Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Find Meaningful Work in a Rapidly Changing World | Bruce Feiler

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Feiler also discusses why we no longer live linear lives, letting go of the idea of having a career, and redefining success.  Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads. His three TED Talks have been viewed more than four million times, and he teaches the TED Course How to Master Life Transitions. His latest book is called The Search. In this episode we talk about:How Feiler went from being a guy whose early work focused on spirituality to now focusing on work How historically work was something that was supposed to make you unhappy. And how Millennials and Gen Z have helped change thatWhat is a workquake?Why the majority of us actually have 5 jobs— what those are and why they matterWhat is a meaning audit? The best single question you can ask yourself to write your own story of success And the historical figures who helped define how we think about successFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/bruce-feilerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. Your host, your boy Dan Harris. Hey, how are we doing everybody? Most people hate their jobs, That's according to the data. Even if you love your job as I happen to do, it can still be a titanic pain in the ass. It can be a source of stress, burnout, social comparison. It can bring up unexamined fear and greed. So how do we infuse this part of our lives work with meaning and happiness? My guest today argues that work is changing in rapid and fascinating ways.

People used to have clear career paths, but that is no longer the case according to my guest. Life is non-linear, he says. This can be scary and confusing, but it's also an opportunity to flip the script to control your own destiny. Bruce Filer is the author of Seven New York Times Best Sellers, including Life is in the Transitions, which he came on this show not long ago to discuss. He's got a new book, which is why he's back on the show. The new book is called The Search, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Coreer World. In this conversation, we talk about how Bruce went from being a guy whose early work focused on spirituality. In fact, his first book was called Walking the Bible. How did he go from that to now focusing on work?

We talk about how historically work with something that was supposed to make you unhappy, and how millennials and Gen Z have helped change that. What a work quake is, why the majority of us actually have five jobs, what those are, and why they matter. What a meaning audit is, and the single best question you can ask yourself to help figure out how to succeed. This is part four and the final part of our series, which we call Sainly Ambitious. If you missed the earlier episodes, go check them out. In those, we talked to guests about how to integrate mindfulness into work, how to handle

big emotions at the office, and much more. If you've got feedback, I want to hear it, hit me up on Twitter. I guess it's X now. You can also hit me up on Instagram or TikTok. I've been experimenting with posting more videos there. So go check those out if you're up for it. You can also hit me up through the 10% happier website. Bosch Legacy returns now streaming. Matt has been taken. Oh God. His daughter. He's in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me?

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You can binge all episodes at free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Bruce Filer, welcome back to the show. My pleasure, Dan. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to talk about this. This is a high interest to me. I think of you as the guy who wrote books about the Bible and then wrote an amazing book about how to deal with big transitions in life. How did you end up

in this discussion around work and success? Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me. I just love everything you're doing at 10% happier and I'm looking forward to this conversation. I felt the same way. I felt like I spent most of my life trying not to write about this topic, the things that I have customarily written about in the three decades I've been doing this have been spirituality, right, and family, and meaning, and purpose. And for most of our adult lives, that was very segregated from work.

And on a very high level, I would say that I feel like work has moved in my direction. My wife likes to say of me that I have hard knowledge about soft things and I think that work has become so often a lot of ways that we're going to get into, I'm sure. So that would, I would say, is the general thing. The very specific thing is that that book, Life is in the transitions that we talked about when it came out, which is all about how life has become one on linear. We spend more of our lives in transitions and transitions are a skill that we can in

my semester. I mean, that book came out in the middle of the pandemic when the entire planet was in a life transition. And it became very clear to me at that time that work was going to be the next domino to fall, that once you introduce things like work from anywhere and once work life balance is more people were working from home. And so I sort of set out on this journey again, let me talk to people about how they're thinking about work and can the larger conversation that you're in the middle of about taking happiness

and meaning and mindfulness and can you apply that to the thing in life that has been most resistant to it, which is work. Yeah, I mean, for me work has been the source of most of my stress and anxiety and depression and unhappiness generally. Yeah, and I think that that's right. I mean, if you go back, you know, why are you in the middle of this conversation? The answer to that is a lot of reasons to having to do with you personally, but also a change that went on a generation ago, right, where the whole positive psychology movement made a change, right? So the first century of psychology was all about looking at people with deviants and sociopathic and criminal behavior and unhappiness, if you will. And when positive psychology was started, you know, more or less at the turn of the century, the idea was, let's look at people who are happy and well adjusted and have

purpose and identity and what can we learn from them to make the rest of us happy. And even when that happened, work was largely, you know, cordoned off from that conversation, okay? Because you were supposed to be miserable at work, right? You were supposed to be depressed, all those things and anxious, as you said. I mean, the most influential story of work ever told, speaking of the Bible, is the Garden of Eden. Because when Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden, what is their punishment? Their punishment is labor. And if you go back and you look like the Greek word for slavery is the foundation for the

Greek word for work, right? The Latin word for business, right? Means not an enjoyable activity. The word office, right? The Latin word for business, right? Means not an enjoyable activity. The word office, right? Means duty, like time and again, the point was you had your life and your work was supposed to make you unhappy. And I think if we're going to use a frame for this particular conversation, I think there is no better frame than that. That has changed. Okay. And I think that the change in an odd way is a generational change and in effect, we have millennials in Gen Z to thank for this, right? Because the normal story we tell, those of us like me who are 50 plus, is you know, get off my lawn, right? You young

people, you have no work ethic, right? You are lazy and you job hop and all these things that we're told in the popular conversation are bad. But in fact, that's what saving work, the attitude that I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to sacrifice my happiness. I don't want to sacrifice my family. And that change is what's driving the larger conversation of how to find meaning and purpose at work. Let me just stay with that notion about millennials and Gen Z folks because I am North of 50 as are you and I have been around so many conversations where people our age or older are either complaining about young people or just expressing a lot of confusion around young people. They're entitled, they're lazy, they don't have the same militaristic,

shut your mouth, put your head down, work ethic that we came up with. And it sounds like you're really like a traitor to your age cohort in saying, no, no, no, we're wrong to be complaining. Well, I think that there's two things going behind that. I think that's a great question. I think the thing number one goes back to transitions in my work there, which is the there is what I call this sort of transition gap, right? Which is what is the larger story of that project? And let me just take another half step back to say my work with transition and my work around work now is focused

on this act of traveling across the country, collecting and analyzing hundreds of life stories, okay? So I've not done 400 in the last six years. That's a 1500 hours of interviews and 10,000 pages of transcripts. And then I get these teams of people and we analyze them looking for patterns. And the big theme of life is in the transitions is that the idea that you're going to have a linear successive, you know, sort of ritualistic things that everyone's going to do the same thing in their 30s and their 40s and then have a midlife crisis. Like, this is all dead. But those of us who are 50 plus, we grew up with

that linear idea, right? So that we are haunted in many ways by the ghost of linearity. And it's the people that are 40 minus, largely, not the millennials on the Gen Z, who are much more comfortable with this pace of change, right? So they move more often. They change ideology more frequently. They change political affiliations and sexual orientations. So they are more familiar with change. To your point, people that are 50 plus look off in at their children in their 20s and 30s and say, wait, hold on. You're having a baby before you get married. You're buying a house before you have a committed relationship. You're leaving one job and you don't, right? You're buying a house before you have a committed relationship. You're leaving one job and you don't know what you're going to do next or you're moving

to a new town and you know, you don't know what you're going to do when you're going to get there. So there is this larger gap with how comfortable people are with this new nonlinear life when things don't follow this progressive ideal that those of us were talked about. So that's point number one. And then point number two is when it comes to work, the people 40 minus looked at their parents 50 plus and said, I don't what what you're having is the opposite of the famous line in when Harry met Sally, right? So one of the questions I asked people was, what were the upsides and downsides of work that you learned from

your parents? Okay, I'm doing these two, three hour structured interviews or series of questions. Everyone gets the same questions more or less. The number one answer when I asked people the upside was the value of hard work. Okay, they learned the work ethic from their parents. They still want to work hard. Okay, that's a lie to the first thing. And just as an interviewer, I'll say,

I was asking this question that I was kind of bored by the answer. Everyone was saying the same thing. And so I was like, well, what have I asked the downsides? And so then I said, well, where are the downsides of work you learned from your parents? And this is where the answer has got interesting. Because the two-thirds said the upside was the value of work,

but the downsides were clumped together all around the third. The number one answer was overwork. The number two answer, strain on your family, the number three answer, unhappiness. So young people looked at their parents and said, they're working hard, which is for me, but they worked too hard, they put a strain on their family, and they were unhappy. And I don't want that. That right there is the change in a nutshell. You know, I agree with the analysis that people under 40 are doing about work, and I agree with

their conclusions. I do sometimes feel like I did when I was a freshman in college and I pledged a fraternity and went through all the hazing and then the fraternity disbanded and I didn't get a chance to do it to other people. So now I'm like a 50 plus year old guy and I've got a way nicer to junior employees than anybody was to me when I was coming up. You know, the people that I have met in my life and then I talk to who feel that way the

most are actually women who feel like, I can't tell you the number of women that I talk to interview who said, you know, back in my day, I had to go to work a week after having my baby, right? And so I think that there are some people no doubt who wanted to pass that on to the people behind them. You need to understand, you know, what it means to work for the man, right? But I think far more young people are willing to walk away. And that's the third element that we haven't really talked about.

Okay. And the third element that we haven't really talked about is a reduction of the stigma of leaving your job. And that I think is worth pausing on. So the search is built around what I call the free lies and one truth about work. And the first lie is that you have a career. So for most of human history, there was no word for work. There was no word for job because we didn't need one. Most people lived where they worked and they worked where they lived. And people did everything. They farmed. They raised their own animals,

they grew their own vegetables, they were their own doctors, they made their own candles, right? Everybody did everything. And that's how people viewed work. It was supposed to be miserable. 90% of the people spend 90% of their time just on subsistence living.

This begins to change in the industrial era, which is, you know, we'll have to say in the middle of the 19th century. And what happens? The answer is, farm equipment and the automobile and new technology allows people to farm much more efficiently and people move to the cities. We're in a conversation now, right? Where AI is going to like disable everything.

Let's see that may or may not happen. I'm a skeptic of that few. But you know, people lost their job in the industrial aid. They answered a third of the country and they left rural areas and they moved to the cities and they're joined in the US from with tens of millions of people from overseas. And so suddenly you have all these new companies and these new jobs that need to be filled. There were jobs more or less invented in the 19th century and you have all these people coming to town with no work. So we needed a way to match up the open jobs with this new population of workers. And I got in Frank

Parsons in Boston, essentially, invents the idea of the career. In 1909, he opened the first job career counseling center in Boston. And within two years, every school in the country is doing it. And the idea was, you took a worker in their early 20s. If they were male, you asked them a series of questions and you linked them with a job and then they did that job for the rest of their lives. And every single way we've talked about the idea of work, job career has been, took a back to what I was saying a few minutes ago, linear. Okay, the career track, the corporate ladder, right? All of these were linear constructs. And then when the idea of changing jobs kind of develops

in the middle of the 20th century, what gets invented the resume? No one ever needed a resume. That was essentially invented in the middle of the 20th century. And what is the resume? It's a linear, progressive listing of all the jobs that you've had and each one is supposed to be bigger and more prestigious than the last one.

And that's the model that you and I grew up with. And that's the model that's breaking down now. What are the other lies? So the first lies that you have a career, because you don't have a career. You can change your job whenever you want. For no other reason, then you want to, right? So there's much less stigma attached to the idea of job changing, okay? And that's, as we're saying, one of the pieces here

when there's no more stigma attached to leaving, you can leave and reinvent yourself and that's now acceptable. So that's line number one. Line number two is really where we are now, which is the idea that you have a path. So the path is one of these linear constructs that we've been discussing,

which is you start here, then you go there, and you end up in a certain place. And this has to be a coherent idea based on a decision that you make in your early 20s. So another reason that this has broken down is that the nature of the workforce has changed. All of this linear career models was designed for an age when it was basically straight white man in the workplace. You know, in the work you do, you're familiar with these tests, right?

The happiness test or the identity tests, right? Or the various personality tests that they give people. In the 1950s, when this idea popped up that you could take a test and match people with a job, a third of the companies that used the test used it on candidates' wives to figure out whether the family was appropriate and was willing to make the sacrifices to have the male go work in the organization so that when the organization said jump or

move or work late or work weekend, they wanted to make sure that the wife was willing to make those sacrifices. Well now, when the workforce is almost 50% female and majority, millennial and Gen Z, and increasingly diverse, that's pushing back on the change. And so the idea that you don't have a path, the word that I use for it is a workquake, right? So what is a workquake? A workquake is an event, right? It's a jolt where either you're forced to or you choose to make a change in your work life.

Okay? The average person will go through 20 work breaks in the course of their lives. That's every 2.85 years. But what we've been talking about, women go through them more than men. Exers go through them more than boomers, millennials more than exers, and Gen Zers, the data it's too early, because they're not enough of them in a workplace,

but almost assuredly, we'll go through them more frequently than millennials. And diverse workers go through them more frequently than non-diverse workers. So as the workforce has changed, they have forced this change onto the workplace, and as a result, forced it on the managers, those of us who are 50 plus, who might be complaining,

but because their workforce is now a majority under 40, they have no choice but to adapt. This is so fascinating. And so what's the third lie? Well, the third lie in some ways is the most counterintuitive, but the third lie is that you have a job, which on the surface seems absurd. Like, of course, I have a job. Like, right?

How else do I pay my bills or get my benefits or my insurance? But it's still a true. The average person does not have a job. They have up to five jobs. So what are the five jobs? And by the way, this comes about because I'm sitting here talking to people every day and the way they're talking about their work lives is not the way that I expected them. So let's talk about this. So these are the five jobs. The first is a main job. And I think on the surface, it might be easy to say what is a main job, but it's actually quite hard. And by most metrics, only half of us even have a main job anymore. I'm going to talk about you, Dan. I mean, like you walked away from a very high profile,

easily identifiable, great line on your resume, main job. Why? Because of a whole bunch of reasons, but in the context of these five jobs is, because what had been your side job suddenly becomes your main job. So in my survey, only 40% of people, 4 and 10 have a main job. Okay, that's the first. The second is a care job, like caring for a child or an aging relative.

Okay, so that's a care job. And economists might not like to call it a job, but the truth is, as you know, is a contemporary parent. The way parents talk about it is a series of jobs that have to be done, right? You take back time, I'll take a carpool, like, you run the supermarket, I'll buy the tickets for Thanksgiving, like it's a series of jobs when both of the parents, if you're lucky enough to have both parents, are still working. So two-thirds of people have a care job. Three-quarters of people now have a side job, but then I kept hearing about two other kinds of jobs that were so prominent that I named them. The first is what I call a side job, but then I kept hearing about two other kinds of jobs that were so prominent

that I named them. The first is what I call a hope job. 89% of people have a hope job. What is a hope job? A hope job is something that you do that you hope leads to something else, okay? Like selling pickles at the farmers market or starting a podcast or writing a memoir. And what's interesting about Hope Jobs is they don't even necessarily bring in money.

Often we pay out of pocket for the privilege of doing them in the hopes that they lead to something else. Like for a lot of people managing their social media is a Hope job, like maybe they can become an influencer, right? Or something like that. So we have these Hope Jobs. And then there's this other kind of job, which I think in some way speaks even more to your life,

which is that 93% of us have what I call a ghost job, which is something that's an invisible time suck that is so difficult for us, that it feels like a job, right? Battling discrimination or self-doubt or sobriety, right? Or mental health. This is the origin story of 10% happier, right? You have a main job. You have more than a main job. You have a coveted job that seemed to you and like

millions of other people, a destination job. But you have this ghost job. It turns out that you've now shared beautifully, vulnerably, you know, passionately, like, inspiringly to other people that this thing that you're struggling with, and that goes job, what is it, Lee? It leads to your side job. And then that side job becomes so big, you leave your main job to a world you have now where you don't have a main job anymore. You have a series of side jobs. And the importance of that, I'm curious to your reaction, but just I want to make one comment before I get your reaction to that. And that is, why does this matter? Because the big idea of this work, if there's one idea I learned from all these conversations,

what the search is built around, is the idea that fewer people are searching merely for work anymore, more people are searching for work with meaning. And what the five jobs allows us to do is to disconnect the money, the benefits from the meaning and the fulfillment and the life satisfaction. It's the meaning that's not negotiable. So maybe I have to do my main job because I need benefits. Because I can, in my case, I got two kids going to college this week, actually, or I've got a lot of student debt. So I'll do this other job for meaning. And then at some point, maybe it'll flip. And I'll get to do the other job for meaning. And then at some point, maybe it'll flip.

And I'll get to do the other thing for meaning. And then something else for money, or whatever it is. We arbitrage the various jobs to get the meaning that we're no longer prepared to sacrifice. I agree with your analysis pretty much wholeheartedly. My concern, though, for the mental health of all of us, who are in the workforce, is that if you've got these five jobs,

the main job, the side job, the ghost job, the hope job, and one other that I'm forgetting. Care job, I think. Care job, of course. That just seems like a recipe for burnout. Yeah. I feel it in my own life. Tell me more.

Well, I'm incredibly lucky. So most of my suffering is self-manufactured. I'm not dealing with as many structural disadvantages as most other people, except for maybe the fact that we all exist in a late capitalist context where our values derived from our productivity or labor, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I don't say that to be anti-capitalist, but just that it's not a flawless system. Yet, I run myself ragged with trying to do too many things at once, and one of the things I've been struggling with for years. Let me just say a couple of things about that. First of all, I appreciate that you're sharing that. Here I think we can touch back into this condition is not exclusive to people 50 plus, but

I do think it's more pervasive. And I think one of the reasons gets back to the first thing you said, one of my philosophies of life, I say 10 times a day now, is I like to listen to the first thing that people say. You framed this conversation, not as a conversation about work, but as a conversation about success. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about how is it that you define success. And I think the first thing that I would say in response to the first thing you just said is if you can revisit and reimagine one part of that equation, it is the idea that success must always be defined the same way at every moment in your life.

The crippling legacy of the idea of a career, line number one, and the idea of a path is that we are, for lack of a better word, brainwashed, taught by our society, reinforced by the magazine covers of the billionaires and all the coverage of the great athletes with the idea that success is a linear construct and that every step must be toward a path of what I call climbing, right? A buyer bootstrap, drags to riches, higher floor, bigger office, better view, more benefits. When there is no path, there is no penalty for getting off the path. When there is no career, there is no penalty for making a decision that is counter to the idea of the career. And how that manifests itself is. We have the freedom at every moment in our life,

20 times, that we go through a work week to ask ourselves, what is the story that I want to tell now? How do I define success today? Because it's different when you have a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, to 18-year-old as I have, and emptiness before you get married. What we've been locked into is that everything must be better than the thing before, and that's the trap. Because these are the three lies, but what is the one truth? The one truth is that only you can define what success means to you,

and you do not have to define it the same way that you've always, always defined it. And that's the opportunity, but that's its own burden. And this is the gap that it turns out that I stumbled into, like I identified these three lies. But then I realized, okay, well, the good news is everybody gets to write your own story success. Who's teaching us how to do that? We get writers block, right? Having to write the story of our lives. Like, that's the situation they're in now, which is why the second half of my book attempts to give people a set of tools to ask when they're saying, well, what does success mean to me right now? Coming up, Bruce Filer talks about the historical figures who helped define how we think about

work and success. The biggest single question you can ask in order to figure out what success looks like for you and what a meaning audit is. Emily, do you remember when One Direction called it a day? I think you'll find there are still many people who can't talk about it. Well luckily, we can. A lot, because our new season of terribly famous is all about the first One Directioner to go it alone.

Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band, and explore why when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcasts. At Bet365, we don't do ordinary. We believe that every sport should be epic. Every goal, every game, every point, every play, from the moment that are remembered forever.

To the ones you've already forgotten, whether it's a game winning goal in the final seconds of overtime or a shot on goal in the first period. So whatever the sport, whatever the moment, it's never ordinary. At bet 365, must be 19 or older. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you are someone you know as concerns about gambling, visit connexontario.ca. Just to pick up on something you said there that were cursed by this idea of linearity, but

it feels like the bigger curse is the narrow definition of success. That's what the magazine covers. That's what the TV shows like the lifestyles of the rich and famous. That's what the movie wall street. The message of all that success is actually narrowly defined by wealth and fame, when in fact that can often lead to social comparison and insatiability and short-changing your family and lots of other decades. So, flagellation. Yes. So, flagellation, lots of other negative externalities.

Yeah. Okay, so this is's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem.

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So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. So, I think that's a big problem. attracted a lot of attention in this country for a whole wide variety of reasons that we can explore. But it's largely an individualistic place that people come from other places to be here, and they get something of an open book. And so therefore, this has been built in. And there are a couple of people that we can blame for this problem of success. And they tend to be heroes,

but let's point them down a few notches. The first is Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin, through poor Richard and the series of things that he does, he's sort of in bodies this story. And Franklin's message is extremely clear. Success is all about character, right? Virtue, early to bed and early to rise. And you know, a penny saved, just a penny earned. And this is a sort of a guerrera idea

when religion was front and center in American life that if you had virtue, you could be successful. And who is the greatest embodiment of this? Horatio Alger, right? Who's Horatio Alger? Horatio Alger is actually a preacher. His father was a prominent preacher in Boston. He goes to college.

He ends up in a unitarian church in Cape Cod. And three years later, he's run out of town, and he moves to New York, and he writes a series of books about these young street urchins who rise to success. And this becomes the Horatio Alger Story. He sells a million copies in the late 19th century, but in the next 50 years, he sells three million copies. He's become bigger. There's still a Horatio Alger story,

yeah, society today, because that's the classic American story. Why did Horatio Alger leave the church and move to New York and start writing these novels? He was a pedophile. And the church finds out that he's abusing boys. And before they can disgrace him, his father writes a letter saying,

please protect my son. Let him go and become a success elsewhere. And he moved to New York and what does he do? He befriends young boys. And he writes these novels that define the American success story. And it's all about these kids with good character who stumble into good fortune and are lifted out of their condition. And that's the first definition of success in America.

Success as a character. Who changes that? Answer Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie, another kid from the Midwest who moves to the big city and starts teaching Elecution and public speaking and writes how to win friends and influence people in the 1930s. And what is that story about?

That story is it's all about personality. It's marketing, like, you know, how to cover up your list and how to be dynamic and how to be a good salesman. This is exactly what's happening in the world is that we move from the farm culture to the industrial culture to the office culture. And this is it. The idea is success is all about personality,

how you market yourself and your pizzazz and your appearance and your speech. That's also no longer relevant today. The cutting edge of the success story today was basically pioneered by a man named Mark Savicus. Mark Savicus, his father actually had a disability and was denied work and this inspired him to go into the career counseling business and what he realizes is that there's a change going on in the 21st century and that success is not your character and success is not your personality. Success is your ability to identify what is it inside of you that you want to do. The best way to characterize this would be success is a story. And Sevikus tells me when I talk to him that when someone comes

to him and says, I don't know what to do, he says, I usually know within five minutes. But my job is not to tell you what to do. It's to help you discover what it is that you want to do. And what it is you want to do at this moment in your life. So for you, Dan Harris, one thing in your 30s, when you want to go into television journalism, and then one thing in your 40s, when you want to start 10% happier, and then one thing in your 50s, when you make this big change and you go to do it, the point is you can change the story. The issue is you have to do the internal work, you have to do the work to find the work that you want to do.

And so this is what I learned, like the people who are happiest and most successful in what they do, they don't just climb, They also dig, right? They do this personal archaeology. They go through this meaning audit to figure out who am I. What is it they want to do right now? Okay. So you brought me nicely to the what to do about all of this portion of the interview. One of the things you recommend in your book is a meaning audit Speaking of digging while climbing what does a meaning audit entail? You do this on the 10% happier podcasts. Can you be crunchy about happiness? I think that this tension between happiness and meaning I find very interesting and you know

It's this kind of rather roiling you know sort of academic conversation that doesn't really exist in the mainstream world, but I'm all for it, right? So what is happening? This is a feeling. It's an emotion. It's something that you feel in the present. Animals can feel happy. But what is meaning? Meaning is how you find your way through times when you're unhappy, right?

Or there are setbacks where you get some lifequake in the middle of your happy life and you have to adjust to it, whether you get a diagnosis or a downsizing or a pandemic or a tornado or whatever it might be. And so what is meaning? Meaning is how you stitch together past, present, and future in a way that allows you to navigate the various non-linear events,

the ups and downs of your life. And what is it that stitches together together past, present, and future? The answer is it's a story. So I think that essentially what I'm meaning on it is a process of what I was just referring to as personal archaeology, right? You kind of go through your own life trying to identify your story, right? So in the way I outline it in the search, it's a series of questions that you're familiar with, right? Who, what, when, where, how, and why? And I think that

the problem that we have in the workspace to move it into this realm is that 90% of the conversation about finding work is about the how, right? Brush up your resume, right? You know, change your LinkedIn profile, use your soft contacts, not just your hard contacts, right? Go about getting yourself a new job. And the problem with this is that it will work, particularly in a climate now where we have three and a half percent unemployment. Like the chances are you will get a new job. But the chances are also that two and a half years from now, or four and a half years from now or six and a half years from now, you'll be just as unhappy or full of lack of meaning as you were before because you didn't do the digging.

So what the meaning audit is is a series of questions to ask yourself to identify who is that you want to be now, what is that you want to be doing, where do you want to be doing it, and most especially why do you want to be doing it? Civic is actually says that you go back to your earliest, earliest memories. I'm not sure you have to go quite that far in my experience, but one of the questions that we were discussing early is a perfect example. What were the upsides and downsides of work that you learned from your parents? Just understanding a basic question like that is grounding your story in the past.

Let's do another one. In the book I call it basically 21 questions to find work. You love a series of questions to put yourself through. One of the most effective is other than family, who was your role model as a child? Let me ask you, Dan Harris, other than family, who was your role model as a child? My parents were such powerful blood out the sun role models and I'm trying to figure out who else people from pop culture you mean? To be pop culture, it could be sport, it could be a coach, it could be a public figure. Nobody really comes to mind. I would say the culture in general, like I referenced Wall Street, the movie Gordon Gecko, Greed is good. Life styles are the rich

and famous, the cover of magazines with rich people on them. And I've only started to get in touch with how that conditioning has driven me in ways that I think have often been not fruitful. The thing about the role model that's interesting, is what did you learn from your parents? That's a who question, right? Because your parents, you don't pick your parents, right?

You inherit your parents and you're learning all these things from them directly and indirectly. But who is your role model? It's a what question, because it often doesn't matter who the person is. It matters. What is it that you admired about them?

Is what matters the most. And that's what's interesting. The idea of role models was invented by a guy named Merton at Columbia, and it was from the idea of doctors in the 50s. And most of the young doctors admired were people on TV and on magazine covers and you know those kinds of people they didn't even know that you don't even have to know your role models but what you admire about them is very telling. So now we have an interesting thing like because normally when I ask this question it will be I don't know whatever Michael Jordan right or Madam Curie or someone like that what now you're identifying at this particular moment of your life, right, where you're auditing yourself all the time, in real time, out loud in front of, you know, millions of people

is you've identified, in effect, a negative role model, right? Someone who shaped your thinking about success and pushing yourself and these external metrics, and you're now finding that you have to push that out, right? That's Tom Brady saying, I was drafted seventh, and I'm going to show that, right? That's Madonna, who gave a speech when she won the Billboard Woman of the Year award, saying to all the haters and the doubters, like some people are motivated by negative role models that maybe push them in certain ways, but then you get to this moment

that you have to, in effect, push beyond it. I'd love this answer because it's incredibly interesting because now in your life, right, you're involved in this public act of self-examination, of introspection, of mindfulness, and you've identified this thing. And for your work life, here at Ricochet's, you walk away from the job that would on the surface

appear to give you that effortlessly for a much harder path. And that is what's really interesting. So a simple question, like, what you learned from your parents, what was a role model? Let me ask you this, Greg, what places were you drawn to as a child? This is such a good set of questions.

I have these very clear memories of traveling with my parents and seeing the homes of rich people and thinking, wow, I want that. There was this foundational experience for me when I was 10. My parents took my brother and I to Paris. My parents were very frugal, academic physicians didn't make a lot of money. You hear doctor, you think they make a lot of money. They didn't until later in their career

after I was grown up. So I'm 10 years old, my parents drive like a shit brown, plummet valiant and a Chevy Chevrolet, and they take us traveling to Europe, but the only reason we were able to do that is my parents were asked to give lectures so they got free plane tickets and free hotels, so they're kind of working while this vacation is happening.

And we get put up in this fancy ass place in Paris called the Hotel Regina. I was in Paris recently with my family and we went back and had lunch at the Hotel Regina. It's still really dope, it's really, really nice. And we go to the Hotel Regina and I'm like, this is how I wanna live. My parents are suckers.

They're working their asses off and they got a terrible car is in a middleing house. And that was to the 10 year old mind, my 10 year old mind, a huge wake up call. I'm a weird guy, right? Like I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, five generations of Jews in the South. Like, you know, you mentioned the Bible. What was the Bible?

The Bible was like, I'm going to go to the places in the Bible and I'm going to read the stories. I'm going to find out what I can learn by walking the Bible. Like, I'm a weird guy. And that's why I love this weird question because it's left out of work most of the time. But you ask people where I mean, I can open my book and find the numbers here, which I will not do. But when you open it up, there's a direct correlation, right? There's outdoor people, there's indoor people, right?

Some people are drawn to Brooks and right in mountain tops and beaches and some people are drawn to honky tongs. Or I tell this incredible story of Shelley Wright who grew up dirt poor in Kansas, and you know, which is playing the honky tongs at at 11 years old and she said when she was five, she disappeared and her parents found her in a nearby old age home like singing to the old ladies, right? She grew up to become a country music singer, right? So where you're drawn as a child often affects. I mean, I tell this amazing story in my book of Kalen Gienrud Regas. She grew up at the daughter of Mexican migrant workers

in the Central Valley of California. Couldn't rub five nickels together in a crappy rented home. Why? Because the father worked really hard and then drank away every bucky ever earned and left the mother to raise their children. They could never be even to afford a house and finally she as an 11-year-old said, we can't live like this,

confronted her father as a Mexican Catholic girl in the 50s and confronted her father. She said, I thought he was gonna hit me and said the next day he came and said, get in the car, we're gonna go look for houses. And they drove around the neighborhood and she would knock on the doors and say, we'll use this house, as a girl.

She grows up, she gets married, her husband works in industry as a blue collar guy. She raises the daughters in clipscoup lines because they don't have any money. And the day her last kid starts kindergarten, she says to the husband, I wanna be a real estate agent. And then she goes door to door

as one of the first female Mexican real estate agents in her community. She becomes realtor of the first female Mexican real estate agents in her community. She becomes realtor of the year in the county, heads, then Hispanic American real estate, nonprofit organization, and turns her childhood pain of not having a place into a life of work that allows other people to seek out what she called that first house they lived in, paradise. There's a poetry in these stories, Dan, that we often miss in the conversation about work, because we miss the fact that we have, what I call, that toothache, like something that's been grinding at us, a pain in our lives. I've

asked millions of questions in 35 years of being a professional writer. The best single question I ever asked people was, did you have a toothache as a child? And that question came from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen called Auntie Tuthache, which was the last of all the fairy tales that he wrote by the young boy who has a dream and the aunt says to him, you have a way with words, you're going to be a poet someday, but he also has a lot of toothaches. And one night he's in a delirious dream. He's visited by this older woman. And she says to him, every great poet has a great toothache. And I crazy love this story. And I asked every single person, did you have a toothache as a child? And what you've just been telling us is a toothache that you had as a child. You had some pain that was driving you, whether you were aware of it, I don't know.

Did you feel like you were aware of this at the time? Maybe it sounds like you were at 10, you said it. So you have this toothache and it has driven you all of these years. And what you've finally done in your 50s because you are devoted, not only doing yourself but to helping all the rest of us go through this process of self-examination, doing the digging, doing what I'm here calling a meaning audit, and you've linked your toothache to your work, and now what you're in effect asking yourself is, I've put the bomb on the toothache. Now what? I don't know, but I'm presuming that you have the nice house. You're having lunch at the hotel Regina. Maybe you don't have a sweet

in the hotel Regina, but you're, they let you in the front door. But you have in effect resolved your two-thake, and a lot of the questions that you and the rest of us are going through, the 100 million Americans who will sit down across from someone they love this year and say, I'm not happy with what we do. Like, let's just talk about the stakes here. We haven't done that down. 70% of us are unhappy with what we do.

75% of us say we intend to look for work this year. That's an appol eight weeks ago. And a workforce of 160 million people. That means a hundred million people will sit down across from someone they love today, tonight, tomorrow, this week, and say, honey, I'm not happy with what I'm doing. And I wanted to do something that I love. If you identify your two-thake, that is the best single question you can ask yourself to find work that you love. Coming up, Roost talks about some of the other questions he recommends using as part of your meaning audit. What if we told you that there's a darker side to royalty? And more often than not,

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Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, or Wondery Plus kits on Apple Podcasts. So wonder ya, or wondery plus kids on Apple podcasts. What are some of the other key questions that we can ask in order to help us write the story of our success? Yeah, I think that's great because I think that what I've been talking about here is the past, right? What are we talking about past, present, and future? So a set of the questions are about the past. But that's only step one. Then step two is to go to the present. So here's a very simple question. I'm

at a moment in my life when blank. Because that's a when question, okay, in my construct of who, what, when, where, why, and how. I'm at a moment in my life when blank. Okay, we talked about this, right? I'm at a moment in my life when I. Okay, we talked about this, right? I'm at a moment in my life when I need to prioritize money because I'm sending two kids to college because I want to buy a new house because I have a student debt I want to pay off. Or maybe I'm at a moment in my life when I've got two kids under five and I want to prioritize work that will allow me to be with them.

Okay, so I don't want to work that makes me travel. Or I'm at a moment in my life when I'm an empty nester, or I'm a little bit older than you, or when my aging parent, who I've been lovingly sacrificing to take care of, is now deceased, and I can do something for myself. Or I'm in a moment in my life when I don't want to commute anymore.

So I want to prioritize work from anywhere, or I want to move out of this rabbit hole apartment that I live in and move to a place where I can have a back yard. With deep enough into this conversation, you can see how all of these themes begin to overlap. In the old linear career model, to make one of those choices, was to stigmatize yourself. I want to stay home with my kids. I know I said I wanted to work, but now I've had these kids I want to stay home from them. And what were two generations of women who did that told you get off the escalator? You'll never get back on the

escalator. Like what is squandered more human potential than that? Because now you can say I want to do this now, but in five years I'll make a different choice. That's the advantage of having 20 work crates in your lives. That's the advantage of the not only in your life is that you can make one decision now and make a different one in five years. You don't have to do this Frank Parsons decided at 22 and then do it for 40 years and get the darn gold watch and then look back and say, wait a minute, I prioritize my work my whole life. That's the number one regret that people have. So there's this simple question.

I'm in a moment in my life when, or I want to do work that, you know? I want to do work that, what? I allows me to make a lot of money. I want to do work that gives back to the community. Okay, I've been doing the same thing for 20 years and I want to do work that makes the planet but I want to go fight climate change.

Okay, I love the story in my book, I've a way to quack, okay? He grows up in Virginia, goes to the Ivy League, I want to go fight climate change. I love the story in my book of Way Take Walk. He grows up in Virginia, goes to the Ivy League, he's from a Chinese family, he learns Chinese, and he runs a Silicon Valley ad agency that's the number one ad agency between China and the United States. And at 40 with two kids under 12, his wife says, hey, there's this movie down at the synoplex. I want to go watch it. It's by this guy, Al Gore. He goes and he watches it. And he's like, I didn't want to go. I'm sort of interested.

So he says, I walk out of the movie. I'm in a full-on work quick. And every night for the next two years, when I'm brushing my teeth, I look in the mirror and say, what am I doing to fight climate change? And he walks away from being the CEO. He says, I'm sitting there arguing about, like, how big the font is going to be on this app. I shouldn't take this to you. You've got a big app now.

But I'm worried about how big the font is on this app. And what am I doing to make the planet better? And he walks away from the CEO job to become basically a foot soldier in the fight with climate change, much less prestigious, less money, but I'm at a moment in my life that I want to make the climate better. And he was inspired as a kid of all people by Richard Nixon, of course, was then disgraced. And he said, I never trust politicians. And then after working at these various companies for five years, he says, this is not even

enough. And he does the one thing in his life he squares never to do. He becomes a politician and he runs to join the city council of his community in California. Six and ten people, when they go through a work wake, what they end up doing on the other side, brings in less money than they did before, and yet they are happier. And this is not just me, Sean Acor, how much are you know? His study at Harvard, nine of ten people will give up a third of their lifetime earnings for work that is more meaningful.

Sixty percent of millennials, to go back to what we said at the outside of this conversation say meaningful work is more important to them than their parents. The change is upon us. That's the opportunity that you have. The challenge is how do you define meaning beginning in your childhood, but also how do you define it right now? Let's do a few more questions. We've done past and present. Maybe move into the future. Yeah, let's move into the future and let's talk about advice actually. In your biggest work quake, did you get a piece of advice that was helpful if so, who is it from and what was it? So this is a big theme. If you go back to life as in the transitions,

that's a book that's about their three phases to a transition like the longer bi, the messy middle, the new beginning, and then there are these various tools to navigate a life transition. And one of those tools is to share your story. Like, don't go through it alone. Have somebody that you're talking to who will give you advice. And so this one I decided to dig down in the answers was surprising. But first let me ask you, you just made a big work transition in the last few years, right?

Did you get a piece of advice? Nifsah, who is it from? I'm a big advice seeker. So I'm trying to pick one thing. Not the life advice, not the meditation advice, not the happiness advice. Like when you were making the work transition, who gave you a piece of advice?

Again, I was asking people advice about that specific thing, but I'll give you one thing. Cut it. Joseph Goldstein is a meditation teacher I've worked with personally for many years, close friend, just fantastic human being. One of the things he and I've talked about a lot is my tendency to over-schedule and

add too many side jobs and projects. His advice to me is do fewer things and make them excellent. That is a big reason why I quit ABC News, which I loved to focus on 10% after. So two things about that. The first headline is that the number one advice came from colleagues and family was last, which is interesting, right?

So the colleague thing is interesting because you might think, like I shouldn't talk to my colleague, right colleague about leaving this job or staying in this job and reimagining all these people leave jobs, by the way, other interesting statistic actually that just pops into my mind. Half of the people who change jobs change occupations. So the best advice from colleagues interestingly enough, not from family, why is that? I mean, it either could be that we downplay the advice of our spouses, or it could be the say that our partners are stakeholders, and maybe they're not giving us the advice we most need, because they're scared too.

And the fear is kind of compound on each other, because if you make a job like this, where the benefit's gonna come from, right? It's gonna change the salary. So that's interesting, okay? But what people said the best advice was interesting. And I think you didn't quite say this way, but my response when I heard you was, did you already know that? Did you over-scheduled and that it was fear-based? Or was he telling you

something new or was he reminding of something that you already know? It sounds like it's the second one. I did know at the moment he told me, but I had only recently taken it in in a powerful way. Right. So here's the thing. Three quarters of the advice that people said was the best advice that they got in a work wake was keep doing what you think you should be doing. That people do not want a kick in the butt or a slap on the back in the head. They want a pat on the back. And this goes back to the sufficus thing where he said, I know within five minutes, but my job is not to tell you,

it's to help you discover it. Right? So Vicus calls this your known unknown. You have this thing that you know, but it is unknown to you and you have to get in touch with it. So therefore, the question in the part of the search that turns this into questions, the best advice I have for myself right now is blank. You know,

it's fun that you mentioned ABC News. So I will say, I was on Good Morning America on the day the search came out and I was talking to your friend and colleague George Stephanopoulos and he was asking this and I was going through some of these questions. He said, you're basically asking people to interview themselves. And I said, yes, in your own way, what I'm saying is, before you get to the hell, back to what I said earlier, we put how to early, go through the who, the what, the when, the why. And so that would be a why question to ask yourself, you know, if you're going to put that into a question, or just said the best piece of advice is, and that's the toothache. You know, my toothache right now, we talked about your toothache as a child,

but what's your toothache right now? we talked about your toothache as a child. But what's your toothache right now? I talked to a woman named Mary Robinson, who grew up in New Jersey. And an idyllic childhood, she said until her father died when she was 11 from cancer. And she grew up at a time when it was not acceptable for children to grieve and to talk openly about their pain. So she buried hers in alcohol and promiscuity. And she was so wanted to get away, she became a flight attendant so that she could travel, and she eventually comes back home and she

works for potential. And she has a great job, but she's deeply unhappy. And one day she goes home and she has a conflict with her mother, and she goes upstairs in her childhood bedroom and she lies down in her bed, and she pulls a book from her bedside table, and she starts weeping, and she realized that she never properly grieved the loss of her father. So she walks away from a job at credential to start and run an organization that helps families and children who lose a loved one,

manage their grief and turn that into something strong. And she finds her why. And her childhood toothache had become her adult toothache that she had never resolved this pain in her life. And her childhood to think had become her adult to think that she had never resolved this pain in her life. And so she makes the change. Again, these questions are, look, I want to do work that, right? I'm in a moment in my life, that's the present, but look forward. My purpose going forward is blank. Turns out, if you won't work with purpose, ask yourself what your purpose is. You know, this is what you

discovered after all 600 episodes, right? What's the secret to having a happy family? I'm sure I said in the conversation we had about the secret to our family. It's try. What's the secret of 10% happier commit to trying to be happier? What's the secret of finding meaningful work? Identify first what gives you meaning and then go try to translate that into work. And what I'm trying to do here is give people the tools to do that because that's what's missing. And that was the thing we talked about at the outset, this conversation, because we were told you don't need it.

You're supposed to be unhappy in what you do. And once you change that dynamic, it can change everything. We only have a few minutes, but does the book get tactical or are you really staying on these sort of big, wide questions? The second half of the book is the 21 questions and how other people answer them, right? So it's like, so Stargull's working from the 1970s, but I did all these analytics and it's a series of tools. So the first half, it explains all of the various lies and the one big truth. And the second half is a step-by-step. It goes through the 21 questions and when I grabbed the book here a second ago

to look it up, I was looking actually to the very, very end of the book, where I literally lined them up. So here's how to write the rough draft of your story. And going through this transition, I realized I want to be the kind of person who blank. I want to do work that blank. I'm at a moment in my life when blank. I want to be in a place that it basically helps you write a rough draft of the work story that you want to be telling. If there's one common element to all of the work stories that I've listened to and coded

and analyzed and kind of immersed myself in for the last three years and collectively in the last six years, it's that every work story at one moment has what I call the unright decision, the CEO who steps down to become a field worker, the woman who's a spy on the Soviet desk, who leaves the Soviet desk to run payroll at the CIA, which all her friends tell her, crazy, you left the sexiest job for the least sexy, what does she end up doing? She ends up running in the CIA. This woman who left the Fortune 500 company to start a nonprofit about grieving, they include the unright choice. Okay, they get off the path, they make the move toward what should be unsuccessful. And in the so doing, they make the right choice

for themselves because the unright choice will disappoint somebody. Maybe that's the family thing. It will disappoint somebody, but it's the right story for you. And in the process, what's happened is, and this I think is the beauty of it, by having all of these abnormal stories, the ones that break away from the traditional career and the traditional path and the traditional job, what's happening in the world of work today is that the abnormal has become the norm. And that gives us all permission to make the unright choice for ourselves, And that gives us all permission to make the unright choice for ourselves, which will collectively make it easier for everybody to make the decision that will allow you to find the work that gives you the meaning you crave, the purpose you deserve, and the success that's right for you on your own terms. I think you're doing a lot of people a great service by giving the tools to make these huge decisions.

Before I let you go, can you please just plug the shit out of your book and any other book that you want people to check out or any other resource at all that you've put out into the world? Well, first of all, thank you. And let me just thank you again. I have the best to know you and have multiple conversations with you over the years. And you've made a series of perhaps unright choices, including being vulnerable about your own struggles that have obviously proved to be the right choice for you.

And so many of us who have come to rely on you. And so I want to salute you and congratulate you. And thank you for including me in a small way in the community that you're building. And this is my work now. It's helping people navigate these transitions. I write up weekly newsletter called The Nonlinear Life, which is BruceFiler.substac.com. And there have been two books that have explored this.

The first is Life is in the transitions, Mastering Change at NEH, which has came out in 2020. It led to a TED Talk and now a TED course on how to manage life transitions and the new book that we're talking about is The Search Finding Meaningful Work in a post-career world, and it's basically a toolkit to help you, or someone you know is in a work-quake right now.

And if you don't know what to do, do this. And that's what I've tried to do, and I appreciate the point you've made, because you're so practical, and a lot of your work to give people, not only, I mean, the way people respond to my work these days, Dan, and this is a technical term, is that they say, you've put words to the feelings that I have,

and that's what's most gratifying. It's like dropping the linearity and accepting the being and the nonlinear life is the great opportunity. You don't have to feel like I'm off track, off kilter, off schedule in some way. And so what I've tried to do is to give people the tools to manage their transitions, and now with the search to manage the work transitions in order to help people get what they want and what they deserve, which is the opportunity to live a life that is fulfilling on the terms that you seek. Bravo Bruce Filer. Thanks for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. really appreciate it. I'm sure thank you for inviting me. Thanks again to Bruce. Thank you to you for listening, couldn't, and really just wouldn't do it without you. If you want to do me a solid, go give us a rating or a review on whatever podcast player you use. That actually really helps. Also don't forget to check out the new stuff I've been posting on Instagram and TikTok.

I can use some feedback on that as well. Thanks most of all, though, to everybody who works so hard on this show, 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davey Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson, special shout out to Justine who mostly haunched the Sainly and Vicious series that we're wrapping up today. Thank you, Justine. DJ Kagemere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman

is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn from the Awesome Band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you back here on Friday for a bonus meditation. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

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