Yahoo Finance Follow your passion is bad career advice, author finds
Something is happening at work. And it wasn’t just the pandemic that led workers to switch their jobs.
After reaching a low of a 1.5 million people following the recession in 2009, the number of monthly quitters rose to 2 million in 2012, 3 million in 2018, 3.5 million in 2019, 4 million in 2020, and then 4.5 million in 2022, according to Bruce Feiler, author of the new book “The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.”
Feiler is also the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including “Life is in the Transitions”, and previously wrote a monthly column for The New York Times.
“A third of the workforce now leaves their jobs every year,” Feiler told Yahoo Finance. “Fewer people search merely for work these days. More people search for work with meaning. We’re moving from a means‐based economy to a meaning‐based economy.”
For this book, Feiler conducted interviews with a diverse group of 155 people and combined that research with interviews from other projects. "I have now collected in four years nearly 400 life stories totaling 1,500 hours," he said.
His mission: to find out what makes people the happiest at work and how those who succeed discover what brings them meaning. “For many people, money is a primary metric. But there are others, like self-expression, or giving back, or balance, or well-being, or purpose,” Feiler said.
He offered some advice and insights in a conversation with Yahoo Finance. Here are the edited excerpts:
Why did you write this book now?
For six years now, I have been traveling across the country collecting and analyzing hundreds of life stories of Americans of all ages and all walks of life, all income brackets, all 50 states, trying to help people find meaning in times of change. And the biggest area of change these days is around work.
More people are determined to find happiness and meaning and purpose in what they do. They are pushing back against the idea that we've been told for centuries that we're supposed to be unhappy with what we do. Work is supposed to be miserable.
The essence of what I do is simply go talk to people and ask them: What do you do? How are you feeling about it? How do you manage to find happiness in what you do? And what can I learn from you?
My priority throughout was simple: How can I help people find more meaning through work?
How do you define a post-career world?
The idea of the career was invented a hundred years ago, and then, and the idea was once in your life at 21, as long as you were a man, you picked an occupation and you did it the rest of your life.
Every way that we've talked about the career in the last century has been through this linear framework: the career path, the corporate ladder, the resume, a linear list of jobs. Each one's supposed to be bigger — but today we have non-linear lives, but we have linear expectations.
The idea of the career is an iron cage, which says you must go through a succession of jobs. Each one is supposed to be bigger and more important and pay you a higher salary than the last one. And few ideas in human history have created more misery and squandered more potential.
What that does is it stigmatizes taking time off with your family, starting an enterprise that maybe will fail, saying, "I want to go to work in public service" or "run for public office" or "work at some community foundation." Or "I want to write a novel in the evening as long while I'm doing something else." Or "I want to sell brownies at the farmer's market today."
The world of work has hundreds of ways that we can find meaning. And trying to fit ourselves into this narrow, rigid construct of a linear career is what's holding tens of millions of us back.
How does one find meaningful work in a post-career world?
Stop chasing someone else's dream, and start chasing your own.
The long answer to that question is that you have to reject some of the worst pieces of career advice that we are given.
So bad career advice No. 1 is "follow your passion".
The truth is almost nobody follows their passion. Almost no one who is happy in what they do follows their passion in order to get there. In my conversations, I ask people, "Did you follow your passion, make, discover your passion, or make your passion?" Only 1 in 10 followed their passion, the rest discovered it or made it along the way.
Why is that? Because your passion will change over time and circumstances in the world.
That leads to bad career advice No. 2: "Make a 10-year plan". Some people set a goal and achieve it. But far more of us rethink our priorities, change our goals, evolve what it is that we want out of life. My data show that the average person goes through 20 "workquakes" in the course of their lives. That's one every 2.5 years.
A workquake is a jolt, or an interruption, where we kind of rethink or reimagine what we do. And women go through more workquakes than men, younger workers more than older workers, diverse workers more than non-diverse workers.
On the one hand, this seems sort of unnerving. The truth is it's a blessing and an opportunity to make a change in what we do.
The third bad piece of career advice is: "Separate your life from your work". And the reason that's a bad piece of advice is because 45% of workquakes begin in the workplace. They happen when your company shuts down, you get laid off. That means the majority of workweeks, 55% begin outside of the workplace. Something happens in your personal life, with your health, with your family. You just change your mind about what you want to do.
So what's going on today is that in the battle between work and life, life is playing a greater and greater role. And so 6 and 10 millennials say that meaningful work is more important to them than to their boomer parents.
Why is it important to write your own story of success?
Since the dawn of this country, we've been telling a singular story of success. And it's all about climbing. Rags to riches, up by your bootstraps, bigger office, greater salary, better view. But the people who are happiest and most fulfilled in what they do, don't just climb, they also dig.
They do what I call a meaning audit. They perform personal archeology, like looking inside themselves and asking themselves, "What is the story of work I've been trying to tell my whole life?"
The great freedom that we have today is to tell our own story, not our parents’ story. In order to do that, you have to ask yourself some basic storytelling questions about who you are, what's important to you, why you're doing what you're doing.
What should someone do when they don't know what to do?
Start by asking yourself a series of questions. In my book, I call it "21 questions to find work you love". Two simple questions that you can ask yourself. The first one is: "What are the upsides and downsides of work that you learned from your parents?"
Turns out two-thirds of people say that the upside of work they learned from their parents is the value of hard work. The top downside they learned from their parents is the risk of overwork, followed by strain on the family, followed by unhappiness.
People want to work hard, but they're not prepared to sacrifice their own happiness. And that's a massive change today.
Next: "I'm at a moment in my life when…?" Maybe it's, “I'm at a moment in my life when I need to make money to pay off my student loans.” Or, in my case, send two kids to college. Or, “I'm in a moment when I have young children,” or “my mother’s going through chemotherapy, so I want flexibility.” Or “I'm in a moment when I've been doing the same thing for a really long time, and I want to make a change.” “I want to give back.” “I want to make the planet better or make sure that our neighborhoods are safe.”
We all go through these moments of change many times in our lives, and the people who are happiest check in on themselves to make sure they're meeting their own needs.
How do we give ourselves permission to change?
The most important step is to realize work doesn't have to be miserable. The second most important step is identifying what is work that would not make you miserable, but would instead make you happy. It doesn't have to be leaving the organization. It could be staying in your own company and saying, “I don't want to come in every day.” “I want a different set of responsibilities.”
It turns out three-quarters of people say the best advice they received from someone else during their work transition was “trust yourself.” People don't need a kick in the pants. They want a pat on the back.
You know the answer inside of you. You know what would make you happy. The only person who needs to give yourself permission is you.
You have a chapter on the actress and co-founder of the Honest Company, Jessica Alba, who is also a Yahoo board member. What is the big lesson in her story?
She went off very early in her life down a linear path of being an actress. And she had stratospheric success, but she had what I call a toothache — something deep inside of her that was her true story that she never spoke about.
And that true story was that she went through a lot of illnesses as a young girl, and this is what I call a ghost job — something that was secretly haunting her and she never talked about. And when she became a mother, she realized that she did not want to pass that ghost job onto her children. And she started a company that was designed to create health and wellness products that could help other people not suffer through a lot of the illnesses that she did. And she became even more influential as a businesswoman.
This is long before this became a kind of common thing in Hollywood. So the lesson of Jessica Alba is that you have a toothache, you have something that's inside you that's been nagging at you, that you want to do — the next time you're in a workquake, don't climb. Dig. Look inside yourself. What is the story you've been trying to tell all along?
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Reporter and Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a workplace futurist, a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New Work of Work" and "Never Too Old To Get Rich." Follow her on Twitter @kerryhannon.
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