Transcript, E217: What makes a good job

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Network ID: LinkedIn News.

Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is Hello Monday. It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us.

I was raised on the dream of the American middle class. Go to school, go to the very best college you can and you'll be able to pick your career. Now inherent in this is my parents' dream for me. Their advice to me, do what you love. You hear that? I mean really, do you hear what's beneath it? You should love what you do. A good job leads to a career and you should find meaning from it. Tie identity to it. Who are you? Well, you're a lawyer, you're a teacher, you're a writer. These are the things that define you. At least they have been so far. Right now, this very moment, that philosophy is changing. Those good jobs, well, they don't feel so good anymore. The teachers and lawyers and writers and everybody else are starting to really feel burnt out. We're exhausted from the relentless march to greater productivity. Our paychecks aren't going as far as they once did, and layoffs are always on the horizon. I think here about the advice Elizabeth Gilbert offered years ago on the very first season of our show.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

If you think you're in a career but you hate it and you're bored and it's killing you, quit it and just go get a job.

Jessi Hempel:

This idea that it's time to divorce pay for meaning, it's going mainstream. More of us are less willing to sacrifice everything to the grind. Instead, we're redefining the idea of work. Welcome to our special series on what makes a good job.

Over the next three episodes, we will explore how a small group of big companies like Trader Joe's and Costco have become so profitable by doing something rather unusual, paying their employees well, training them and not overworking them. And then we'll dive into a new book that offers examples of how people have reclaimed their life from their work. But before we get there, we're going to start with a new take on the job search. Our guest today is Bruce Feiler. His new book is called The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.

If I had to boil Bruce's philosophy down to one sentence, it would be this. A good job is whatever you say it is. Bruce has spent a career looking at the interplay between life and work and the last six years specifically, he has collected and analyzed people's life stories to better understand what motivates working people and what matters most to us. His book is an excellent tool for anyone at a crossroads trying to figure out what to do next or to make sense of what jobs you've done so far. To start, Bruce offers up three lies. These are lies he says that we tell ourselves right now about work. Here's Bruce.

Bruce Feiler:

So lie number one is that you have a career. And I think a lot of what's going on now is that people feel out of sorts and uncomfortable and worried and confused and stuck in their career. Well, if I'm here to say anything, it's the problem is not you, the problem is the idea of the career. It's a complete historical aberration. For most of human history, people worked where they lived and lived where they worked, okay? They were farming because that was 90% of humans or they were small artisans of some kind. Career was never used, job was never used. All these words were essentially popularized in the late 19th century when two things happened, people moved from farms to cities, and then also in this country, people moved from outside of this country to this country, and so you suddenly have all these people in cities and they had no infrastructure and nothing to do.

So a guy named Frank Parsons, as you know in 1908 in Boston, a guy who himself had 50 jobs in 30 years invents a process of sitting people down, asking them a series of questions about themselves, giving them a list of organizations that needed roles, and they did a match. And he called it the Vocational Bureau. And within two years there was career counseling taught in every secondary school and college in the country. He basically invents the idea of the career. But here's the problem. He only did it for boys and he only did it once and if you weren't a boy and you needed it later in your life, you were psychologically damaged and he wanted nothing to do with you.

Okay, so cut 50 years later, then we move from the factory to the office, and then the next invention comes along and it's the resume. No one had ever used a resume. No one had ever needed a resume. What is a resume? It's a linear list of jobs that you have. That had never existed before, helped with the idea that you could do it multiple times, but still over fetishizes the idea of the linear progression. So now we are in this networked age and people don't even have a job anymore because people have multiple jobs.

So lie number one is that you have a career lie. Number two is that you have a path. Career path, career ladder. Listen to these terms. They're all linear. It's so narrow and it also reflects what was going on in the middle of the 20th century when five stages of grief and eight stages of mortal [inaudible 00:05:42]. Everything was a linear construct then, but we have 20 work quakes in the course of our lives. Xers have them more than boomers. Millennials have them more than Xers. Zers are going to have them more than even millennials. Women have them more than men. Diverse workers have them more than non-diverse workers. And what is going on now today? The workplace is majority female, it's increasingly diverse, and now most workers are under 40. So therefore the reason for this is that there is this generational shift going on, which is that younger people have grown up much more comfortable with non-linearity. They change religions, they move more often, they're more sexually fluid, they're much more committed to meaning and happiness. Why is that? Well, because the American dream has always been do better than the prior generation. Most young people are not going to make more money than their parents, but they say, I'm going to outdo my parents and living life of meaning. That's what emerged from these conversations.

Jessi Hempel:

Okay, Bruce, I'm going to push back on one thing.

Bruce Feiler:

Please, push back on four things.

Jessi Hempel:

Which is, I think all those things that you say about young people feel true to me and obviously represent your research. And then there's this other thing that we know about young people, which is that they are more anxious than the generations before them, that they're caught in the midst of this mental health crisis. And I suspect that it has to do with not being able to hold on to some linear path, not being able to have any prescribed direction for what's supposed to happen next.

Bruce Feiler:

Okay. I love this pushback and I'm pushing right back at you. To me, the tension is not between the life they have and the life that they want, the tension is between the life that they were taught to want and the life that they have. So we have to sharpen the point a little bit. We have linear expectations, but non-linear lives, and it is that gap that creates the tension, okay? Because that's the gap that creates. I'm off schedule, okay? I'm off-kilter, I'm not living the life that I thought I would be living. I'm not living the life I expected to be living. I'm not living the life that my parents wanted me to live. I have some tension with my wife on this topic because sometimes when someone says, what is The Search about? The Search is about one thing, you don't have to live someone else's dream. You can live your own dream. The challenge is to figure out what your dream is.

Jessi Hempel:

I was going to say that that stresses me out. You can live your own dream. That it stresses me out because I'm like, well, okay, how are you supposed to know what your dream is?

Bruce Feiler:

Okay, good. So let's talk about this. For sure what I'm trying to do is first of all persuade you that this is the thing. But I said the tension with my wife is she kept saying that I'm overselling that people do what their parents want them to do, and I don't think that I am. It kept coming up over and over and over again. My culture tells me this is what success is. My family tells me this is what success is. They sacrificed for me to go do this, and therefore they expect me to do that. What do I hear? I have 18 year old identical twin daughters who are about to graduate from high school and go off to college. When you hang out around with those people and the people that give them advice when they go into their life, it's your number one job is to figure out what you want to do and your number two job is how to market it to your parents because it may be different than what your parents want.

So I think to me, the tension is between our expectations and our lives. So if we normalize nonlinearity and we normalize the way people, the third lie before we move on to the question of what is the one truth and how to do it. The third lie is that we have a job. It's the one that sounds most preposterous. Of course we have a job. No, no, no, but it's true. Each of us has up to five jobs, a main job, and by the way, fewer than half of us now have a main job. In my cohort, it's 39% and that's not far off from the national averages. Two thirds of us have a care job, caring for young children.

Jessi Hempel:

That's me as podcaster and me as mother.

Bruce Feiler:

Right. Okay. Then three quarters of us have a side job, which we talk a lot about. Okay, that could be something you do for love or money.

Jessi Hempel:

Me as book writer.

Bruce Feiler:

Well, because then we have something. Then we have two new jobs that I've labeled now that didn't exist before, but I kept hearing them. One, 86% of us have what I call a hope job, which is something that we're doing that we hope becomes something else like writing a screenplay or selling pickles at the farmer's market. Do you have a hope job?

Jessi Hempel:

I mean, I guess also writing books. I just got to do my hope job, so I'm in a weird category.

Bruce Feiler:

Yeah, exactly. Okay. But there's another category, which is the number one category, which is 93% of us have this invisible time suck that we spend a tremendous amount of time on that feels like a job, and I had never heard about this. I've never read about it in the literature of work, so I decided to name it and I spent months trying to figure it out and I've ultimately decided to call it a ghost job. A ghost job is something like trying to stay sober, battling discriminations, worrying about financial wellness. So many people who I talked to who didn't grow up with parents who talked to them about money, reading investment books, trying to figure out how to preserve and save and invest, that's a ghost job. Most people say they do it, it's always on their mind, but when I ask people to quantify it was 12 hours a week, Jessi, that's a quarter of the typical work week.

Jessi Hempel:

I thought about that. I was trying to really wrap my mind around what you were getting at with this idea of a ghost job, and it feels like that is the space that is taken up by navigating the difference between who you actually are and everything you bring to the table and who the world expects you to be and whatever.

Bruce Feiler:

I think that's much more beautifully expressed perhaps than I have it in the book. Yes. I think it's the tension between how you present or want to present and how you feel, and that tension sucks a lot of times. So what are the consequences of this? What are the consequences of this are, we use this kind of basket of jobs, I call it Work 360 to balance off where we get meaning. So maybe we do this job for money and salary and benefits, and maybe we do this other job for meaning. So maybe we have a day job that pays the bills, but we manage our social media or we work on our sci-fi novel at night or we blueberry muffins that we're going to sell at the farmer's market because that brings us more meaning or maybe it's flipped, okay? Because this is how entrepreneurship often happens, right?

The entrepreneurship becomes the side job and then the main job pays the bills, and then when you then make the leap to the entrepreneurship, you got to do something else on the side to even out the money for a while, and one way of looking at this is that in the battle between life and work, work has won. And most people bemoan this. I'm sure many of the people who've sat in this chair bemoan this. We work too much and we work many more hours, and this is a common thing. I think we missed the point. We are working more because we're not willing to compromise at the meaning, but we can't always get it from where we want.

I'm about to send two kids to college. You don't think that I'm thinking about that. Or someone has to say, "Okay, my kid's on travel soccer this year and I got to travel." So I got to put more weight in my care job basket and lessen my side job because that's important to me. I'm at an age, I lost my father in the middle of working on this book, I have a mother in her late 80s. I spend a lot of time, less time on the young children and more time on the aging parent thing, so that takes up a lot of time. It both gives meaning and also sucks meaning at the same time. So I think everybody wants meaning, but we have this blessing of this Work 360 model so we can allot the meaning to different roles, different jobs in our life.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah, I love that. I remember when I first began recording this show, my second guest in the studio was Elizabeth Gilbert, and she, for any listener who doesn't know wrote this book, Eat, Pray, Love, that was really a revolutionary book for its time. She's an incredibly gifted writer and she advanced this thesis that really made us all uncomfortable at the time, which is that she thinks work should just be work, you should do some work for some money if you need to pay your rent. It's just a job that is not where her meaning comes from, and it is absolutely okay to just divorce where you get your money from, from the value you find and what you do in your days.

Bruce Feiler:

Well, let's look at Elizabeth Gilbert, right? She was working at Time Magazine, if I'm not mistaken. It was a divorce if I'm not mistaken, that sent her on this year of traveling around the country. Then she writes a big phenom, then she gets married again, then she divorces her husband, the second husband who was a man, and she gets into a serious relationship with a woman who then dies of illness. This is a perfect example that you can't separate work from life. Oddly, the people who integrate their life into their work are more happy than the people who entirely try to divorce them. And so sure if you have to make compromises wrong the way, that's part of it, and it's completely okay to say, I'm going to do this to bring me in some money because I'm doing this other thing to bring me meaning. The thing that's not acceptable is to say, I don't want meaning from my work and to divorce it from what yourself, that's the one thing I would counsel against.

Jessi Hempel:

That's when people die slowly inside.

Bruce Feiler:

That's when people die slowly. That's what quiet quitting is. That's what rapid quitting is. That's where you are torturing yourself because what is it that makes us human? It's meaning. Happiness is fleeting. Happiness is the present. The difference between happiness and meaning is that happiness is a present emotion and meaning stitches together, past, present, and future. And that's why meaning essentially is a story. That's why the essence of this whole project and this will now allow us to talk about how you do it, is how to write your own story, not someone else's story, your individual story of what it is that makes you happy.

Jessi Hempel:

We're going to take a quick break here, but stick around because when we come back, we will have more with Bruce Feiler on what makes a good job.

And we're back. Today on the show, we've been learning one way of looking at what makes a good job with author and researcher Bruce Feiler. I love what he said just before the break about meaning being a story. It's the story we tell ourselves about why we do what we do at work and in life.

In this section of our conversation, Bruce really digs into how we tell our stories. He's going to use my answers as an example. I encourage you to follow along here, and when Bruce asks me a question, try answering it for yourself. Now, if you're up for it, share some of what you learn in our Hello Monday group on LinkedIn. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Once again, here's Bruce.

Bruce Feiler:

I would say if there's one thing to take away from this is that the people who are happiest at work don't climb, they dig, they do the personal archeology, and maybe this is because I'm an archeology bum, but as an archeologist once told me, "The best way to understand the future is to understand the past." If you want to be happy at work, you have to dig into this mix of stories and parables and homilies and expectations that were imprinted on you when you were young, that you chose by whom you chose to admire and model your life on. And that has built up over time and that at any given moment, is undergoing large forces of change, which is why literally 60% of The Search is about how to do it, how to do what I call the meaning audit to identify what brings you meaning so that you can start writing the story that is the most important story you're ever going to write, which is the story of what makes you a success.

Jessi Hempel:

I love that. I love that as a tool. And honestly, you know this Bruce, I have spent a good deal of my last couple of years thinking about a similar question through a different framework because I think that I've written about this idea of coming out and I think that's what coming out ultimately is, it's looking deeply within. And the process of looking deeply within is how we get to the good stuff.

Bruce Feiler:

I'm smiling because in your last book, The Family Outing, I asked you a question. I saw you outside of a work context, and I said to you, what's your book about? And you gave an answer, which was exactly what you just said, that what you learned in working on that book is that each of us has this story inside of us that is guiding and shaping and directing us that we don't share with others. Is that a ghost story? Is that a coming out story? Yeah. Is that a secret? It's all of those things. What's the antidote to a ghost job? Telling somebody about your ghost job. Feeling comfortable enough to say, I'm carrying this thing around inside of me.

So let's just say that you want to do this, that you want to write your story. So I think the essence of this is what is storytelling? Okay, so storytelling is mixing past, present, and future. A snowball is not a story. A bloody face is not a story. The connection between a snowball and a bloody face, now that's a story. So it's two events connected over time, okay? So the essence of what you're doing if you're going to write this story is you have to start with the archeology, which is what I call the going back, the digging to what you learned. So let's just look at two questions there. So a first question to ask would be, what are the upsides and downsides you learned from your parents? In fact, let me ask you, what were the upsides about work and downsides you learned from your parents?

Jessi Hempel:

Upsides, work ethic. You put it in, it comes back to you.

Bruce Feiler:

That's the hard work

Jessi Hempel:

Downsides, you can give all of your time to an institution and it will not give you love back.

Bruce Feiler:

Okay, so what this tells me, if I'm going to start to construct your work story, Jessi Hempel live on your own podcast. It's okay. You believe in work, but only to a limit, and you're committed to doing something that is true to who you are. As we discussed, what is that? Okay, now let's look at the next question to ask. Other than family, who were the role models you had as a child?

Jessi Hempel:

Had a high school teacher who was incredibly empathetic, cared a lot about people and over invested in people, and I began to babysit for a woman when I went to college who was a writer, and that's what she did all day, and that's where she made her money. She'd go off and write and her novels would come out and people would read them.

Bruce Feiler:

So as you know, I try to guide people through this process of writing your own work story and what those of us who come up in journalism were taught, the Kipling questions as I call them, after Rudyard Kipling, who, what, when, where, why, and how? The biggest problem in how people approach work is they start with how and they succeed. They go get another job, and in 2.85 years, they're looking again. Because if you don't do the who, what, when, where, and why, before you do how you're going to get a job, but you're not going to be any happier because you're not going to be closer to what is going to bring you meaning. Okay?

So tell me the upsides and downsides you learned from your parents. That's a who question. Because you don't pick your parents, you inherit your parents. This is the environment you're growing up in and what are you learning? What role models did you have? That's a what question, because your role model in effect is the first work decision you ever make because you're choosing this person to identify with and who the person is irrelevant. In fact, it turns out, fascinated is, most of the role models people I identified were people that they didn't know.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. Interesting.

Bruce Feiler:

Robert Merton, who coined the term role models in the '50s said this he was working with doctors at Columbia and would mention, they would mention people they saw on TV like Michael Jordan would come up, or Michelle Obama or Madame Curie or these kind of people. So it doesn't matter who they are, it matters what you value in them. What did you say? I like listening to the first things people say. The first word out of your mouth was empathy. Okay? The second word was person. Okay? And then, I don't know if it was the same person or different. Then you mentioned somebody who was telling stories and people would read them. So that's communication and connection. So again, it doesn't matter who they are, it's what you value in them.

So now I'm beginning to know this story that's always been inside of you. This is the story that you've always been telling yourself, but we haven't outed it. We haven't put it out there. We haven't identified it. This is not how people talk about finding work. This is how you should find work. Okay?

So now let's talk about the present. So then you go to today, then you got to figure out why are you uncomfortable today? Who was your who is your today? If I were to ask you that, who was your who today? Who are the people in your life that are most important to you right now?

Jessi Hempel:

My wife and my kids.

Bruce Feiler:

Right.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Bruce Feiler:

So that means that you need to make a work decision today that allows you to have a work that gives you time for this other source of meaning. So you would be prepared to do something if it would help them because that's the source of meaning. Who is your in this case? Well, I'm about to be an empty nester, that answer ain't going to work for me in six months. Okay? Let's just talk about my demographic. People who've been caring for children for decades and then their empty nesters. Or people who've been chasing salary for 30 years have put their children through college, and then they're saying, "Well, I want to do something for myself." So who is your right now? It's you. I want to do something for myself. And again, the blessing of this moment, when there's no career, there's no path and there's no job, is a lot of those women of a certain age when they got off the ladder, the escalator, the path, they were told you can never get back on again. That's preposterous. So when there is no path, there's no penalty for getting off the path. That's the blessing of this chaos.

So while you said you're confused and you don't know what to do, and you're speaking and I'm speaking for everybody out there, the bad news is we're confused. The good news is because there is an abundance of possibilities now. Okay, so two questions now. So who is your who right now? And then answer this question. My purpose right now is blank.

Jessi Hempel:

My purpose right now is to expand people's perception of the opportunities available to them in the world.

Bruce Feiler:

Okay, so what have we learned about your work story by asking these incredibly simple questions? As I said, there's 21 of them in The Search. We know you want to work hard, but you want to also do something that's being true to yourself. We know you want human connection. We've got empathy, we've got writing, and we've also got reading. That's different from journaling. You want someone to read this writing and you want it based on people. That's a little bit of the story that we've learned about you from the past. We know that who you value right now is your wife and your children. So whatever you do must accommodate that. So you don't want to be doing something that's being a management consultant where you're going to be traveling three weeks a month and maybe making a nice salary, but away from that. There's time for that later. Because there's no path, there's no career, there's no job. But what's your purpose right now, you want to do something that helps people take advantage of this increased possibilities.

So now let's go to the third, which is the future. So right now I want to do work that, fill in that blank. Right now I want to do work that blank

Jessi Hempel:

Right now I want to do work that helps people and matters in the world.

Bruce Feiler:

So meaning, so we know that you're interested in communication, but you want that communication to be service oriented. That's another who that you have, helping others. By the way, in my study, the number one thing people want, the work gives them meaning if the work helps somebody else. Who they're serving, who they're giving to, who they're connecting with, by the way. But you know what that means it's not? Colleagues. So people are prepared to sacrifice being in the office in order to serve somebody. Now we understand the tension between work from home. What's your number one? Who is your who right now? It's your family. So that means you don't want to be here every day and the people you want your work to connect with are the people you serve, not the people you work alongside. Now, one last question. What's the best advice you have for yourself right now?

Jessi Hempel:

I mean, the best advice I have for myself right now is to make the time and space to listen to myself. Because actually at 47 years old, excuse me, at 48 years old.

Bruce Feiler:

Ha, Happy birthday.

Jessi Hempel:

I can say definitively that I've come to trust myself as a pretty good barometer of the things that I should be doing, but in order to hear that advice, I have to quiet down and I need to keep reminding myself to do that.

Bruce Feiler:

In this book, I actually asked people what was the best advice? Who did you consult with? And by the way, interestingly, the best advice people got was from everybody except family. So colleagues, friends, mentors, not family. Now that's interesting because you got to figure, most people actually ask their family, but it turns out that someone with a little distance who may not be so precisely invested in the outcome is the advice they preferred. Then I asked, what was that advice? And I have to say, this surprised me. The majority of advice they found most helpful was to keep doing what you're doing. Was reaffirming what you already believed. So people don't need a kick in the butt or a slap in the face, they need a pat on the back. And that's the essence of this.

The essence of this is nobody else can write this story, only you can write this story, only you can answer these questions. I talked to a guy who was one of the defining people in the world of narrative career construction, this idea of telling the story. He said, "When I meet people, I know within five minutes what the answer is. But I don't want to tell them I want to be useful. I want to help them tell themselves."

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah, well put.

Bruce Feiler:

Only you can write your own story. Only you can listen to yourself. And then ultimately, only you can give yourself the advice that you need.

Jessi Hempel:

Bruce, that is a wonderful invitation to spend time with this great book that you have written. Thanks for joining us in the studio. It's great to be with you in person.

Bruce Feiler:

Like so many people, I'm grateful for your voice in this conversation and an honor to be here-

Jessi Hempel:

That's awesome.

Bruce Feiler:

In conversation. Thank you.

Jessi Hempel:

That was Bruce Feiler. Check out The Search out now wherever books are sold.

So now it's time for our new spring segment, our quick tips, and for that, I'm bringing Sarah Storm back into the studio, our producer. Hey Sarah, how are you?

Sarah Storm:

Hey, Jessi, I'm great. How are you?

Jessi Hempel:

I'm so enthusiastic for this series, Sarah. It just feels like this is the conversation I'm having around every dinner table right now, around every lunch table in and out of the office. And honestly, with so many listeners, Sarah.

Sarah Storm:

I know. We've gotten so many people sending their quick tips around this topic to us, so I brought you two today.

Jessi Hempel:

I'm excited to hear them. And yes, in fact, they don't call them quick tips, it's just kind of conversation on the platform. But Sarah, you and I have called through all of that conversation to come up with some good stuff.

Sarah Storm:

Yep. These are fantastic thoughts and I'm excited to share them. So first up, we've got Rohini Majella who tells us, "A good job is one where learning is encouraged, authenticity is appreciated, supporting colleagues is in the fiber of the organization."

Jessi Hempel:

Three strong words there, learning, authenticity and supporting. I love that.

Sarah Storm:

Yeah, me too.

Jessi Hempel:

What else do you have?

Sarah Storm:

Next I've got Nicole Howard, and she offers this thought. For me, a good job really starts with good leadership and supervisors. Next would be space to be creative, innovative, and having flexibility in your work schedule.

Jessi Hempel:

It's funny to listen to those two comments together, Sarah, because you just realize that actually they have a lot in common, right?

Sarah Storm:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessi Hempel:

It seems to all speak to what it means to trust somebody. And to show up bringing your, hate to be coy with this term, but bringing your whole self to what you're doing.

Sarah Storm:

Yep.

Jessi Hempel:

Okay, so here's the question For everybody listening. What's one thing you've learned about the makeup of a good job? Please let us know on LinkedIn. You can jump into the group where we're always chatting about it or send us a voice memo to [email protected]. If you've never done it's not that hard. You just pick up that little voice memo feature on your smartphone, play into it a little tiny bit, and then zap off that voice memo to us at [email protected]. Either way, I hope that you get to hear your contribution on an up upcoming show.

Now it's time to talk about Hello Monday Office Hours. I love Office Hours. It's that time of the week when we get together as a community just to check in, see how we're doing, and for the next few weeks, we're going to be talking about this series, about where our meeting comes from, about what makes a good job.

Now, this week we're using some of Bruce's framework. Who is your who right now? What's your purpose right now? What motivates you today? Join us for Office Hours to chew on it with us, it's 3:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday afternoon. We're going to go live from the LinkedIn News page, and if you're not sure where to find us, well send us an email and we'll send you the link. It's [email protected].

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm produces our show with help from Lilia Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Assaf Gidron. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Wallace Trusdale, Kaniya Rogers, and Michaela Greer help us find meaning in our work lives each week. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Coupe is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the Editor-in-Chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

Bruce, so funny that you think about family members and the advice they give. I feel like Francis has come to understand that her question to me when I pose a conundrum is, do you want advice or do you want me to listen and affirm? And she's come to understand that it's 90% of the time, it's the second. "I don't want you to tell me what to do here. I want you to go like, yeah, yeah, that's awful. That's awful."

Bruce Feiler:

Obviously my kids are older than yours and now they're too old and they want nothing to do with me, me. But when they were younger and they would show me their writing, we had this back and forth and it took us a long time to figure it out. And finally I realized I should just say to them directly, do you want me to tell you how wonderful this is? Or do you want me to tell you how to make it better? And then we came to this wonderful place where the right answer is both.

Jessi Hempel:

That's a pretty great thing.