Welcome everybody, I'm your host Greg McEwen and I'm with you on this journey to learn
so that we can make our highest contribution.
Have you ever felt that your life could be more than a simple career?
I've invited Bruce Feeler to be here.
He's the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers.
And by the end of this episode you will be able to escape the suffocating idea that all
there is to a career is to go higher and higher on a single, linear ladder of success.
This is not the way to your highest contribution and Feeler will explain how.
Let's get to it.
If you haven't yet,
let's go.
Are you ready to level up your business and scale effortlessly?
Meet NetSuite by Oracle, your essentialist solution for growth.
NetSuite's modern cloud-based platform brings HR, financials, inventory and more together
in real time in one place.
Boost efficiency, control costs and scale easily with a platform that adapts alongside you.
NetSuite helps you make faster, better decisions.
For the first time in NetSuite's 22-year history, as the number one cloud financial
system, you can defer payments for a full implementation for six months.
There's no payment, no interest.
Join 33,000 companies that have upgraded to NetSuite for visibility and control over
financials, inventory, HR, e-commerce and more.
Take advantage of this special financial offer at netsuite.com forward slash essential.
Bruce, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
And for me, the feeling was I'm confused about work.
I don't know what the old rules are, but the new rules haven't been written.
It seems to me that everybody I know has this feeling of being overwhelmed and confused.
There's all this opportunity for change and yet everybody feels incredibly stuck in the
mud in where they are.
One thing I've learned in doing this kind of work for a very long time is that when
you feel stuck, the best way to get unstuck is to go talk to people and ask them how they
got unstuck.
And so this book comes at the second part of now a six-year life's work that I've been
doing, which involves going out and collecting and analyzing hundreds of life stories, looking
for patterns that can help the rest of us as we navigate change.
As you know, I wrote this book, the book that was the first round of this was called
Life is in the Transitions that came out in 2020.
And that book kind of came out of the middle of the pandemic when the entire planet was
in the life transition at the same time.
And I had been working on this project for many years and kind of wandering around them
in my home in Brooklyn as we have this conversation saying, why are we talking about life transitions?
Why has there not been a major book on this in 40 years?
And everyone was like, okay, that's kind of interesting.
And then boom, all along comes the pandemic and everyone's in a transition.
And I happened to have the book that was waiting for this moment.
Then at that moment, I realized, oh my gosh, all the rules about work are changing.
And let me go out and see if I can explore how it is that work is changing and how each
of us can learn to navigate that change.
And that was really the inspiration.
And so what the book is is a roadmap for kind of finding meaning and purpose and work, which
turns out to be really the essence of the big change.
So you were feeling this personally, is that true?
Even as an author and speaker and you were yourself going, I don't understand how it
all works anymore.
Or is it more that you sensed that this was a challenge, lots of other people were facing?
I appreciate that question.
And I think the answer is the former, not the latter.
What happened if I take a half a step back?
So kind of my backstory is I grew up in Georgia.
I went to Yale in the mid 1980s.
I left there and I moved to Japan.
And I started writing letters home.
I'm older than you are, but on crinkly airmail paper.
Like this is what happened.
I've used those.
This is what happened to me today.
When I got back to Georgia, six months later, everyone said, I loved your letters.
And I was like, great, have we met?
And it turned out that my grandmother had Xeroxed these letters and passed them around.
And they went viral in the sort of 1980s sense of the word.
You think that's so cool.
And that propelled me into this life.
I was like, well, I should write a book about this.
I didn't know anyone who'd ever written a book.
And one thing led to another.
And I sold my first book at 24.
And this is all I've ever done since.
So in my 20s, I spent my books about Japan.
I spent a year in your beloved hometown of or whatever it is, current residence of Cambridge.
I spent a year as a circus clown.
And I hold the whole time.
I just went the same year, right?
You were.
But that's the question.
Let's just talk about that for the next 20 minutes.
You were at Clark College.
I was at Clark College.
One of the third one colleges at Cambridge.
And you were doing what there?
I was getting a master's in international relations.
I just come from Japan.
And I went to Claire.
And it turned out that what was interesting about it was sort of being immersed in this
subculture of kind of global life where all these people gather together.
And so I wrote this book called Looking for Class Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge.
And this is sort of what I was doing is really kind of the purpose of this diversion was
I would go immerse myself in world and write about them.
I just finished a four part solo series for this podcast where I shared finally some of
the experiences that I've been having at Cambridge and people get asking and I just hadn't been
very explicit about it.
So I shared some of those experiences.
Can you share what your experience was, Claire?
It's a beautiful place.
I've been to 90 countries in my life.
I have written books about five continents.
I mean, I very much have lived my life around traveling, as I said, immersing myself in
different worlds.
I mean, that strip of colleges and river and stories.
I mean, it is as storied and as beautiful a strip of land that I could possibly imagine.
I would also say that I found it in the 1980s.
And I had, I'd also come from Yale, right?
So it's not like this is my first time in one of these kind of rare, rare-fied environments.
I would say that I found it relatively cut off from the rest of the world.
And it's interesting as we get into this conversation into this other thing that you
and I have in common, which is sort of trying to figure out how to write the stories of
our own lives.
One of the things that is the heart of this new project, which I'm sure we'll get to,
is that the kinds of stories that we have been telling for centuries about what success
is, about what work should mean to you, about how you make decisions, about what you want
to do, have largely been modeled around a time when we were only telling one type of
story with only one type of hero chasing one kind of dream and only one metric of achievement.
And I think that Oxford and Cambridge have played a part in that, right, by preparing
one type of hero to go lead, to go lead the world.
And I think that I look back on the late 20th century, my time there, as a kind of setting,
a setting of that sun, right, a turning of that page where it was all about the great
icons who walked those paths in the past.
And I think you can see in that a setting of English power in the world, maybe even
a setting of colonial powers in the world and a kind of turning to a new kind of story
that we're trying to tell now.
So you found it personally beautiful, but also somehow insular.
And backward looking, I would say yes.
In particular, backward looking, and that there is value in entering the cloister, so to speak,
to reconnect with the past.
But I'm not sure I would argue that at that time it was doing as good a job as it might
have of really preparing for the changes that were about to come.
And if you look back, you know, in the say 30 years since I've been there, right, you
can see the rise of digital technology, the rise of entrepreneurship, right, the rise
of diversity, the rise of globalism, have Oxford and Cambridge been at the forefront
of much of that?
I think that the answer writes itself.
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of an interesting question when you're in these institutions
that, you know, in the case of Oxford 1000 years, and in the case of Cambridge 800 years,
that is so unusual in and of itself.
There are so few institutions in the Western world that have that kind of longevity.
It's actually, I think quite hard to get your arms around how it even works, what it even
is.
It took me a few weeks to put my finger on this, which is that nobody at Cambridge, not the
longest tenured faculty member, let's say 40 years, has any idea how the institution itself
works, because they arrived with, you know, at 760 years of longevity.
And so trying to make sense of these institutions is a non-trivial challenge.
And of course, you tried to do that when you went there and then wrote your book about
the experience.
And so if I were putting money on their existence 500 years from now, I would actually say that
chance is high, higher than for other institutions.
Nevertheless, the point you're making about did it launch the next movement?
How close was it to the digital revolution?
I mean, I've spent the last more than 15 years working in Silicon Valley and working
with primary companies there.
And yeah, Oxford and Cambridge does not have its thumbprint on all of that, maybe any
of that.
So this seems to be part of your observation.
It's like somebody famously said that they chose Stanford over Harvard because those people
are creating the future.
And maybe that's what you're saying is that at Oxford and Cambridge, you entered a place
a world where they had created the past and you're saying, but I don't see the creation
of the future here.
And that turned out to be the case.
And I think that brings us to what we're here to talk about in a lot of ways, right?
So there's a lot going on here.
And I'm just, I love this.
I was looking forward to this and now it's turning out to be even more exciting and real
than I had hoped.
Let me do two things here.
Let me first of all finish the story I was articulating of how I ended up in this conversation
and then bring it back to this.
So what happened to me was I was living this life, right, where I was traveling and I was
entering various cultures, right?
And then in my 30s, I spent the better part of a decade traveling back and forth to the
Middle East, writing books and making television about religion and the Bible.
I wrote a book called Walking the Bible that became a thing and spent a year and a half
on the bestseller list.
And I ultimately wrote five books in this space.
It was at the moment that we were in the, can we get along conflict after 9-11?
And I was very much thrust into the middle of the interfaith conversation and like, what
are we going to do with religion and the contemporary world?
Okay.
And this story is the Oxford and Cambridge story, right?
It's the Harvard and Yale story, right?
It's the story of, of, of linear success, right?
I figured out what I wanted to do early.
I did it for no money.
I had some success.
I got married and I had children.
That's the, the straight linear upward trajectory.
Okay.
That's the hockey stick in, you know, in kind of entrepreneur terms.
But then what happened to me is that in my 40s, my life blew up.
Okay.
First, I got cancer as the father of three year old identical twin daughters, a kind
of a raging life-threatening cancer in my left femur.
And I spent two years on crutches.
I spent a year in chemo.
I had to get my leg rebuilt.
Then I had financial troubles that came out of the, the great recession and my family owned
a bunch of real estate.
And then my father who has, who had Parkinson's at the time, got very depressed and tried
to take his own life.
Okay.
So suddenly I had this linear story and I had all these nonlinear events.
But I'm a professional storyteller and I didn't know how to tell this story.
And when I did, I realized that everybody else had these moments when their lives blow
up or they get stuck or confused or, or, or reoriented or re-evaluated or whatever it
is.
And that's what plunged me down this large project of collecting and analyzing life stories.
And so what is the big idea that has emerged from this?
For one, the idea of the linear life is dead.
Okay.
And that's what we're talking about, Greg, right?
The first thing that you said about Cambridge is that it's a thousand years old.
Okay.
That is a linear construct of it's always been here.
It's generation to generation, right?
And it's the same in this country as it happens.
We're having this conversation on a day when my own children who just turned 18 year olds
last week, my identical twin daughters on this very day have just gone off to an elite
Ivy League institution that's 350 years old to start the next chapter and their life.
And these we tell these stories.
Okay.
You come from X.
Okay.
You go to one of these institutions, you enter the elite, right?
Rags to riches up by your bootstraps.
Everything is about following.
That's a complete historical aberration.
That is not how life has always been viewed.
That's not how life is lived now.
And there is a kind of trap, I believe, in falling prey to the idea that everything follows
a linear progressive narrative that turns out to be literally an accident of history.
It was only even invented 150 years ago with the rise of science.
And today the greatest skill is not to join that.
It's to understand that life is nonlinear and disruptive and comes in networks and comes
in changes and comes with non-periodicity.
And we have to learn to respond to it.
And I think you could make a very strong case that these institutions that have been around
for a long time contribute to this flawed narrative that so many of us have been reared
basically to try to achieve.
Okay.
There's lots to impact that.
Yes.
But overall, like an overarching point you're making is that there is a meta narrative, a
great story that tells you what success is and how to achieve it.
And you're calling this the linear narrative.
And you're saying, first of all, that's wrong.
That's not how the world works right now.
And maybe it never has worked that way, but that a narrative was born, you're dating it
150 years ago, and that that has produced in many, many people's minds a sense of a paradigm
that has acted as a roadmap for people in their minds that does not match the territory.
I think you're saying it never has matched the territory, but especially now it hasn't.
What am I getting wrong?
First of all, that's pretty darn good.
And I love it and I love where we're at.
So let me now first of all, answer this specific question that you have.
If you go back to the ancient world, and as we just were saying, I spent many years
of my life thinking and occupying, if you will, the ancient world, there was no linear
narrative because there was no linear time.
The way we understand, here's the basic formula.
The way we think about the world explains how we think about our lives.
Okay.
The ancient world, they follow the agricultural cyclical nature of life through every season,
turn, turn, turn.
So they believed that life was cyclical too.
Your job was not to follow your own path, your own life, your own source of meaning,
your own definition of success.
It was to follow the existing paradigm and be within that paradigm.
It was actually the Bible in the Western where it introduces the idea of linear time.
They ground history in one particular family.
People can think what they want about it now, but this was hugely influential.
The idea that you have Adam and Eve and then you have Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, this
ground history and a linear narrative.
If you then go look, as in my last book, Life is in the Transitions, I have this documentation
in the Middle Ages.
They believe life is a staircase up to middle age.
You peek and then you go down, straight up, straight down.
There's no new love at 50, no retiring and starting an Airbnb or a bookstore in your
60s.
No moving to the Mediterranean or to Florida and restarting your life in the 70s, straight
up and straight down.
What's interesting about that is it's the exact opposite of how those of us in the 20th
century were raised.
What happened to 150 years ago?
What happened to 150 years ago is that the economy changes.
We move from, in the search, I call this the move from economy 1.0 to 2.0.
We go from a predominantly agricultural world to a predominantly industrial one.
That's not a new story.
We know that.
But what we fail to recognize is that it also changed how we understood human life.
Now we began to look at life as a matter of development.
Why?
Because it was a progressive path built around the conveyor belt and the assembly line.
You've got Freud saying that there are psychosexual stages.
You have Piaget saying that there are childhood development stages.
You have Erickson saying the eight stages of moral development.
You've got the hero's journey.
You've got the five stages of grief.
These are all linear constructs of life.
And these reach their peak in the 1970s with a woman named Gail Shihi who writes a book
called Passages in which she literally actually convictedly steals the idea of a midlife crisis
from two scholars, one Daniel Levinson at Yale and Roger Gould at UCLA.
Gould actually sues her and she had no money at the time.
So she gave him 10% of the proceeds of her book Passages which goes on to sell 20 million
copies.
It was like one of the worst decisions you possibly could have made.
So she popularizes the idea that everyone does the same thing in their 20s, the same
thing in their 30s and then has a midlife crisis in air quotes here between 39 and 44
and a half.
That's how specific it was.
It's all bunk.
And so what's happened today is that we understand now because of chaos theory and because of
a whole series of constructivism and philosophy and narrative career, all these fields which
are out there in places like Cambridge and New Haven and Cambridge Mass and Palo Alto,
we now know that life comes at you in nonlinear ways.
There's periods of stability and periods of instability, but we haven't changed the way
we look at our lives.
And that's the flip we haven't made.
So we have linear expectations but nonlinear lives and that creates I would say 80% of
the anxiety that people feel I'm off schedule, I'm off track, I'm off culture.
I'm not doing what I'm not living the life that I wanted to be living.
And this is the terrain that I have now decided to spend most of my work life.
Okay, one thing I can't let go because I'll forget to come back to it is that you just
said like what a bucket is 39 to 44 all of that.
But I can't help but notice that the great big transition and shake up your if your life
happened in your early 40s.
So it was.
I was 43.
I was dead on it.
Yeah.
So in your own life, you did have a moment right at the pinnacle right that fits this
old description.
And I just don't want to miss that moment that that's a curious person.
I love it.
But here's the thing.
I went to 23 when I didn't go to Wall Street like everybody's I graduated from college
with I went to Japan and started writing on Kringley or mailpaper.
Okay.
Then like everybody else, I had one in my mid 50s when the pandemic hit.
Okay.
And so the thing is if you have one between 39 and 43 and a half, fantastic.
But let's just take the pandemic as a perfect example, Greg.
Okay.
If you were between 39 and 44 and a half, you were having a crisis at that time.
But if you were 27, you were also having a crisis.
And if you were 77, you were having a crisis or like my children, 15, you were having a
crisis.
So it's not that they don't occur then.
But the thing about the mid life crisis that was so wrong was what the basic idea.
There are two things about it that were well, there's one thing that was wrong.
And then there's the why it was wrong, which gets to what we've been talking about in
this whole conversation.
But though the core issue that it was wrong was it says only the go back and look at it.
It said between 39 and 44 and a half is the first time you confront mortality.
And that that is the source of the crisis.
That's what's fundamentally wrong.
It's not.
Because by the way, a lot of people I've done 1500 hours of life stories.
Okay.
That's 10,000 pages of transcripts.
A lot of people are and I call these events lifequakes, right?
A lot of people are born into a life quake if your parents split before or they have
a crisis.
They're parents when they're 12, right?
Or they have a disease that hits them at 22.
These events have very little or it's not the exclusive reason that it's confronting
mortality.
But now here's the why.
Dan Levinson in New Haven in the 1970s who came up with the idea of the mid life crisis,
he did it by talking to 40 people, all white, all men.
The same problem with the hero's journey.
Okay.
The hero's journey only applies to a certain kind of hero.
It's the problem with success, the success story we've been telling, which is exactly
what my new book, The Search is All About.
We've only been looking at one type of hero, achieving one metric of success.
When you widen the aperture, turns out the stories are a lot more complex and a lot more
interesting.
I love everything you're saying.
I suddenly recall having access to some primary data that speaks to this issue.
I have put many, many people, thousands of people through an exercise where I have them
draw graphically their life from birth to the moment that they're drawing.
And they're just to identify peak moments, pain moments, explain briefly why, and then
they get to share that story with somebody else and they share theirs in reverse.
And the thing that is universally true, 100% true, is that those are peaks and valleys
throughout the entire story.
And it's true for everybody, there is no single rise up to midlife and lying down.
I've never seen anyone draw anything like that.
So that's an interesting data point in support of what you're saying.
Greg, I want to ask you a question.
What shape is your life?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just wrote that question down.
What's the shape of a life?
That's literally what I just wrote down.
What shape is your life?
And to the question?
Yeah, it's definitely lots of ups and downs.
So that's the first answer.
There have definitely been moments when I think about, for example, quitting law school
at 21 that just brought my whole life to a different kind of contribution.
It just changed the trajectory of my life.
But even after that, it's not like it just went up and then went straight or went just
up and to the right.
There have been whole ups and whole downs.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
So about five years ago, I started asking people this question because I had went to
the same realization that we're having in this conversation.
And I started asking people what shape is your life?
And I'm talking to a guy.
His name is Michael Angelo as it happens.
He...
No pressure.
Yes, exactly.
That's funny.
He's a great business.
He literally runs a beauty salon and he's an artist and he's wonderful man.
He is a devil.
Yeah, exactly.
And I said, yeah, you want to get to sort of nominal determinism, whatever you would
call it.
So I said, Michael, what shape is your life?
And he said a heart.
You're not understanding the question.
I'm asking, what shape is your life?
The sort of ups and downs, the trajectory.
He's like, no, no, no, you're not understanding Bruce.
The shape of my life is a heart because for me, everything begins with love and then we
move around that.
And this was a sort of like little intellectual crisis moment in my life.
So what I did is I've now asked this question of hundreds of people.
And this was the single...
So what I do is I do these life stories with people.
They're two, three hour interviews that we start with ancestors and we come up to today.
And they're incredibly personal and revealing and it's insanely labor intensive, but it
turns out to be a very effective way to unearth kind of insights about the world.
And this is the...
And then we code them.
I get teams of people and I pay them and we code them.
And this is the hardest thing I've coded in all these years of coding.
And then what I realized is that people, not everybody thinks of their life as a line.
Some people think of it as a shape and some people think of it as an object.
And when I realized, if you go back a hundred years ago, let's just go back on this geek
out on history, which is I guess what we're doing in this conversation because we both
love it.
Most of the sources of meaning that we have in our lives were fixed.
Okay?
We had to live where our parents wanted us to live.
We had to do what our parents wanted us to do.
We had to love who our parents wanted us to love.
We had to believe what our parents wanted us to believe and so forth.
Fast forward today and that's not true.
We can in most circumstances live where we want to live, believe what we want to believe,
love we want to love, do what we want to do and so on.
By the way, this changes particularly enormous for women, okay?
And for people from underrepresented backgrounds.
How do we, but we get, we're overwhelmed by the choice, right?
We get writer's block writing the story of our lives.
And so it turns out that we have, and this is sort of the way I've come to understand
this, kind of three building blocks of meaning, kind of levers that we push and pull.
I call these the ABCs of meaning, okay?
So the A is agency.
That's what we do or make or build or create.
For many people, it's our work.
The B is belonging, that's our relationships, our family, our loved ones, our co-religionists,
the people we march in protests with and they are enjoying clubs with.
And the C is a cause, a calling or something higher than ourselves, okay?
So in narrative terms, I think of the A as our Me story, the B as our We story and the
C as our V story, okay?
So what's interesting is when I ask people, we all have all, let me just pick a step back
here.
We all have all three of these in us, but we prioritize them in different ways, okay?
So like I'm an ABC.
So I'm a writer, I'm a creator, I'm very agentic.
Belonging I'm a very involved family member, super involved dad, I would take cause is
less important to me.
My wife who started and runs an organization called Endeavor that supports entrepreneurs
in 50 countries around the world, she's very cause oriented.
She's a founder and a co-founder and a CEO, so she's a CAB.
Belonging like outside a family, she doesn't, you know, this is not her thing.
The people for whom they are primarily agentic, they're agency people, they're work people,
they tend to answer what shape is your life is a lie because they think about it as their
own progress through life.
The people who are belonging people, they tend to pick a shape.
So it's a heart, right?
It's a house, okay?
It's something usually that contain, I asked somebody who was a marathoner and had an accident
and had a bunch of eating disorders.
And then she took a fall on the ice and she's, she and her husband have since gone on to
adopt nine children.
The shape of her life was a minivan, right?
So it's all about this vessel that she uses to hold the people in her belonging circle
together and other people are a cause.
So they're a pair of boxing gloves, right?
Or they are a web or they are a lettuce if they are into saving the environment.
And so these shapes, these visual manifestations become for us the totems of how we express
what's really important to us.
So two threads here.
The first is that research mechanism of asking people to tell the big narrative, starting
with grandparents going into their life now and presumably going forward as well, asking
them to think about the future too.
I once interviewed Al Gore and my first question to him was tell me about your grandparents.
He wasn't expecting that question and I loved that he wasn't and because he'd actually
turned down, we'd met for a few minutes before the interview before it was a public event
and he sort of turned down any chance to talk about pre-questions or anything.
He'd been on a plane all night.
He'd been writing an article for The New York Times and he just was, he was over it.
And then as soon as the interview began, it was like, it wasn't slightly awkward in a
good way moment of him going, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm ready to tell my,
talking points and I talking points.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But this was the whole point because I had watched a few weeks before I'd watched him
be interviewed at a live event at a public event.
A colleague of mine asked him a question and he, instead of sitting on the stage as they
were together facing each other and answering a question for a minute or two and then getting
the next question, she would ask a question and he would stand up and lecture for the
next 20 minutes.
And so she really only got to ask him three questions and he just completely controlled
the exchange.
And it was hard, hard break.
The only person I've ever interviewed that did the same thing was Joe Biden.
Well, that's interesting.
They must teach it.
No, that's interesting.
Democratic Senate circles in the 1980s.
Maybe they do.
Maybe there's something to it.
But I, I did find, I think what it's to do with is, of course, you take complete control
of the conversation, it's no longer a conversation.
It's just a pretense because you're just lecturing and you happen to have somebody on
stage that launched you onto your lecture.
So having been warned about that by watching it, I thought, okay, I need to do something
that breaks through the shell, that breaks through this PowerPoint presentation.
And that was the mechanism I tried to do it with.
And it became so raw and so open and it was a great experience.
And so I just think that's an interesting thing that you have even selected as this primary
vehicle now.
This, let's call it something like the intergenerational narrative of a person's life, like that
that's the mechanism to try and get the rich story.
Even a story they themselves are unlikely to be aware of because they're just living
their day to day life.
This is a huge difference of perspective.
I just wanted to pause on that before moving forward.
Any reaction to that?
I do.
And first of all, that was a beautiful story.
And then if I had to venture, I guess, I'm almost prepared to guarantee that later in
the conversation, there is a moment of shared discovery that happens between you, in this
case, an al-cor that he said at the beginning that he was not expecting us to say because
that's what happened.
There is this moment of co-creation that goes on.
Why did I do this?
I did this basically for two reasons.
Number one, immediately before doing all of this work, I wrote a book called The Secrets
of Happy Families.
And I was digging into how contemporary parents who were quite different from parents or prior
generations in terms of equality between the genders and between all the disruptives and
disruptions and technology and brain scans and the like, how do they navigate the decisions
that they have to make?
And by far the most interesting idea that I encountered while doing that, I was actually
trying to debunk the idea, which a family dinner, which turned out to be overly emphasized.
And I was sent to a man named Marshall Duke, who is a psychologist at Emory.
And in 2001, Marshall Duke and his colleague, Robin Fivish, tipped off by Marshall's wife,
who works with special needs children, created a test that I later in the New York Times called
The Do You Know Test, which is asking children how much they know about their family history.
Do you know where your grandparents were born?
Do you know what happened when your parents met?
Do you know an aunt or an uncle who had illness that they overcame?
The children who scored highest on this test, which is to say the children who knew most
about their family history were better able to navigate the ups and downs in their own
lives.
It was the number one predictor of a child's emotional well-being.
I put this in my book, The Zigards of Happy Families.
I wrote it in my column in the New York Times.
I was writing at the time called This Life.
It was the most emailed piece for a month.
It was a huge viral phenomenon.
Six months later, my father went into this suicide spree that I was referring to earlier.
He got mental challenges.
If you're looking it up in the New York Times, the piece was called The Stories That Bind
Us.
If people want to look it up.
My father suddenly loses the desire to live.
He had lost the plot of his own life.
We tried every medication, talk therapy.
The thing that saved my father's life was that every Monday morning I started sending
him a question about his life.
Tell me about the toys you played with as a child.
Tell me about the house you grew up in.
How did you become an Eagle Scout?
How did you meet mom?
This act of having to re-engage his life story.
It turns out I didn't know that at the time there's an entire field called narrative
gerontology.
Just like there's an entire field called narrative adolescence.
This was all happening at a time when narrative psychology, which started in the fringes of
American academia in the 1980s, had kind of arrived in the center of American intellectual
life.
That's the moment that we are in now.
The idea of story is all around us.
That's what got me into this story.
What got me into the project I've been doing now is that for whatever reason, while we
understand the idea of our life story being important, we have not transferred that to
work.
So we have not really engaged in the idea that we have a work story as much as we have
a life story.
And it was that gap that I've been working to fill in the last few years.
Thank you, really.
Thank you for listening.
Bruce Feeler is really something that I love the conversation that we're having.
Tune into part two next week.
And until then, consider these questions.
What is one thing that stood out to you today in this conversation?
And what is one thing that you can do in the next few minutes to apply that single idea?
And who is someone that you can share this episode with?
The first five people who write a review of this episode will receive free access to
the essentialism academy.
I'll see you next time.
Bye.