Bruce Feiler | The New American Dream -Writing The Rules for Success on Your Terms

Srini: Bruce, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Bruce Feiler: Thank you. I'm flattered by your invitation, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. 

Srini: I think that anytime somebody else refers at another guest to me, I don't really even bother to look at what their story's about, because I almost always know that if somebody else refers them, it's going to be a great, and you were referred by AJ Jacobs, who is, one of those people who's just amazing in so many different ways.

Bruce Feiler: I Agree. The prince of a man in every single way.

Srini: AJ Jacobs is like the most Interesting human being alive, almost, like the way he approaches his work and everything else. But speaking of work I think that funny enough, as many times as I'm asking this question, this one is actually very relevant to the content of your book, but that is what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping and influencing the choices that you've made?

Bruce Feiler: Oh my God. I love this question because I have personally asked it hundreds of times. This was essentially the first question I asked in these, in the, what I call the work story project. And it's interesting because I'll tell you how I'm gonna answer your question by telling you what I learned in asking this question.

Okay. So what's happening is I'm starting this process where I'm gonna interview people about work and I, like you, I don't really know what I'm gonna find, so I'm gonna start asking questions. And okay. I'm gonna start with the question you just asked me. And so I start asking people like, what were, the way I phrased it was what were the values or upsides about work you learned from your parents?

And what I learned in asking this question is that the answers were uninteresting, right? Because basically everybody, later I coded it and it was like 67%. But basically everybody said, I learned the value of hard work. Yeah. And so look, as somebody who asks questions for a living, to me, the only metric about I recently spoke to some high school journalists and I said, look, the only metric to evaluate a successful question is the quality of the answers.

So you may be highfalutin and you may think you've got the perfect question, but if the answers are not helping you or not revealing, then it's your fault. The questions are the problem. So I decided, okay I'm not getting at the thing I'm trying to get at. Even I don't, even though I don't know what I'm trying to get at.

So then I started asking what were the downsides or the shadows of work Yeah. That you learned from your parents. And that's when it got interesting. Okay. So with that preamble, I'm gonna now answer your question. So I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, and my father, Was in a family business.

His father had been a kind of a country lawyer who defended anybody that he could defend when he was a Jewish lawyer in a kind of, still backwater Savannah, Georgia, where that was not necessarily a kind of a ticket to traditional avenues of success and achievement. So he defended pornographers, he defended criminals.

He defended murderers because that was the only work he could get. And then he started in the fifties, a small building company called The Home Loan Company. And my father, who grew up in Savannah, also went to the University of Pennsylvania, joined the Navy, married my mother, who had grown up in Baltimore, Maryland, or Baltimore as the people from Baltimore actually say it.

And his father, my father's father summoned them back right when my father got outta the Navy. And my mother resented it her whole life. That, that my father could have done anything, could have gone anywhere. He had this Ivy League education and she was dragged against her will back to Savannah. Okay, so what did I learn?

What were the upsides in my frame? What did I, what my parents do and what did I learn? I learned the value of hard work. In fact, every Saturday when I was a kid, I used to have to get dressed up. Not like a suit and tie, but corduroys and a button down shirt and go behind the house.

I grew up in to my grandparents' house and my grandmother would make breakfast. You know this because you read my book and it's the opening, and then I would get in the car with my father and he would drive five miles an hour for a trip that should have taken seven minutes and took 17. And I would sit in this family office, a cinder block building in downtown Savannah, Georgia, which they were in the real estate business and they owned apartments and built one bedroom houses for low income families using government subsidy.

And I would take 18, 20, 20 $2 rent payments and enter them in a ledger. And my father, my grandfather in, polished, tied Oxford shoes and suspenders and a bow tie would sit behind me, right? And look over my shoulder and tell me, look them in the eye, and shake their hands and ask about their families.

And he would brag about my good grades and my penmanship. And then we would get back in the car and we would make this return trip. And then he would tell stories about growing up in Mississippi and the first job he had and the first car he was in. And the first time he was experienced air conditioning, the first time he was in an airplane.

And the message was very clear. Son, the most important thing in life is work, not family, not love, not relationships, not happiness, not meaning like we all have today, but work. But I didn't wanna do that work. And that was a challenge. And my mother was a creative person. She was a painter and an artist and an art teacher.

Worked in an art museum. And she was totally stymied by a cultures fan of Georgia at the time where women were not expected to do these things or work outside the home or express themselves or have their own viewpoints in any way. And this was the tension in my life between the kind of the dutiful path I was expected to follow and the more creative, risky, not linear in the language of today path that I wanted to follow.

And so this tension is what in some ways has defined my whole relationship with work and in its own way, I think shaped the questions I was asking. And ultimately, I think the themes that I heard when I was asking those questions, yeah. And

Srini: so many questions come from that alone. I think it was Daniel Levitton who had told me about Jewish parents and Indian parents in the similarities.

He said, it's like Dr. Laura engineer failure. And he told me this joke. He said that, some Jewish mother is that the presidential inauguration and her son is the vice president and she looks and turns to somebody sitting next to her and says, that's my son up there. He could have been a doctor.

And I'm curious for you what that narrative was around your household wasn't the typical Jewish kid slash Indian kid slash Asian kid narrative. The other thing I'm really curious about is growing up in Savannah, Georgia, at the time that you did as a Jewish person, what did your parents explicitly or implicitly teach you about race and bias and those

Bruce Feiler: kinds of things?

Well, lemme take those in reverse order. Yeah. So I do believe that. Being Jewish in the South turns out to have been a sort of defining aspect of my identity and even more specifically a kind of chief motivation of the work that I've ended up doing because I grew up loving the South. I love the ness, I love the stickiness.

I love the storytelling ness. Like I love all of that. Not to mention the college football and a lot of those and the barbecue. But yet I grew up Jewish in the south and so therefore I grew up apart from that. So I was a part of the culture, but I was a part from the culture. At the same time, I also love being Jewish.

I love the ness and the stickiness and the storytelling. This right, there's a sort of a parallel there. But yet I grew up Jewish, not just an American Jew, and therefore, separate from the long narrative of Jewish life, which it began in the Middle East and then spread through North Africa and the Middle East and Europe, and then didn't get to America for 2000 years.

But I also even grew up from the American Jewish tradition, which was largely based in, New York and the Northeast. So I grew up a part of that culture, but apart from that culture at the same time. And so what have I done with my life? I in some ways followed that same journey. Okay, I grew up in the south, that I left there, I went to Yale.

So therefore I'm going back to the northeast where my mother was from. And and my father had gone to school. And then I went from there to Japan in the eighties and I started writing letters home. And I'm older than you are, but on crinkly air mail paper. Okay. Did you ever write a letter on the air mail paper?

I was

Srini: thinking about the last time I wrote a letter to a friend, one of my best friends from college,

Bruce Feiler: she, oh my gosh, should you, I've never even written a letter. You're of an age, so you never even wrote a letter unless on crinkly onion in air mail paper.

Srini: I maybe have written a letter, but definitely not on that air mail paper.

But you know what? My parents came to America or to left India in the late seventies. So know what you're talking. No. Cause that

Bruce Feiler: was what my parents communicated. And the way it was the thing about those letters is the, with the paper was very thin, right? Because of the costs. That's why it was air mail, as opposed to ship mail. And the pad of paper would have lines on it, so the, it wouldn't get all squiggly. And so I go to Japan I'm having a homestay. I like, I wake up the next, they serve me liver pie for dinner. Like I would eat everything but liver. And so I left, but I ate the liver pie cuz I was trying to make a good impression with my homestay family.

And the next morning I woke up. I've heard my first lesson about life in Japan, which is that, Breakfast is leftovers from the night before. So on a Sunday morning, I was served a piece of cold liver pie and I got up and I wrote this letter home and it was basically, you're not gonna believe what happened to me.

And I basically started sending them every few days for months. And when I got back to Georgia six months later, everywhere I went, people said, I loved your letters. And I was like, great. Have we met? And it turns out that my grandmother had Xerox them and passed them around and they went viral in a kind of 1980s sense of word.

And I thought if this is that interesting to me and all these people, like I should write a book about this. I didn't know anyone had ever written a book, and it doesn't happen this way. But I saw my first book at 24, that's almost 35 years ago. And then that set me off in this life of entering worlds and writing about them.

Okay. And this is all that I've done now. I've never held a job in the last 30 plus years. So what do I think that is? That's becoming a part of something. But being apart from it at the same time. So I'm the kind of person who like has a foot in the, in this immersive world. I enter, which in my case was Japan and then Oxford and Cambridge, and I spent a year as a circus clown.

And I spent a decade going back and forth to the Middle East writing books about religion and can we get along in the kind of conflicts of interfaith relations. So I enter worlds, become a part of them as much as possible, and then leave them separate myself. I'm now apart from them and share what I learned with people who might be interested and want to immerse themselves in these worlds.

And that I believe fundamentally comes from being a Jew from Georgia.

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Okay. There's no way I'm gonna let go of the fact that you mentioned you spent a year of working as a circus clown. You're gonna tell me about that. What in the world did you learn from that and what do we not know? What do we see? Because. Circuses are such bizarre sort of subcultures to be like, all I remember about a circus from one podcast guest, he was a guy who basically helped guys pick up girls by teaching them how to dance.

And I, went from college to a circus art school and I asked what it was like, and he's from Rinni. He's you wanna see lots of beautiful women? He's go to a circus school.

Bruce Feiler: Wow. I should tell your listeners that you, one of your devotions to your listeners is that you want to hear your interviews as your listeners hear your interviews, and therefore you don't use this feature that is on the platform on which we're recording this, where you can see me.

Because if you could see me, you would see a picture behind me of me on a camel juggling, which links those two parts of my life. The part of me that, rode camels around the Middle East for a decade. And the part of me that juggled in the circus for a year. So I grew up I learned to juggle when I was a kid and I used to joke that I put myself through high school by doing my birthday parties.

And so I always had this dream of joining the circus. And after many years of living abroad, I came back and I thought this is a great way to learn about America. So I spent a year in the Clyde Brady Cold Brothers Circus, and I did we did 16 states, 99 cities. I did 501 circuses in the course of a year.

And I will tell you, it is the most magical and fascinating world because on the one hand, it has what I call the seven circus sins, which in the year that I was in the circus and by the way, I did write a book about this called Under the Big Top. But in the year that I was in the circus, we had murder, rape,

,

arson, bigham, bigamy, bestiality, group Saxon organized crime.

Okay? So that's the seven circus sins. But we also had two Tupperware parties, three births, a wedding, a funeral, right? So on the one hand, it is this thing on the edge of society where these outsiders come. And I love this phrase of a city that moves by night and set up. And so there's this conflict and it attracts people who were marginal in some way, but yet is also a family.

And people travel and live in RVs. And the typical things you would see in a family also get, so I think that the circus is the tension, but what is so magical about the circus is that when the circus people in the townies, as we call them, go under the tent, they participate in the shared narrative of adventure and the idea of doing extraordinary things, which isn't fundamentally what the circus is all about.

And I love that about it, which is this shared, we're gonna enter this world and together we're gonna build something magical. I think that's beautiful. Wow. But since you said you're not gonna let the circus go, I'm not gonna let a story about work and the circus go because, and I haven't told this story, and God I can't.

Maybe a very long time, years ago I was at one, I was actually at a Renaissance weekend, like one of these sort of fancy gatherings of people. And I was seated next to, and I won't say his name, but put it this way, he was the founder of Sam Adams Beer. And you, I can get going on questions. And so we're, I don't know, an hour into a dinner and I have asked him question after question, which I deeply enjoyed.

This is my life's work now, asking people questions. And not a single time did he ask me a question. And I was, and it was just fascinating. Okay. Like you just love telling stories about yourself. So I'm like, I'm gonna do a test. And my test was, I'm gonna start dropping any circus stories, and if you can't ask a question about that, then you really are not interested in getting to know me.

So I started just randomly telling, oh yeah, when I was in the circus, this happened, or when I was in the circus that happened. And he never turned and said what you did. So again, you're now my hero, and I'm saluting you and embracing you for I wasn't even doing it intentionally. But for not letting something like the circus go by without pausing to talk about it.

No, there's no

Srini: way I could do like the, I like weird, quirky things. I was like, wait, what the circus? I was like, I have to hear about that. Let's actually get into the content of the book, because I think one of the places I'm gonna start is you went to Yale and I went to Berkeley, and one of the things you say in the opening of the book is that the huge flaw on the myth of success.

We've been sold is that it? GS two exclusively and elevated two reflexively on only one type of hero and one measure of achievement. The only way to be successful is always push ahead mark four, reach higher, get more. I don't know about you. I you'd imagine it, it's was very similar at Yale because my sister was a gift at her residency at Yale, but that's the default narrative of the average Berkeley undergrad, at least when I was there.

And even when you watch the kids in the documentary about the college admission scandal, the way they, either are just jumping through joy or absolutely devastated, like I remember getting the big envelope, but I didn't, run outta my parents' lawn and like jump for drive.

I was like, oh, I got him into Berkeley. So talk to me about that, like particularly in that environment how is it that you managed to not be so conditioned by the default narrative in an environment like that?

Bruce Feiler: I love this question and it hits close to home, I have to say, because I I have identical twin daughters, as but as you may not know, they just turned 18 three weeks ago and they just accepted college admission a week ago. So we have been in, when I have been calling in the college application death March for the last year. And I think that one of the interesting things that's going on in the, the Gen Z world is is this wrestling over this because, the, these elite universities have gone through kind of multiple phases.

First they used to be all male, essentially into the late 1960s, and then they started admitting women. So suddenly half the people that used to get in were not getting in anymore. And, but even until a decade ago, these institutions were still primarily white. And that has changed dramatically in the last 10 years and in the last several years in particular.

So I, and I think that they, it has forced these institutions to ask even more, with more challenge and focus, what kinds of students do they want to admit and how do they look at success. So with that preamble, let me set the stage here. So again, if you could see me, I'm sitting at my desk here in Brooklyn and when I sent out to write a book about work and as just to set the stage a little bit I actually at my 30th college reunion at Yale in 2017, I, in fact, I'll tell that story cuz you like a, you, you like stories.

And this was a very meaningful story that appeared in my last book. Life is in the transitions that you may not know. I was moderating a panel of prominent classmates and I was driving from Brooklyn to New Haven and I was driving with a friend, classmate and neighbor, and he was closing a 400 million real estate deal, and he was on top of the world, but he was toggling between d conversations about closing that deal and conversations that left him in tears because the previous day he had a partner who had a nine month old and the nine month old went down for a nap and never woke up.

Geez. So he is a bully and heartbroken, wrenching, crying in this car ride. And so we get to campus in New Haven. I have resumes that were very impressive of the people, 250 people in this room. And I had the microphone, I was moderating and I said, you know what? I ripped up the resumes and I said, losers don't come to their college reunion.

I don't want to hear about your successes. Tell that to your mother. I want to hear about your struggles and what keeps you awake at night. And that night it took me two hours to walk from the bar at one end of the tent to the other because person after person came up to me and said, my wife went into the hospital and died.

The next morning my daughter cut herself and tried to take her own life. My brother was diagnosed with stage four. This I'm being sued for malpractice. Like I, I, I can't, my partner has stolen money from me and I left that this is a drop dead true story. And I left that limping cuz I have, leg problems cuz I have had cancer in my leg as a young adult.

And I called my wife and I said, no one has had to tether life story anymore and I wanna do something to help. And what I did has now been to devote the last six years of my life to collecting and analyzing life stories of Americans, of all backgrounds, all walks of life, all 50 states. In the world of narrative psychology, which is the academic field that this is adjacent to, a typical paper.

I have 10, 12 life stories. I've done 400 now in six years, and for the last two or three years I've been focused exclusively on the topic of work. And that really is the heart of what I'm doing today. And so to now answer your question, at the start of this project, I'm like, okay, I'm writing a book about work.

I should get the greatest books on the history of work and I should read them. And so I ordered them all. Some of them I had in my house, some of them I ordered right off of the internet. And I had the great books about success, about finance, about work. And then one day I looked at them and I realized that they all had one thing in common.

They were written by white men. And so I did this thing, which I had never done before. I stacked the five most prominent success books of the last century. Okay. That includes the how to win friends and influence people, the power of positive thinking. What color is your parachute? The seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I turned every page, I analyzed every name, tracked them down, and the bottom line is that 93% were straight white men. Only 7% were women. And 0.009% were minorities people of color, people of different ethnic backgrounds. It is astonishing. So I think before we talk about how success is changing, we just have to pause and accept, as you just quoted the search as saying that the story we've been telling has been single-minded, focused on only one type of person.

And frankly, I actually think cruel. The only people, even the only blacks mentioned in those books are like a colored made right. A chef, a jazz singer. It's an astonishing cliche. And yet it is the core problem that the story about work we've been saying, as you just mentioned, is all about up.

Yeah. Rags to riches up by your bootstraps, higher floor, bigger office, greater salary, better view. And I'm here to tell you, if you remember only one thing from this conversation is that the people who are happiest and find most meaning and get the success on their own terms, what they have in common is they don't climb, they dig, they do.

What you started me doing in this conversation, which is what I started in my conversations, which is they go back to their childhood and realize that we've all had these dreams. We've been nurturing and this scripture of work that we've been cultivating, and we have a story we have been trying to tell.

But as you've said several times in this conversation, because of our parents, because of our culture, because of the institutions, because of the expectations of society, we don't often. Chase our own dreams, we chase someone else's dreams. And that is responsible. Huh? That is the main reason that 70% of the people are unhappy with what they do.

And three quarters of people in a poll released five days ago said that they plan to look for work in the next 12 months. Wow. Yeah

Srini: it's interesting cause I distinctly remember that part of the book and as we're talking about this, it just reminds me of something, one of my mentors Greg Colonel used to say, he would always say there's this sort of distinction between what is probable and what is possible.

And he said, we look at these sort of role models that we put on pedestals and we read books about these successful people. And, I think that the big sort of thing after, a thousand interviews and a thousand self-help books that I realized is that when we look at that advice as just blanket prescriptive advice, we fail to consider the context in which that advice is given.

Nice. And we think to ourselves, oh, you know what I, I remember very distinctly I was with my dad, and it was right after I graduated from business school. I just started a podcast. And my dad's oh, not everybody can be the next Steve Jobs. And that really pissed me off because I was like, oh, you don't tell my sister.

She can't be any kind of doctor she wants to be. And lo and behold, if you go to a medium feed, you'll see, I wrote an article titled, you're Probably Not Gonna Be the Next Steve Jobs Over Beyonce. Because I think that's the thing that struck me most, particularly when we talk about this kind of literature around success, is that, outliers are the role models.

And I think even Paul Graham, his essay on Wealth said, outliers are not good examples to follow yet. If you think about it, nobody writes books about people who didn't amount to shit and spent the year, spent years busting their assets. Those aren't the people we put on covers of magazines.

Bruce Feiler: I think that what's, there's a lot in that I think that there, and there's a lot of beauty in that and I think there's a lot to, to spotlight in what you said, right? Because what I hear in what you just said in terms of sitting where I'm sitting of listening to people talking about work for the last three years, thousands of hours of interviews, right?

I've done 1500 hours of interviews, 10,000 pages of transcripts. I've hired two different teams of 12 people to analyze them. I'm hearing a lot, I'm hearing, east Asian, south Asian, Jewish cultures, right? I'm hearing parents, I'm hearing institutions right. That is what I call that I've come to call actually the script of work that we are handed.

Okay? Script theory is actually not something I knew a lot about before I started this project, but I'm fascinated by it. So script theory, basically to geek out on the science, cuz I know you like that kind of stuff. The script theory is basically we have a script of going to a restaurant, right? We know you go in, you either sit down or you wait to be seated.

You look at the menu, you order something, the food comes, there's some interaction. Then you finish your meal. You pay for your meal, and then you leave. That's a script of eating in a restaurant. No one ever teaches this, teaches us that script. Is something that we just internalized by watching, by doing it ourselves, by seeing it in movies, and now social media.

So we all inherit a script of eating in a restaurant. In the same way we inherit a script about work. From looking at our parents, right? From listening in the a, a around the, whatever cultures we grew up in, by going to the institutions that we go to by looking at the same magazines you mentioned now by listening to the podcasts that you alluded to.

So we inherit this script, but we also have this other thing, right? That's the script that I inherited when I was growing up. Okay? You get dressed up five and a half days a week, you go to work, you wear a certain kind of clothes, you conduct yourself in a certain way, and there are certain metrics of achieve external metrics of achievement and success that you are taught to follow.

But we all have this other thing, which I have called, I've come to call in the search a scripture. Unlike any scripture in culture, what's scripture made of? It's not a single kind of thing. There's stories, right? There's parables, there's lesson, there's homily, there's tension, there's narrative. We all have this scripture inside of this, and if there's really anything that I'm trying to do in this book, it's to coach people up and help people through the process of listening less to the script that

,

they inherited and more to the scripture that they're trying to tell.

Because the headline, if I were to summarize in, one bullet point, if you will, of what I learned, the, what the homily that I would give from this project is that fewer people are searching merely for work anymore, and more people are searching for work with meaning that we are moving in effect from a means based economy to a meaning based economy.

That takes place over a long period of time. And part of it, and we can get into it, is that meaning changes over time. Like sometimes it might be self-expression, sometimes it may be money, sometimes it may be, protecting your family, sometimes it may be giving back, whatever. But the opportunity of this fluidity and this change in how we think about work led I will say by the fact that the workforce is younger, majority female, more diverse.

So as the workers are changing, we are changing the narrative around work. And so more people want this meaning, but the problem is they don't know how to achieve it. Which is why the bulk of this project is giving people the tools to identify what is the meaning that you have right now? What is the story that you want to tell?

And here's how to go about setting out to achieve that. Hey, babe. What you got there? This is a check from Carvana. I just sold my car to them. I went online and Carvana gave me an offer right away. Then they just picked up the car and gave me this.

Srini: Oh, that's a

Bruce Feiler: big check. Obviously you could put this towards your next car, or we could finally get that jacuzzi, or I could start taking Tuba lessons, or I could quit my job and write my memoir,

Srini: or I can put it

Bruce Feiler: towards

Srini: my next car with Carvana.

Sorry, your check not mine.

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Find More Balance with Better Help. Visit better help.com/unmistakable today to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's better help h e l p.com/unmistakable. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do this. First, let's talk about the for worst pieces of job advice, that kind of are part of the traditional narrative and then use that to get into the framework of this whole work story idea.

Cause I know that throughout this there are numerous prompts and questions that you to sort work story, but I think we should start

Bruce Feiler: with these sort of

Srini: you ideas that are part of the dominant

Bruce Feiler: narrative. Yeah. Like this whole conversation, and what I appreciate about this conversation is that first of all, it has the oxygen to breathe, and that's a credit to you and your, the community you've built that we can dig into this more.

There are two parts of this. One is identifying the script and then trying to move beyond it, and then writing your own scripture. So you're right, let's start with the script. And yeah, I, I think that there's two frames here. One is there are three lies that we've been told. The script is built on three lies.

Why? Number one, you have a career. You don't have a career, okay? The idea of a career was invented a hundred years ago by a guy named Frank Parsons in Boston in 1908. So the idea that once in your life, in your early twenties, you're gonna pick a field and you're gonna then do that for the next 40 years.

That was always a historical collaboration because for most of human history, people lived where they worked and worked where they lived. And we never had the word career essentially until the late 19th century. So that's fly number one. You have a career line number two is that you have a path, right?

And you think about the ways. We talk about career, right? Career track, career path, career ladder. What do all those things have in common? They're all linear constructs. And that's essentially a byproduct of the 20th century. When we were enthralled with linearity because of the industrial world that dominated at that time, and the conveyor p and the factory floor, these were all linear ways of making things.

And so all the ideas and the 20th century were about linearity from Freud's psychosexual development, the eight stages of Merl development, the five stages of grief. These were all linear constructs, and they're all wrong. And they all did a lot of harm because we all expected things to unfold in a line, but they don't unfold in a line.

And, the essence of my last book, life is in their transitions, is about, life quakes. And how we get in this, in the essence of this is work quakes, right? And we basically get, our lives get interrupted. 20 times in the course of our lives and half of those begin outside of the workforce, right?

So that's, that's the second line. And the third line is that we don't have a job. So the well this has led to, and back to the spirit of your question, is what's the bad career advice that we get? To highlight one, I think that people have heard a thousand times is follow your passion.

Decide what you want to do and then do it. That sounds amazing, but it applies to almost no one. Yeah. Because the idea that, your passion at 22 is absurd. Totally. Find me, look, some people do this. Some people wanna be doctors and they can become doctors, and that's what they do.

Some people wanna be lawyers, some people want to be painters. But really well look around anyone listening to us. You know a lot of people who start off, doing one thing maybe because of self-expression or creativity, and then they, maybe they get married and settle down and they need to somehow support their family and they go do that for a while.

And then we also know a lot of people who chase that linear external metric definition of success, that work. They had a family, they made their parents happy, and then they get to 45 or 55 or 62 and say, oh my God, I've been doing this. I've been miserable my whole life. Now I wanna give back or do something for myself.

And they pivot again. So these pivots happen every two and a half years, and that number's only quickening. So when you ask people is, I did you follow your passion? Follow your bliss. Discover your bliss or make your bliss. Only 15% of people said they followed their bliss. Yeah, 85% did one of the other two.

Either they discovered it by doing something and falling in love with it, or they created it perhaps in their main job. But back to you have, you don't have a job or sometimes with their side job or their hope job or these other things we do because what's non-negotiable here is that people won't work with meaning.

And the question is how do you get it and what is the meaning at the particular life moment that you're in now.

Srini: Yeah. I mean it, when I saw that, it reminded me of Kel Newport's book, so Good They Can't Ignore You, where he really just tore the passion narrative to shreds. And I said, if you follow your passion only to realize that one, you're not very good at this thing and nobody will pay you to do it.

You have, a very expensive hobby or, you're, more often than not, I was like, following your passion is a road to poverty

Bruce Feiler: for a lot of people. Yeah. And also by the way, your passion changes, we all know people who, who discover, I alluded to this earlier. I'll pause and tell it.

I was a 43 year old adult man, and the father of three year old identical twin daughters, when I suddenly had a life-threatening cancer and my left femur and one even more. I wrote a book called Walking the Bible that been a year and a half on the best settle list, and I made a TV series about it for pbs.

I was known as the walking guy, and suddenly I was looking at never walking again, like I was on crutches for two years, okay? I was on a cane for a year after that. I didn't leave my bed for a year. So if my whole identity was built around this passion of walking guess what? I needed a new identity, and it turns out that I'm not alone.

Over and over. There's a story, as that's one of my favorite stories. It's in the opening chapter. That's how much I like it, of this guy who grew up. In the fbi. Okay. He was in the computer def, the computer arm of the F B I, and he rose to become the head of intelligence for the entire federal bureau of ex of investigation, like one of the top intelligence jobs in the entire United States government.

And then he retired and went to work at Disney and rent security for Disney. And he was watching the documentary Finding Neverland about Michael Jackson and those boys. And he turned to his wife and he said, that happened to me. And he discovered this long suppressed memory that he had been abused as a kid.

And he walked away from an $800,000 a year job working for the Walt Disney Company because he said I would drive home from work and I would look at people who were working as mechanics, and menial blue collar jobs who would've envied and killed everything to have my job. And I realized I wanted to be them because they were happy, because he prioritized this mental health.

Over these external metrics. I tell this other story, which I love, this ma story, McRoy Park, who joined the CIA after graduating from college. And she was on the Soviet desk at the time that was the most elite desk in the entire US government. And she said, you know what? There's this logistics side of the cia, I think I can make more impact there.

And our friends were like, are you insane? You're doing the most prestigious thing and you're testifying before Congress and you wanna run payroll for the cia. What happened to her? She rose to become the first Asian American director of the entire Central intelligence agency. So a thing that happened in common, and this is like the bad career vice to me, a thing that I kept discovering.

And I, it was really, I was, I had a hard time naming it, which is why this is the very last page of the search, is that every story of somebody who was happy at work contains one thing uncommon, and that thing. Is an unright choice. Okay? It's taking the unright position. It's making the unright the unright choice in whatever you do.

And that unright choice, and I'm purposely not saying wrong, but that unright choice always disappoints somebody. It disappoints your parents. It disappoints your spouse, it disappoints your colleagues. It disappoints somebody. But the only way to make the right choices for you is to sometimes make the unright choices to other people.

Wow.

Srini: I think that makes a perfect segue into sort of, how we begin to, rewrite what we call, the, what you call the work story that we all have. And I know that it's a pretty layered framework. In the interest of time, can you walk us through how we do this?

Cause I know that you pose a number of different questions, which it would take us forever to actually go through every single one. But I want people to understand how we look at the past, how we look at the present, how we, think about the future based in the context of this sort of mental model that you've given us to think about work.

Bruce Feiler: I appreciate that. So the three lies, you have a career, you have a path you have a job. All those give way in the present to what I call the one truth, which is that only you can decide what brings you meaning and only you can write your own story for success. And the emphasis here is on only you.

Like I interviewed the guy who created, where career counseling has moved in the last generation and move that pretty much nobody on the planet is that much aware of, which is basically toward what they call narrative career construction, which is the idea that you have to construct your work story as I call it in this book.

And he said, usually when I meet somebody I know within five minutes of what they should be doing, but my job is not to tell them. My job is to help them discover it. Okay. So how you discover it? So that's why the second half of my book to simplify the structure, as I think about it now, is like 21 questions to find work you love.

Okay? And to geek out on the science for a second, because I think that there's value in this. We talk a lot about happiness, and happiness is a fleeting moment. Okay? It's how you feel right now, but actual meaning is more valuable than happiness. There's great research on this, which I quote in, in the search from Roy Balmeister Outta Florida State.

And what meaning is it stitches together, past, present, and future. Okay? Because happiness is about being happy, but meaning is often learning to accommodate things that may not make you happy into finding meaning from, the pandemic as a perfect example, right? Of I went through this chapter and I was this, and now I'm that.

That's an essence. The essential act of storytelling is what we're talking about here. So how do you tell this story? And

,

so I've tried to break it down into 21 questions to find work you loud. And because the essence is past, present, and future, some of those are about the past, some of them are about the present, and some of them are about the future.

So the first one is the one you asked me at the, of this conversation, right? What are the upsides and downsides that you learn from your parents? So what is that? That's what I call a who question and the who, what, when we're, why, and how framework, because that's really what you don't, that's what you inherit.

Like you don't pick your parents, so therefore you can't control really the lessons that you learned from them. But what question, which I think is very valuable is who were your, other than family, who were your role models at this job? So let me ask you this was coming cuz you read the book and again I salute you for that. But who, other than parents, who were your role models as a child? I was thinking a lot about this because, and what did you

Srini: value in them? Yeah. Because it took me until I realized it was like the people that I would've looked at as role models I didn't even think of until I got to about ninth grade.

When I looked at that question, I was thinking about it. One was my ninth grade band director because of his absolute commitment to seeing me accomplish when I fit. I've never had a teacher who just, you know, out of the goodness of his heart made me his personal project and, drove me to, make old state band three times.

And he was the kind of guy who would stay after school every day to work with me and, like he wasn't being paid for it. So that always struck me. And I think it was the fact that he was so committed to somebody else's, success was what really stood out to me. That was the first person that came to mind.

And I actually wrote about him in one of my books and I said, like of all the people in my life, he deserves far more credit than he would ever get. He's one of those people behind the scenes that make so, made so much possible for me.

Bruce Feiler: That's a beautiful story and I'm, I just feel it in my heart listening to you, but I wanna say a couple things.

First of all, I love nothing more than you're saying when you're reading this in the book, you're thinking about it because that's what it turns out people do. It's interesting when I've shared this book is, as we speak, just preparing to go on sale. And so it's just been being encountered by readers.

And when people coming up, they're not talking about me or the book, they're talking about themselves, which to me is a sign that the process is working. That's point number one. Point number two is I call this role model question. A what question, because in effect, what matters is not who the role model is.

And in fact, the most common are people you mentioned like teachers or coaches or preachers, right? Or often celebrities, people you don't even know. It's a what question? Because the real question is what did you admire about them? And in effect, this role model question is your first decision that you make about work.

Okay? The people that you choose to admire and model your life and your own conduct after are making your first decisions about work. And here's why it's powerful. One thing I've learned, okay, what did I tell you? I said to me like the value of a question is only in the power of the answer. And one of my rules of thumb is to listen to the first thing people say.

And what was the first thing you said about this person? He allowed you to see yourself. Yeah. And what is the first thing that you said to me in this conversation? I don't want to turn the camera on because I don't want to see you. I want to see you as you really are in effect. I want to hear you. I want to understand who you are, and if I look at you, I'm gonna be distracted.

To me that is a direct line between the decisions you made in ninth grade. That's when you're, we'll say 15 years old, that whatever you want to do, what's important to you is to see people who they really are and help them become better. And I could draw a direct line between that and what you're doing now, which is bringing people like me on trying to see them for who they are and to listen to the story that they have to share with the goal of helping the people who are listening to us.

That is the power of this process. If you ask these questions of yourself or someone you love who's struggling with what they do, there is no chance that you'll not have moments like we just had because the process is that powerful. And I'm almost prepared to say invincible. Yeah.

Srini: Yep. We will have to either, put together a list of these 21 questions for our listeners to download, or obviously we're gonna encourage them to go and buy the book.

But yeah. So I think that's, that, you're right. Like when you say it like that, it makes so much sense because I I realized what he was doing is enabling me to see often what I couldn't see in myself and get things out of me that nobody else could. And I realized, like when I pride myself on as a podcast host, being able to get people to tell me things that they don't tell anybody else on any other show.

And really basically peel, an onion and get, far beyond the surface of what they do and really understand

Bruce Feiler: who they are. And if I could interrupt, cause I know you're about to ask a question, but the risk of interrupting, let me just say, what were we discussing in the first half of this conversation?

We were discussing in the first half of this conversation? The scripts from others that we inherit, that are imposed on us. From our families, from our culture and ethical traditions, from the institutions that we attend, from the magazines and the podcast. So what you're saying you're committed to, which is in effect what I'm saying, I'm committed to.

And even more important what this band teacher is, that's not where we think career counseling and career advice is coming from a band teacher. But what he's doing is helping you discover your own script. He's not saying you must go to Julliard. Or you must go to Michigan and dot the, and is it Ohio State that they dot the i or is it Michigan where they dot the i maybe it's Ohio State where they dot the I as the ma whatever it is the maestro of the marching.

He's not saying, you follow my script. He's saying, let me help you discover the script that you don't even know is inside of you. That's the change that's going on our own work and that is what we should be celebrating. Yeah, absolutely.

Srini: One thing that you say in the book later honor is, we have, we all have moments in our lives that are defined by this cnce of work fate and time of who, what, and when.

At fully, actually this moment is to grapple with all three of these dimensions, including the one that knows people struggle with timing. Is now the right time for me to make this move? Is now the wrong time to pursue my idea? Should I post pause? Should I stay? And you said, knowing when your story starts will help you tell a better story.

Because all good stories on some level involve a break in time. And the moment I read that it, if it gets fitting that I'm reading this book while I'm here in Brazil, because I was thinking about what that moment was for me, and it was when I stood up on a surfboard for the first time.

Sadly I've been outta the water for two years and not surfed at all since I've been here in Brazil. But that was when I I connected the, the.to that moment and thought to myself, yeah, you know what, like I wouldn't be where I am today. None of that changed. In fact, I had to been thinking about a trip down to the Seldom Pad of Brazil where I caught my first wave.

And then I realized, wait a minute, I should absolutely go back there. It's like a pilgrimage to where everything changed. Let's go back and see what happens if I go back

Bruce Feiler: again.

I I love that you, and this is again, your commitment to reading the book and makes me happy that the book is speaking to you in these ways. And that's, this is someone who's written a lot of books. I've written 15 books and had seven New York Times bestsellers and blah, blah, blah. But what is always most surprising to me is you never can guess what people are gonna respond to, right?

And that, I always say my goal is not to give you five or six or seven ideas, but it's to give you 150 because a hundred of 'em are gonna reply to you. But five of them are gonna really speak to you in the moment that you're in now. And it's interesting that you say you like to get people to tell stories they don't normally tell.

And I'm gonna excuse myself and cough for a second. Take a sip of order. I love that you said that you want to get people to tell stories. So I don't often tell that story of me in Kyoto, Japan writing that letter on crinkly hair mail paper. But for me, that's when my work story began, because that's when I realized that I liked this immersion into a different world.

And then I liked to immersing, emerging from it and telling and sharing it with others that it was that act of, I don't know, translation, if you will, between the world and the outside world. And that's what's motivated me to try to keep doing what I feel grateful to be doing.

But let's talk about WAN for a second. So again, so the building block of these 21 questions to find work you love, and I'd be more than happy to share them with you, to share with listeners on your website or newsletter or whatever, blog. You have all of those I know is that a good story is who, what, when, where, why, and how.

And I do them in that order specifically because the problem and work is that we put how to early. So if it's how to get a job, there's no, how about that? Beef up your resume, reach out to contacts close and distant, right? Cha have a frame of mind, do informational interviews, et cetera.

And the problem with that, how is that it will succeed and you will get a job. But the problem is then if you don't do the prior work, the digging work, in two and a half years, you'll be doing it again. So the purpose of putting Halas is do the personal excavation in archeology, as I call it, to figure out where you are now, and a very simple and there's a three when questions within this.

Okay. So one of them is, as you say, when does your story start? If you say, When was the moment that the kind of energy gathered, right? And the change happened. What is storytelling is right? A person living in an ordinary world and boom, there's a change, and then they go in a different direction. Okay?

That's what every great story is, and it's why in my book I list some of the great first lines in history, and they all are about changes changes in time. I re it was the day that years later, I remember the story that the that the rifle went off at the firing squad. That's the opening line. Orally paraphrased of a hundred years of solitude, right?

It's all there, it's a change in time. And for you, it's when you get up on the surfboard. So what does that represent? I don't even know your personal work story, but I would assume from what I'm hearing here, it has to do with, ah, this is me. This is learning to ride the wave. This is, what is more oscillating than a wave?

And what's more oscillating now than a story of life? But it's when I am doing this for myself, Because that was not in your scripture. You were not told, son, you're gonna go to an elite college and you're gonna profess one of these professions and you're gonna do great good to your name and to your culture.

And the best way to do that is to be on a surfboard, right? That was not the story you were told. I'm pr I'm going on a wild limb and guessing that wasn't the story you were told, but this, why does it mean at all to you? Okay, fine. Even with your California background, right? But the why is it matter to you?

Because this is saying, I can do that other thing, but I can also be on a surfboard, cuz that's important to me. So that's when it begins. Then if you, so that's the past question, right? Then the present question of the 21 questions that are related to when is do I stay or do I go? And that's a really hard question for people.

And what was interesting and digging down in that, in the answers that I heard was that people chose different things. They did. They would give them a buffer zone. Like I'm gonna give myself. 18 months. And I did this, remember when I left the stable job in Japan to come back home to write this book about Japan that became learning to bow.

It was like, I'm gonna give myself 12 months to see if I can make this dream happen. And if not, I'll go find another dream. So people do that. They create a buffer zone, right? The other thing, remember I said we don't, we didn't really get into this, but I said, we don't have a job. Why? Because we have main job and only half of those, even half of us even have one of those anymore and side jobs and what I call hope jobs.

And often what we do is we use our side job or our hope job. And by the way, what is a hope job? A hope job is something they're doing that you hope becomes something else, like selling jewelry on Etsy or writing a screenplay, or, selling pickles at the farmer's market. We will do our side job or our hope job at the same time as our main job, as a way of testing it out.

Okay? So we have our stable job and then we do our side job. And then maybe that, by the way, this is where most entrepreneurs begin. Then maybe we jump to do this entrepreneurial activity. But then our side job is something we do for money while the entrepreneurial thing is getting off the ground. So again we allot and we move and we're fluid.

Like we get our meaning from this job, and often we get our money and salary and benefits from another job, and that's the opportunity of this nominee

,

work life. And then all that leads to one when question, which is the future question, which again, we can do right now, answer this question I'll ask you.

So fill in this blank. I'm at a moment in my life when I

Srini: am finding that 13 years of doing interviews is leading me down this weird sort of odd path of exploring what's possible with ai, simply because I have, access to way more information than the average person does.

And so it, in fact, I'm starting a new company just literally the website went live today and I just signed my first client yesterday. It's called Workflow Genius ai, which. I would not have predicted that 10 years ago. When I started this. But I would also say I'm in a moment in my life when I'm, oops, think, I'm 45.

I wanna be in a position where I can start a family and have, the finances to do that. So it's, yeah. Then I think to some of my priorities are changing. I have a seven month old nephew and it's funny, I talk to, I talk to my sister every day specifically so I can talk to him even though he's seven months old.

But, it's one of those things that's just become part

Bruce Feiler: of the day-to-day. Now,

again, I love this answer, and I think in it is the model of where we are now. Okay. So number one, you're in a moment when. You're starting a company in a field that did not exist 10 years ago, or was only in the lab 10 years ago. And frankly, 10 weeks ago, you might not even have thought this, but we are in a moment when a technology has created a new opportunity and that turns out to dovetail with skills that you have an interest that you want to pursue.

So that's one of the reasons you can't follow your passion. Yeah. I wanna start a company in generative ai, right? Eight months ago that would've seemed absurd, right? No less eight years ago. No less 18 years ago when you graduated from college. So again, one of the things is life changes all the time, and even our skillsets evolve over time.

Okay, so you're in a moment, you wanna start a company, but you're also in a moment where you're thinking more seriously about family. Okay? And so that suggests that in two or three years you might be, I'm in a moment in my life when you know what I wanna prior, I have young children, I wanna prioritize that.

Okay, so maybe I'm not gonna start a company now, so maybe I'm just gonna stick with this other job. It gives me stability because then I wanna spend more time with my family. And that again, is where we are and why the essence of this project in these 21 questions to find work you love are focused on not you three years ago, five years ago, or even three months ago.

It's you right now accepting the reality and the opportunity and sometimes the curse that we can revisit this at any moment in time for no other reason than we want to. And that is the opportunity. And what it means that only you can define your meaning and only you can write your own story. It's a burden.

Sometimes we can writer's block trying to write our work story because there's so many different directions we can take. Good. But that's why my mission, I'm at a moment when I'm about to be an empty nester, right? I'm gonna be, refiguring out my family cuz I'm gonna go from a full nest of two kids at home to zero kids on the afternoon of August 20th when I drop my kids off to college.

But I'm at a moment when I want to use my questions and my storytelling e experience to help other people tell their story. And that's why the essence of my work is to try to give you the tools to do something because I'm a professional storyteller, so I'm, I have a little bit more experience.

And the reality is, each of us, anyone listening to us, you're writing your own story of success. You're just probably not writing it as good as you might be and effectively as you might desire, and certainly, as meaningfully as you deserve.

Srini: I have two last questions for you.

So you, one thing that you had mentioned earlier was, seven books on the New York Times bestseller list. We live in this world where just social comparison is just almost inevitable, and thinking about this because my friend Ryan Holiday's book daily dad just came out and Ryan is like the publishing industry is darling at the moment, like literally on every show.

But something stayed with me that he said, and he said, you would think that, everybody thinks that, okay, he must wake up every day and think, life is amazing. I get to do all these things. And he said, don't get me wrong. He's I have, the job that millions of people would kill for.

I get to write the books that I wanna write. And he said, but the thing is, if you think about it, nobody does that. And he said, basically everybody thinks okay, whatever that next level is. It's oh, it's not, a, like the highest, home run in the World Series, it's a grand slam.

Then it's no, it's a highest salary in baseball. But the thing that he said about all that, he said, it's good on the Aggregate because it drives a lot of achievement. And that, he said if nobody, if everybody wanted to be senator, nobody want would run for president.

But he said, on the individual level, it's a lie because it doesn't lead to the satisfaction that you think it will. And of course, like it's, you keep thinking to yourself, yeah, okay, fine, Ryan Greg, you're, you've got five books on the New York Times Best Seller list at the same time.

It's easy for you to say that. And on the one hand I know that consciously. So like, how do you think about that? Like how do you think about success and how's that whole definition of what it means with age change? Because by, if we look at traditional metrics of success, we've had multiple New York Times festivals like that's, in, in our industry that's, the kind of, gold standard in a lot of ways.

Bruce Feiler: I love this bringing up Ryan's work and because what is the essence, in some ways the backbone of what he talks about with the stoics. I actually, as it happened, spent last summer living in Athens. Because my children are classicists and they're interested in the ancient world and will graduate from high school kind of randomly and somewhat oddly, with six years of ancient Greek and six years of Latin.

And so we spent the summer in Greece. And as part of that I got a tour cuz I brought a lot about archeology over the years of a newly excavated part of ancient Athens, including the sto, which is this indoor outdoor I don't know what to call it. Like one of those things. It's almost like the area outside of the white House, right?

Where there's a building on one side and columns and it's a half enclosed walkway and half knot. And that was the stoic where the philosophers would sit and, propound their theories, which is actually what gave name to the stoic. And so what is the basic building block of stoic ideas?

It's, you can't control what happens to you. You can only control how you react to what happens to you. And this has been on my mind. Because a sort of, I wouldn't say mentor cuz I met him later in my life. It's hero and sort of a figure that I've admired. Died last week and his name was Harold Kushner.

And Harold Kushner was a rabbi at a synagogue in Natick, Massachusetts in 1966 when, and he had a son named Aaron. And he gave his wife gave birth to a daughter named Ariel. And 12 hours after Ariel was born rabbi Kushner and his wife Suzette, learned that their son Aaron had progeria, which is an a rapid aging disease.

And he wouldn't live into his teen out of his teens. And in fact, he died in age 14 at 25 pounds having never matured. And Rabbi Kushner was a rabbi and he's, he's not a particularly, I've met him, I admire him so much. He's not a particularly. Charismatic person. He is not physically commanding.

His voice is squeaky. Like he's not the person you wouldn't let you would identify as a celebrity. But he became a celebrity because he wrote a book called When Bad Things Happened to Good People, and it sold 4 million copies and made him an international celebrity. And the essence of that book is the essence of the stoic it, right?

Which is everybody wants to ask why do bad things happen to good people? Or in the case of maybe what we're talking about success, why good things happen to bad people? But he said the question is not why do bad things happen to good people? Which is the question that all of us ask is what do we do when bad things happen to good people?

And I think that is how I think about success now, is to reiterate something I said earlier. The majority of destabilizing events in our work lives do not begin in the workplace. 55% of 'em begin in our lives, okay? In our bodies, in our families, in our health, in our minds, we get on a surfboard and we change our minds.

We see something changing in society like generative ai and we see, I wanna start a company that didn't come out of maybe what you do, even though some of the skills you're gonna draw, and it became something that happened outside of your existing workplace. So we are at a moment now where success is to find primarily not by what you do at work, it's what you do in your life and what you choose to prioritize and what you choose to value.

And if you've taken away one thing from this conversation is that can be different at any moment in your life and will be different at many moments in your life. So stop believing that a star. Excuse me. Stop believing that success. I grew up watching the night show when I was in Savannah, Georgia.

And how did that work? Johnny Carson would come out from behind a a curtain and stand on a star that was painted onto the floor. And that's what we used to think success was. It was a star you had to reach on the floor. That's what's not true anymore. There's stars all over. Some you can see and some you can't.

You can move. You can stand on different ones in different times. And the worst thing you can do is say, success is only achieving one place by one metric. Success is not status. Success is story. You control that story. Tell a story that makes you happy, brings you meaning, and gives you success on your own terms.

Wow. Yes.

Srini: So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unable Created. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable.

Bruce Feiler: I think what makes somebody, or some story unmistakable is that it doesn't make unforced mistakes. I was having a conversation with my now young adult daughters as they head off into the world and I was explaining to them, cause they don't know that much about tennis when I grew up playing tennis.

What an unforced era is and an unforced error, a mistake that you don't have to make is following someone else's story. If I say one thing to my children over and over again don't do what you think I want you to don't chase my dream. My dream is not for you to fulfill my expectation. My dream is for you to fill your expectations and for you to do the work to figure out what you want to do.

So your, the biggest mistake you can make is doing what you think I want. The way to be unmistakable is to figure out what you want and do that. And accept that it will change over time and accept that it will weave and Bob and be oscillating and be nonlinear. But the way to be unmistakable is to not make unnecessary mistakes.

Beautiful.

Srini: This has been one of my favorite narratives of the year. I can see why AJ referred to you. This has been absolutely phenomenal and just packed with so much insight and knowledge and wisdom and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share all of this with our listeners.

All right. Work with people, find out more about you your work, the book, and everything

Bruce Feiler: else that you're up to. First of all, this was just a beautiful conversation. I appreciate the entire way you approach this and the insights that you have And I'm excited to to join your community of creativity and UN and unm.

I'm Bruce Fler. It's f e i l e r. You can find me on social channel at Bruce Fler. You can find me on Facebook at Bruce Fler author. I write a weekly newsletter called the Non-Linear Life on which, among other things I just wrote about Rabbi Kushner and When Bad things happen to good people, that's at bruce byler.ck.com.

My last book that we referenced a few times here is called Life is In the Transitions, mastering Change at Any Age. It gave Talk to a Ted Talk and I teach a TED course, how to Master Life Transitions. And this new book that we've been talking about, and I'm just so grateful for this opportunity is called The Search Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.

You can get it wherever you support your books, and reach out. Tell me what stories and ideas mean the most to you, and let's keep this conversation alive.

Srini: Second, and sure, everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Bruce Feiler: Seeking the truth never gets old. Introducing June's journey, the free to play mobile game that will immerse you in a thrilling murder mystery. Join June Parker as she young, uncovers hidden objects and clues to solve her sister's death In a beautifully illustrated world set in the roaring twenties with new chapters added every week, the excitement never ends.

Download June's journey now on your Android or iOS device, or play on PC through Facebook games.

Srini: Did you catch our recent pilot episode of how they met each other? If you enjoyed hearing the stories of how Couples met, then we've got some great news. We're working on making a full season of the show, but we need your help to make it happen. If you want to hear more episodes of how they met each other, just text the code.

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