:59:44] I am now in Georgia, your old hobby. Oh really? Yeah. Where are you in Georgia? North of Atlanta, like an hour north of Atlanta. Okay. So I think I will see your, because of the pandemic absolutely,

[00:59:57] but then I will echo what you said to me a few minutes ago, which is it's the combination of all these things. It's the pandemic coupled with the career fluidity and the freedom to quit and do it from anywhere, right? Plus the technology,

[01:00:13] which allows you to be in Alpharetta or Keybiscayne or Newark or Puerto Rico and be able to engage with the world. And so it's the combination of all those things, which is interesting because it's both the, because all those in some ways are place lists, right?

[01:00:31] The internet means, the internet is a place, but it allows the rest of us to be place lists. But it does put I think exactly what you said, which is more opportunity. Be short on, I don't know, should be short on who?

[01:00:47] Yeah, be short on who and belong on where in the six questions of your work story. It reminds me of, in stand-up comedy, I heard a comedian being rejected for a spot once and he was asked these questions.

[01:01:03] You need to know who are you, why are you and why now? And those are similar to your questions. I mean, there's not the where are you or things like that. Well, just to do a where and why, a where and who question.

[01:01:18] I tell the story of Kelly Lively, you may remember from my book. She goes up in Iowa and her family moves to Idaho and she said she and her sister like cried on the back of a car the entire way because they're like, they won't have indoor plumbing.

[01:01:32] I come from Georgia and I heard this joke in college, right? But there's no, and she goes and she gets a job, she doesn't go to college and she goes and she gets a job working as what we know what the time was called

[01:01:42] a secretary at the Idaho National Labs. And she slowly rises and rises and rises and but she gets stuck in her 30s. She's married and with kids at this point and she decides to go back to college. She leaves her husband and she,

[01:01:55] well, you know, ultimately takes this position as the first woman to lead this huge project involving this nuclear reactor that they're gonna take into space and she's in charge of driving it from Idaho to Cape Canaveral in Florida not the far south from where you are right now.

[01:02:14] And they're like, you can't have a woman do this. And of course she does it successfully. But after all of these years, these huge number of work weeks going back to college in her 30s, leaving her husband, ending up as a powerful woman

[01:02:26] who starts as a secretary at the Idaho National Labs. What does she tell me when I talk to her? She's gonna move to the West Coast, live on a houseboat and become a standup comedian. So this where story that she thought was awful

[01:02:42] and going to Idaho turns out to be central to her life. And at the end of it, she wants to go wear this again and live on a boat and spend her evenings in comedy clubs. And she says, I'm older than all the other comedians.

[01:02:57] Like I'm old enough to be their mother and they wanna tell dick jokes and they're doing it standing in front of me and everyone's awkward but it's like a great way to make comedy. No, it's interesting that a similar experience happened to me which for about six years

[01:03:12] I was doing standup comedy almost every night and starting around right after we met, A.J. Jacobs of largest family reunion was around then that I started doing it. It was weird being 20 to 30 years older or not 30 years but like 20 to 25 years older

[01:03:31] than just about everybody else who was doing it. Well, next time you go to my hometown in Savannah the rabbi of my childhood's synagogue, like you has a side job and probably a bit of a hope job as a standup comedian.

[01:03:45] The two of you were closer in age so keep at it. I've never been to Savannah but people tell me it's nice and there's nice little islands here there that have nice interesting homes. One of them is called Tybee Island.

[01:04:01] My family, I grew up there in the summers and one of my twin daughters is named Eden for the Garden of Eden and one of them is named Tybee for Tybee Island, Georgia. Wow. So where became really important to you? Where?

[01:04:14] Oh yeah, in fact we named both of our kids after places because both my wife and I are travelers and it's kind of one of the things that that was sort of central to our relationship. It's really interesting. You've lived life. You've been a storyteller.

[01:04:27] You've told stories of all these people who have had these transitions and work wakes and changed career but it was really not just to tell their stories but to show that this is happening. That this is a valid way to live which 15 to 20 years ago

[01:04:42] this wasn't necessarily considered a valid way to live. Like there was still the you must have a long-term career script that people lived by and that's changed. I think that changed basically with the Gen Xers and continued from there. So it's fascinating book. I really love it.

[01:05:02] I highly recommended The Search by Bruce Filar. What's the next book? Obviously you're on a book tour for this so what are you gonna do next? Well, first of all, I appreciate what you're saying and I wanna just echo. I think you're right.

[01:05:13] I do think maybe it's The Xers to me. It's the millennials but yes, they've saved work. They've saved work from the over scripted should expectations of earlier generations and yet again, the biggest changes in this case are coming from the young

[01:05:29] and what's happening is it's actually now boomeranging back to their parents who are saying I want some of what my kids are having and I too want to go after. I think of my, the answer to your question is

[01:05:40] I think of myself as in the transition space right now and this is I fell into this space because I had a kind of linear life early in my 20s and 30s where I figured out what I wanted to do early.

[01:05:52] I did it for no money then I had some success and I got married and had children and then in my 40s, my life blew up. First I got the cancer that I alluded to earlier as a 43 year old new dad.

[01:06:04] Then I had some financial troubles in the last recession and then my dad who had Parkinson's in Savannah got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And that back to back to back set of nonlinear experiences is what sent me down.

[01:06:21] I was a storyteller as you say but I didn't want to and I was ashamed to tell my life story and that's what set me down this path of collecting and analyzing stories and what I am now focused on in the topic

[01:06:33] as you say of my next book is I've been focused on how individuals can navigate transitions both in life is the transitions my last book and there's a Ted talk and a Ted course that I run on how to master life transitions

[01:06:46] and now the search which is how to navigate work transitions. I've been focused on individuals and how we do them and what I'm interested now is how groups navigate transitions and how individuals and groups come together at certain moments in our lives

[01:07:00] and help us go through various moments of passage and I'm just beginning a project trying to think and rethink and reimagine how we can do those group transitions because as you say, we're going through many, many more than we've ever done in human history.

[01:07:16] And it's very important what you said earlier like the fact that we have multiple things going on at once because you could like I feel like I'm in a transition moment right now but it doesn't mean I'm gonna stop this podcast

[01:07:31] for instance, I have no intention of doing that but there's other things that are stopping and other things that are starting and like I'm kind of figuring that out. And so it's very exciting reading your book even though many things I don't plan on changing

[01:07:43] I think it's important to ask these questions all the time and see where the compass might even be pointing you a little bit because a hope interest could turn into a hope passion could turn into a hope job. So you just have to sort of follow multiple compasses

[01:08:01] at any one moment in your life. And the hardest single part of it, I think James is the giving of permission. The giving yourself permission to do something that for whatever reason you have resisted, you have feared, you didn't wanna disappoint somebody

[01:08:16] you're afraid to fail, whatever it might be giving yourself permission I mentioned earlier and we can end with this. I mentioned earlier that I asked people about the best advice they got, right? And we talked about who that advice came from, right? Colleagues and I love your analysis

[01:08:32] more than family members. But what was the best advice people said they got? Three quarters of people said, listen to yourself keep doing do the thing that you're secretly your inner voice is saying, we know the right answer.

[01:08:47] And the question is will we tune out all the expectations the outer noises, the shoulds, the people around us and listen people don't wanna kick in the butt or even a slap in the face. They wanna pat on the back. You know that inside yourself there's a story

[01:09:04] waiting to be told. The first and most important step is to give yourself permission to tell that story. I wanna add to that, I know this was gonna, that was a good last moment I could have stopped there but I wanna add one thing to that

[01:09:20] which is there's an important skill I think people should at least become acquainted with which is the skill of storytelling. Because then you can understand what is, A, what is a possible story for yourself where you have conflict and you have adversaries

[01:09:41] and you have allies and rising problems but then solutions and so on. And I think that can, that also gives permission that hey, not everything is, oh I've gotta be number one in the next day after I decide to start something. Like everything's meant to have some hardship

[01:10:03] and you push through it and that's how you love something more is by participating in the story of it. Also, in order to switch sometimes occupations you need to be able to tell the story of that occupation. Like you need to be able to,

[01:10:20] like let's say I'm interested in basketball but I'm not gonna be a basketball player. Five foot nine, I'll say a Jewish guy, not gonna be, and I'm 55 years old I'm not gonna be on the New York Knicks. Well maybe the Knicks you could be on man.

[01:10:34] Fair enough, fair enough. But it could be the case that I could write only two feet shorter than Wemba Yama. That's true, that two feet shorter than I could jump that high. So, but if I had the ability to tell a story

[01:10:49] I could write a book about basketball. I could be a radio announcer about basketball or do a podcast about basketball. I could make a fantasy sports league about basketball because I could communicate some other aspect of my interest in basketball other than just playing.

[01:11:06] And I think the art of storytelling helps you realize those possibilities. The Italians, amen. The Italians have a great expression that I love called lupus and fabula. The fabula is the fable of our life. It's when it's fabulous. It's when everything is going right.

[01:11:20] The lupus is the wolf and the wolf shows up, right? And lupus and fabula means speak of the devil. Like just when everything is going well along comes the wolf. And if there's one thing I've learned it's that people wanna banish the wolf,

[01:11:33] get the wolf, the ogre, the downsizing, the tornado, the pandemic, the diagnosis, the disease, get the wolf out of my life but you cannot banish the wolf because you banish the hero. The role of the hero is to get over around or through the wolf.

[01:11:50] That's what makes it a story. And when you get through the woods, when you get over the bridge, when you get around the bend, when you defeat the wolf, that's what makes it a fairy tale. And there's a reason that we tell our kids fairy tales.

[01:12:05] Night after night, year after year, generation after generation, millennium after millennium because it's the fairy tales that turns our nightmares into dreams. Correct, that's powerful stuff. And Bruce Filer, author of the search, what a pleasure having you on. Your book really puts a word,

[01:12:24] so many things I've been thinking over the years and it's really described so much of what's gone on even in my own life. So I really appreciate it. And thank you once again coming on the podcast and come on again. Look forward to your next time on.

[01:12:38] Let's keep the conversation going. You mean a lot to a lot of people and I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks Bruce.