Greg McKeown:
Welcome everybody. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, 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 Feiler to be here. He’s the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, and by the end of this episode, you’ll 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 Feiler will explain how. Let’s get to it.
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Bruce, welcome to the podcast.
Bruce Feiler:
It’s my pleasure, Greg. Thank you for having me.
Greg McKeown:
The Search, what is the search book about?
Bruce Feiler:
Yeah, so for me, Greg, I think all of these projects, this is the, I think, the 14th or 15th book that I’ve done, it begins with a feeling. And, you know, in the, it sort of, it starts in the heart, and then it moves to the head if you will. And for me, the feeling was, I’m confused about work. Like I’m stuck. I don’t know what the old rules are, but the new rules haven’t been written, and it seems to me that everybody that I know has this feeling of being overwhelmed and confused, and there’s all this opportunity for change, and yet everybody feels incredibly kind of, you know stuck in the mud in where they are. And sort of one thing I’ve learned and sort of 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, you know, how they got unstuck.
And so this book comes at, you know, it, it, it’s the second part of now a six-year kind of 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. You know, right with this book, kind of the, the, 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 in 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. I’m in my home in Brooklyn, is we have this conversation saying, why aren’t 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, 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, can learn to navigate that change. And that was really the inspiration. And so what the book is, is a roadmap for, you know, kind of finding meaning and purpose and work, which turns out to be really the essence of the big change.
Greg McKeown:
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?
Bruce Feiler:
I appreciate that question, and I think the answer is the former, not the latter. You know, what happened if I take 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 air mail, paper, you know?
Greg McKeown:
I’ve used those.
Bruce Feiler:
This is what happened to me today. And when I got back to Georgia, although, you know, 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 Xerox these letters and passed them around, and they went viral in the sort of 1980s sense of the word. 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 twenties, I spent, I wrote books about Japan. I spent a year in your beloved hometown over whatever it is, current residence of Cambridge. I spent a year as a circus clown.
Greg McKeown:
Those weren’t the same year. Right?
Bruce Feiler:
That’s the question. Let’s just talk about that for the next 20 minutes.
Greg McKeown:
So you, you were at Claire College, one of the 31 colleges at Cambridge. And you were doing what there?
Bruce Feiler:
I was getting a master’s in international relations. I had just come from Japan, and I went to Claire, and it, you know, it turned out that what was interesting about it was sort of being immersed in, you know, in this subculture of kind of global life where all these people gathered together. And so I wrote this book called Looking for Class: Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge. And this, this is sort of what I was doing is really kind of the, the purpose of this diversion was I would go immerse myself in a world and write about them.
Greg McKeown:
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 kept 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 at Claire?
Bruce Feiler:
It’s a beautiful place. I mean, I’ve been to 90 countries in my life. I’ve 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, that strip of colleges and rivers 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, I’d also come from Yale. Right? So it’s not like this is my first time in, in one of these kind of rare, rarefied environment. I would say that I found it relatively cut off from the rest of the world. And you know, 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, to go lead the world.
And I think that I look back on the late 20th century, my time there as a kind of 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.
Greg McKeown:
So you found it personally beautiful but also somehow insular?
Bruce Feiler:
And backward looking? I would say yes, insular, 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 la 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.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of an interesting question. When you are in these institutions, that, you know, in the case of Oxford, a thousand 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 are 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 the 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 are saying is that at Oxford, Cambridge, you entered a place, a world where they had created the past, and you saying, but I don’t see the creation of the future here. And that turned out to be the case.
Bruce Feiler:
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, and I’m just, I love this. I was looking forward to this, and now it’s turning out to be e 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 thirties, 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 best federalist.
And I ultimately wrote five 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 gonna do with religion in 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 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 straight linear upward trajectory, okay? That’s the hockey stick in, you know, in, in kind of entrepreneur terms.
But then what happened to me is that in my forties, my life blew up. Okay? First, I got cancer as the father of three-year-old identical twin daughters, a kind of 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 Great Recession. And my family owned a bunch of real estate. And then, my father, 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 non-linear events, and 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, you know, reoriented or reevaluate or whatever it is. And that’s what plunged this large project of collecting and analyzing live stories. And so, what is the big idea that has emerged from this?
Number 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 years old last week, and 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 in their life. And these, we tell these stories, okay, you come from X, okay? You go to one of these institutions, and 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. It’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 an, 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 non-linear and disruptive and comes in networks and comes in changes and comes, you know, with nonperiodicity. 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.
Greg McKeown:
Okay? There’s lots to unpack there. Yes, but overall, 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 are calling this the linear narrative. And you are 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 are dating it 150 years ago. And 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 are saying it never has matched the territory, but especially now, it hasn’t. What am I getting wrong?
Bruce Feiler:
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 the 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, you know, thinking and, and, 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? So in the ancient world, totally, they follow the agricultural, cyclical nature of life, right? To 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, or 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 world that introduces the idea of linear time, right? They ground, they ground history, in one particular family. And you know, 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 in a linear narrative. And if you then go look as, in my last book, Life is in the Transitions, I have this documentation in the, that in the middle ages, they believe life is a staircase up to middle age, you peak, and then you go down, straight up, straight out. That’s no new love at 50, no retiring, starting an Airbnb or a bookstore, you know, in your sixties, okay?
No, you know, no moving to the Mediterranean or to Florida and restarting your life in the seventies, straight up and straight down. And what’s interesting about that is it’s the exact opposite of how those of us in the 20th century were raised. So what happens 150 years ago, what happened 150 years ago, is that the economy changes, okay? And we move from, you know, in, 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. Okay? That’s not a new story. We know that. But what we failed to recognize is that it also changed how we understood human life. So 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.
So then you’ve got Freud saying that there are psychosexual stages. You have Piaget saying that they’re, you know, 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 Sheehy, who writes a book called Passages in which she literally actually convicted me, 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, 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 you go that everyone does the same thing in their twenties, the same thing in their thirties, and then has a midlife crisis. And air quotes here between 39 and 44 and a half. I mean, like, that’s how specific it was. It’s all bunk, okay?
And so what’s happened today is that we understand now because of chaos theory and because of a whole series, you know, of constructivism and philosophy and narrative, career construction, 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 non-linear 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. We have linear expectations but non-linear 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 kilter, you know, I’m not living the life that I wanted to be living. And this is the terrain that I have now decided to spend, you know, most of my work life.
Greg McKeown:
Okay? One thing I can’t let go, because I’ll forget to come back to it, is that you just said what a bunk is, 39 to 44, all of that. But I can’t help but notice that the great big transition and shake of your life happened in your early forties. So it was,
Bruce Feiler:
Oh, I was 43. I was dead on it. Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
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 wanna miss that moment. That’s curious.
Bruce Feiler:
First of all, I love it. But here’s the thing. I also had one at 23 when I didn’t go to Wall Street like everybody that I graduated from college with. I went to Japan and started writing on krinkly air mail, paper, okay? Then like everybody else, I had one, you know, in my mid fifties 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, the, 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 midlife 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, if you go back and look at it, it said between 39 and 44 and a half is the first time you confront mortality. And that is the source of the crisis. That’s what’s fundamentally wrong. It’s not, 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 life quakes, right? A lot of people are born into a life quake. If your parents split before, or they have a crisis, they lose a parent 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 midlife crisis, he did it by talking to 40 people. All white, all men. The same problem with the hero’s journey, okay? That 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, you know, achieving one metric of success. When you widen the aperture, turns out the stories are a lot more complex and a lot more interesting.
Greg McKeown:
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, like 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, 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, 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 line down. I’ve never seen anyone draw anything like that. So that’s an interesting data point in support of what you’re saying.
Bruce Feiler:
Greg, I wanna ask you a question. What shape is your life?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, yeah, I just wrote that question down. What’s the shape of a life? What’s, that’s literally what I just wrote down.
Bruce Feiler:
What shape is your life? Answer the question.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it’s definitely lots of ups and downs. So, you know, that’s, 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.
Bruce Feiler:
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. The funny thing is he’s in the beauty business, like, he, literally, you know, he runs a beauty salon and he’s an artist and he’s a wonderful man. And I said yeah, you wanna, you wanna, you wanna get to like, you know, sort of like the nominal determinism or whatever you would call it. Yeah. so I said, Michael, which shape is your life? And he said, A heart. And I said, no, no, no, you’re, you’re not understanding the question.
I’m, asking like, what shape is your life? Like the sort of ups and downs, the trajectory? He’s like, no, no, no, you are 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, you know, like little intellectual crisis moment in my life. And 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 or three hour interviews that, you know, 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 what I realize, if you go back a hundred years ago, let’s just go back and let’s geek out on history, which is, I guess what we’re doing in this conversation, cuz 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 wanna live, believe what we wanna believe, love who we wanna love, do what wanna 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 writers 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 we march in protests with and are enjoying, you know, 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 is our we story and the C as our V story. Okay? But what’s in, so what’s interesting is when I ask people, we all have all, let me just take 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 A, B, C. So I’m a writer, I’m a creator, I’m very agentic, belonging, I’m a very involved family member, a super involved dad, I would say 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 C, A, B. Belonging, like, you know, outside of 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 line 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 ask somebody who is, who is a marathoner and had an accident and had a bunch of eating disorders, and then she took a fall on the ice and 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, you know lettuce if they are, you know, into, you know, 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.
Greg McKeown:
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. And he wasn’t expecting that question, and I loved that he wasn’t. And cuz 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 was this slightly awkward, in a good way moment of him going, oh, I’m ready to tell my talking points. And I called the talking points.
Bruce Feiler:
Exactly, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
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
Bruce Feiler:
Heart heartbreak. The only person I’ve ever interviewed that did the same thing was Joe Biden.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s interesting.
Bruce Feiler:
They must teach it in democratic senate circles in the 1980s.
Greg McKeown:
Maybe they do, maybe there’s something to it. But, 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 are just, you are 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’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. Now I just wanted to pause on that before moving forward, any reaction to that?
Bruce Feiler:
I do. And first of all, that was a beautiful story. And then, if I had to venture a 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 and Al Gore that harkens back to something that he said at the beginning that he was not expecting us to say. Because that’s what happens. Like 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 to 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 Fiveish 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, number one predictor of a child’s emotional well-being. Okay? I put this in my book, The Secrets of Happy Families. I wrote it in my column in the New York Times that I was writing at the time called This Life. It was the most emailed piece for a month. It was a huge kind of 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. And my father suddenly loses the desire to live, he’d lost the plot of his own life. And we tried everything, medication, you know, 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’d you become an Eagle Scout? How’d you meet Mom? So this act of having to re-engage his life story. Now it turns out I didn’t know it 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. And so that’s what got me into this story. What got me into the project I’ve been doing now is that for whatever reason why 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.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you. Really, thank you for listening. Bruce Feiler is really something, and 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. Just go to gregmckeown.com/podcastpromo for all the details. I’ll see you next time.
