How To Start (Even When You Don't Know Where You're Going)

As work becomes the place we look for identity, stability, and meaning, the stakes feel higher than ever. Esther invites you in for a live conversation between friends, New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor and facilitator and author Priya Parker. A question echoes through the room: how do you start when you don’t know where you’re going? This is a conversation about uncertainty, ambition, and finding the courage to begin anyway. My annual Sessions Live two-day live event is coming up next month! Through clinical, cultural, and creative perspectives, Sessions Live 2026: Cultivating Aliveness: Desire & Its Disruptions explores how relationships are evolving, and how we can translate those insights into practice. Whether you’re a practicing clinician or curious mind, you’ll discover fresh insights and takeaways to help you connect and thrive. Come see me live on May 15th and 16th in NYC! Podcast listeners get a special discount with the code FRIENDSLIVE to get $100 off an in-person ticket, or FRIENDSVIRTUAL for $50 off a virtual ticket at checkout on the Sessions Live ticket page. For Jodi Kantor's new book How to Start: Discovering Your Life's Work visit https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jodi-kantor/how-to-start/9780316609555/ To pre-order Priya Parker's upcoming book The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict visit https://www.priyaparker.com/priya-parker-books Also, please join me on Entre Nous, my new home on Substack for anyone who wants to live, love, and work with more connection and imagination. I invite you to sign up and become a free or paid member at estherperel.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Esther Perel?

  I'm often asked how I started my career. So, of course, when Jodi Kantor, author of "How to Start", investigative journalist for "The New York Times", asked me to join her and Priya Parker, author of "The Art of Gathering", in a conversation about how to start our work life, our careers, I was instantly intrigued. There's so much to tell about how to start. I actually really liked the focus on the starting rather than even anything that follows afterwards. So we showed up on stage and basically asked questions about the book to Jodi. Like, what made you want to write a book

• 0:45Esther Perel?

  for young people finishing college or school and wanting to know how to start? What was special about the audience was how intergenerational it was. Because everyone is concerned by the question of work today. Whether you have just paid for the college of your child, whether you are yourself in transition in your mid-40s, or whether you are just starting. It is actually a collective question at every age level. So my friend, Priya Parker, who is a consumer group facilitator, set the intention for the evening and facilitated the conversation.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  We are gathered here tonight as a temporary community with a shared question. And we are gathering around one of the things that people have done for as old as time, which is to sit together and ask something that is relevant to our young people, but is actually relevant to all, which is how, in this moment of uncertainty, in this, one could even say, mess, does one find one's life's work? And a year ago, our friend Jodi was asked by the Columbia students to be their commencement speaker. Now, I don't know if you all remember what was happening at Columbia at the time,

• 2:12Speaker 01

  but most people would probably say, "You know, I need to wash my hair." And Jody being Jody, accepted. But she also didn't go and pontificate in a corner. She did what she always does, which is she went to the people most affected. And she spoke to Columbia students graduating and said, "What are your questions?" And I want to read just the opening paragraph, one of the paragraphs from "How to Start." "I reached out to students to ask how they were navigating their sad, strange senior spring. They didn't want to talk about Israel and Gaza, or President Trump, or even the university administration.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Many of them had grown to distrust. Instead, all of them, regardless of demographics or political views, were united in worry over one question: How, in this environment, were they supposed to find and start their life's work?" And that speech went on to become this beautiful, beautiful book, "How to Start." And the question that has most kept her up at night over the last year is, "How do young people begin?"

• 3:35Esther Perel?

  We have to take a brief break. Stay with us.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Así que es por eso que estamos aquí. Y también queríamos averiguar por qué estás aquí. ¿Esther?

• 4:51Esther Perel?

  Sí, sí. Hola a todos. Así que, ya sabes, una de las preguntas que todos teníamos en la sala trasera aquí es: Si alguna vez recibiste consejo de carrera que fue espectacularmente incorrecto, por favor, si recibiste ese tipo de consejo, levanta o indica de la mejor manera que puedas. Realizaremos rápidamente cuánta similaridad tenemos. ¿Puedo preguntarte por un momento cuántos consejos espectaculares incorrectos fueron de un padre? Gracias.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Mi hijo acaba de levantar la mano.

• 5:46Esther Perel?

  Y por favor, ¿te levantas si el trabajo que tienes hoy es un trabajo que sabías existir cuando tenías 10 años?

• 6:02Esther Perel?

  Llevó un momento para recordar. Correcto. Está bien, gracias. Y, ¿puedo preguntarte quién aquí está haciendo el trabajo de hoy que absolutamente no planeaban hacer cuando comenzaron sus carreras?

• 6:22Esther Perel?

  Ya, espera un momento porque veo a la generación que está sentada. Así que para todos los jóvenes en la sala, y ustedes también, y yo también, solo miren, porque entre lo que la gente pensaba que iban a hacer y donde terminaron es un poco de un viaje de la vida. Sí, gracias.

• 6:44Esther Perel?

  ¿Y quién en realidad está haciendo lo que pensaban que iban a hacer? ¿Hay personas así en la sala?

• 6:51Esther Perel?

  Sí, podemos aplaudir.

• 6:57Esther Perel?

  Some people had some linearity in their life, you know. And may I ask you, who remembers the first time that they walked into a professional room and thought, "Somebody is about to realize that I know shit."

• 7:16Esther Perel?

  Stand up.

• 7:23Esther Perel?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. How many of you have had job interviews with chatbots? And may I ask you, raise your hand if the chatbot never told you any feedback about your interview and you never even got a rejection letter either for that matter. And how many of you it was your first job interview? So that you had no guidance? Anyone? Yes, tell us, tell us. What's your name?

• 7:52Speaker 04

  My name is Leila.

• 7:53Esther Perel?

  Hi, Leila.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Hi. So I did an interview a few weeks ago and I had to talk directly to an AI, which was very strange because there's no real conversation, there's not really a connection that you're having. You can't, you know, be like, "Oh, how's your day?", you know, have that little banter in the beginning. So you're just really talking to yourself and then they are like, "Okay, great, so there's the next question." There's not really, there's no connection.

• 8:23Esther Perel?

  There's no connection, there's no reciprocity, there's no contingency, there's no sense that if you say something, it engages another person to say something else and when they do, so do you and a rapport is created. So there's nothing before and there's not much after.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 8:40Esther Perel?

  Good, yes.

• 8:43Esther Perel?

  Would you please stand up if you feel that your career choices have been too risky?

• 8:52Esther Perel?

  Yes, yes, I see you rise slowly but surely. And you too? Yes? Would you like to say something?

• 9:03Speaker 05

  I'm trying to pursue journalism.

• 9:09Esther Perel?

  There was somebody else... Who stood up here? Hmm? This one?

• 9:15Speaker 06

  I've left some big companies to join some small startups, where there's a lot more risk.

• 9:21Esther Perel?

  Anybody else?

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I started a startup digital agency the day my premature twins were born from the hospital. With my husband, both of us in, no net. It lasted eight years.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  There's one more here.

• 9:42Speaker 07

  Oh. Hi. Yep, thanks. I write musicals.

• 9:55Esther Perel?

  I'm gonna ask you one last one. Stand up. If you've ever looked at something that is broken in the world, and then you thought someone should fix it,

• 10:09Esther Perel?

  and then you realized that that someone should be you.

• 10:15Esther Perel?

  Wow. Wow.

• 10:20Esther Perel?

  At some point, when you leave here tonight, I will invite you to speak with each other about exactly that. What did you notice was broken? What did you think needed fixing? And in what way did you engage with the project? Thank you so much.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I want to start, Jodi, by asking you a simple question, which is, why did you write this book?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Thank you, Priya. So as you said, you know, I get this email a year ago, and it says, "Will you please give the undergraduate commencement address at Columbia, where I went?" And it was a huge honor and kind of a bad offer because of what was going on at the school. Like, it was just chaos. And my... I may not name you, but I see a Columbia friend right there, a very wise Columbia friend, who was like, "Don't do it." "Call in sick."

• 11:28Speaker 01

  But I felt like, "Give me those kids for 15 minutes." Because I was just so upset, not really from any one political point of view, but I was so upset at seeing what had happened there. And then what happened is that I got on a Zoom with the leadership of the Columbia College class. Some of the students are here. Will you guys stand up?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  So we get on the Zoom, and I think you mentioned this. They were like, "We don't want to talk about Israel. We don't want to talk about Gaza. We don't want to talk about President Trump. We don't want to talk about the university administration. We chose you because of your career, and here's your assignment. Every member of this class, no matter what their political perspective, is united in anxiety over this question about, in this crazy time, how do you find and start your life work?" And Priya, their question hit me. I mean, I love good questions. I love hard questions. What's the point of easy questions right now?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And what I understood, because I had covered employment for many years, and also because Meghan and I had been speaking on college campuses ever since we broke the Weinstein story, that this was a generational question. The students are saying, "Housing prices are so high that I'm worried that even if I get a good job, it's not going to be enough to rent or buy something decent." I'm hearing students say, "Enjoyable jobs are only for rich kids." I'm hearing, there's a thing of not typing the word "job,"

• 13:22Speaker 01

  J-O-B, in your text chains. People are writing it J asterisk B because the real word is too scary.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And year over year, visiting these campuses, I was seeing this feeling of disillusionment and cynicism rising about work, which is a rational response in so many ways, including to like the AI chatbots. I mean, Astaire is completely right. You know, I don't think we know what AI will do to entry-level work yet. It's too early to say. But I can say this now. It is making the process of looking for a job so sterile, so digital, so lonely. I'm talking to students who are telling me, "Jody, I applied for 150 jobs, and not only did I not get a bite,

• 14:17Speaker 01

  but I did not meet anybody in the process." So anyway, I gave the speech.

• 14:23Esther Perel?

  I think people need to take a breath when you say something like this.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I know, because for people our age, it's inconceivable. So I'm seeing this, and I'm seeing that into this very scary situation, I'm meeting too many students who are either getting bad advice or no advice. So essentially, what that does to me is that it makes me unable to stop writing. And I'm like, I give the speech. It goes great. It's on YouTube, if you're curious. And then Ron and my family will tell you, I spent the rest of the summer getting up at 6:00 in the morning, being at my laptop, writing more and more, saying like, "Am I writing a book? What am I doing? I'm not an advice columnist. I'm an investigative journalist. Is this weird?"

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And the question I was gripped by was, what does a productive response look like to these circumstances? Like, in the book and at this event on night, like, okay, we laid the groundwork. It's a very tough environment, but we're not going to do the equivalent of doom scrolling tonight, right? Because it's not helpful. The question is, what are young people supposed to actually do in this situation? And I wanted to give them something that felt real and true. And listen, I want all of my journalism to help people.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  But this was like taking the subtext of my journalism, which is I want to live in a better world. And this was like making it taxed. This was being like, sit down on my couch. We are, we are going to work together. I don't want you to give up. I don't want you to give up before you start, because then you're going to put satisfaction further out of reach. And we have to do it because the stakes are too high. You can't give up on work individually, but also we can't give up on work collectively. It is our source of collective progress. Right? Total cynicism about the workplace is tempting, but at the end of the day, we cannot afford it.

• 16:40Esther Perel?

  We have to take a brief break. Stay with us.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 17:48Esther Perel?

  Support for Where Should We Begin comes from Shopify. Starting a business requires you to be resourceful, and the more you flex that muscle, the more you start to recognize growth opportunities, like using Shopify to launch your business. And that's especially true if you launch with Black Friday approaching, so you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday-selling season for businesses at every stage. Their pre-built website themes and AI site builder make it easy to launch a beautiful, professional-looking website. And you don't even need to touch a line of code to do it. They also have a mobile app that lets you run your online store from anywhere.

• 18:31Esther Perel?

  If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/Esther to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/Esther. Go to Shopify.com/Esther today to hear your first...

• 18:49Speaker 01

  So here's the first thing we're gonna do on our way to working this... to this answer of, "How do you start?" I wanted to ask Esther and Priya, and I will contribute myself, to tell you a story of how we started.

• 19:06Esther Perel?

  I started my first job working in my parents' clothing store. I lived above the store, and I was, basically, from the moment I could talk, I was asked to come and help. And that meant talking to people of all walks of life, and being shy, not being shy, and selling clothes. And that is very personal when you sell clothes. It's actually a very particular form of intimacy that you develop early on. So that was my first job. Then I was in Israel, and I basically studied in Jerusalem at a Hebrew university. And I was part of the theater company of the Israel Museum, and I worked in puppetry,

• 19:50Esther Perel?

  puppet theater, for four years. And I taught dance and movement and theatre, and I performed and I created plays and I worked with puppetry. It was fantastic. And that same puppetry is what gave me access to my first job in Boston, when I came to graduate school, because I wanted to do family therapy. And the only way I could get into the offices of the big teachers was to say I could do puppetry with the children while you work with the parents. And then I became, basically, I would work with the parents with the puppet too. And I became a disciple of three teachers who allowed me to be in every session just because I could do something that they could not do,

• 20:35Esther Perel?

  but that made perfect sense if you work with families and young children. I was living in Brooklyn and I was taking the subway all the way to Brighton Beach to do workshops. That took me about an hour and more to get to, to then have one person show up at a workshop. And I just thought, why am I doing this hustle? And then somebody said, come back another week. They will come, they will come. And I just thought, OK, I'll do it again. And I iterated and I came back and I, I basically hustled and lied.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  What did you lie about?

• 21:12Esther Perel?

  Oh, I lied. I didn't have, I needed a visa to be in America, first of all. I had already had every other student visa and all of that. I needed, in order to open an account, you needed a job. In order to have a job, you needed an account. You needed a house. And in order to have a house, you needed an account. It was one of these things you couldn't. So I had, I knew five people in New York. Everyone became my previous employer, my previous,

• 21:37Esther Perel?

  my previous landlord. I mean, whatever I needed to say, you just manage. So I didn't be, they were nice, that are nice, they're fun. But they, you know, so that's the, that's really that. It was taking everything I could find. And then, OK, I'll give you one more because, so I, I knew I speak French and Spanish. And with that, I could go work in the Bronx. And I went to neighborhoods in the Bronx where I just can't believe I walked. I walked sometimes in places I didn't know where I was. And I would go to the clinics, but I didn't have the right degrees to get into these clinics. So in the end, I didn't go and work to any of these places.

• 22:21Esther Perel?

  But I knew that with Spanish and with French, I can find a job in a hospital. And so I began working in the psychiatric hospitals where in the units where people came that spoke primarily French, primarily from Haiti, and in Spanish primarily from Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and places like that. And I just thought, I am so lucky to speak languages. It's like, what do I have that other people don't? It's very simple. So that's the beginning of Esther Perel.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  And Priya.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  I am biracial. And I went to the University of Virginia. And the first question I would be asked over and over and over again was, what are you? And I didn't understand what the question meant. And I quickly, I thought, oh, a first year, a woman. And I quickly was educated. No, no, no, they mean racially. Oh, OK. So I answered the question in the ways that were, I was supposed to answer them. I'm biracial, I'm half Indian, half white American. And I, the first, I remember an orientation, I went to the orientation party and it was at the athletic center. And it was at a swimming pool. So we walk in and there's a swimming pool. And I looked to the left and there's a lot of black students dancing and hanging out.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And I looked to the right and it's all white students. And I literally in that moment, unless I jumped into the pool, had to decide which direction I was going in. And it was such a strange experience for me. I was, like many of you, I was, I was born in Zimbabwe. There need Zimbabweans in here. And I, my mother's an anthropologist and we moved a lot. And so this was the first time I was in a sort of highly racialized environment. And I was very lucky that UVA has a strong sense of student self-governance. And two older students basically said, do something about it. I was like, what do you mean? They said, do something about it. And that was the first time, it was kind of a shocking idea that I could, I could,

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I'm a freshman, like, I could do something about this thing? And so I just started asking questions, like, well, what is the history of race here? And what has been done so far? I took courses on race. I put my foot in my mouth over and over and over again. I would say things and there was no social media. So fortunately, you could just kind of make mistakes. And I learned about a process through my mother, actually, called Sustained Dialogue. And I emailed the guy, his name was Hal Saunders. And I was very lucky that he helped write the Camp David Accords. He had retired, he was a senior diplomat, he was very interested in young people. And he said, I will come and teach, train you and your peers in this process called Sustained Dialogue.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  And we launched this process, the Student Club, September 10th, 2001. And 9/11 happened the next day. And part of what happened was, we launched, meaning we wrote a letter to the community saying, this thing's happening. And all of a sudden, there was a deep and necessary demand for dialogue. And we didn't know what we were doing, but we had a practice, we had a need, we had trainers. And over the next seven years, I learned how to facilitate a dialogue group with people not like me. I learned how to help people have conversations safely that usually only happen behind closed doors. And so I started with this question that was like, why is everyone asking me?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  What are you? Wow.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I was fired from my job as a columnist at the Columbia Daily Spectator. But it made me hate journalism. It made me say, journalism is this messy, chaotic, non-brigorous, non-trustworthy thing I want no part of. And I thought, I admire what lawyers do. I did an internship at DOJ. I was a Nazi hunting intern. And...

• 26:43Esther Perel?

  What does that mean?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  So DOJ used to have an office that rooted out former Nazis that had lied on their immigration papers to get into the US.

• 26:57Esther Perel?

  I didn't lie about that.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And DOJ found these people and sometimes denaturalized them and sometimes deported them. But anyway, I went to law school. And then in my first semester of law school, one night at 3 o'clock in the morning, I had an epiphany that was half horrifying, half thrilling, which is that I really, really, really, really, really did want to be a journalist. And I had no evidence that I could succeed. In fact, as you now know, I had evidence to the contrary.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I scrambled. And thanks to generous friends, thanks to Frank Foer, to whom this book is dedicated, I was able to get my first job in journalism. And within a week, I said, I'm home. I want to get into the text to how to start. And I think Jodi has two really core ideas in this book, which I think deeply resonates with both of us, which is focus on a craft and focus on a need. And I want to actually just read you a paragraph. "Most successful fulfilled people are practicing a combination of expertise and skill, the special thing they know how to do

• 28:27Speaker 01

  that other people do not. This is craft." Craft guides the hand of the surgeon restoring an accident victim's body. It's how a writer, composer, or director holds an audience's attention for hours at a time. It's why restaurant meals cooked by experts taste so good, and also why the best-written home recipes turn out beautifully in amateur hands. Craft is why an AI summary, even an accurate one, feels blank, because it's missing an author's voice and intelligence. Now, listen to this paragraph. It's one of my favorites in the book. "When contracts, science experiments, and brand campaigns are well-crafted, investment becomes more secure and likely to pay off.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Craft protects us in the face of disaster. Firefighters and psychologists rely on strict rules and knowledge passed through generations to protect us and lead us from devastation to repair. When we hone our craft, we build up protection against being regarded as disposable or interchangeable." What is craft, and how did you find yours? Craft is a special expertise or skill that you have that other people don't. You know, part of what the Columbia students were asking me was, "How do I gain agency, right? How do I empower myself?"

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And when you have a craft, it's protection against being regarded as disposable or interchangeable. Craft is something you learn over a long time, right? Like, it's, in so many ways, it's not really rewarded on social media. Like, the kinds of slow stumbles and repetitions and experimentation and exploration that are required to really build a great craft, like, they're not going to look good on social media, right? They're not going to look sharp on LinkedIn. The online world is telling 20-year-olds that they should become crypto-billionaires.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  I'm arguing the opposite. I'm arguing...

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Have something that's yours. You can be fired from any job. The employment world is cruel, but your craft can never be taken away from you. Craft is also incredibly rewarding and pleasurable in a way that's really hard to see when you're 22 years old because you don't have it yet, right? And it's only when you get... There are rewards along the way, but it's really when you get to like that highest level of mastery that the feeling is completely different. Young people are being told, "You're not needed." That's false. It's degrading. It's wrong.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And so, I want you to come back to the world with a craft that's gonna pull and guide you and say, "This is my offering."

• 31:34Esther Perel?

  I mean, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, "We need to make one distinction." Because in the last years, instead of talking about craft, people have been talking about passion. "What's your passion?" And, you know, passion doesn't need... doesn't have an on-ramp. Passion is not something that you learn. Craft is a different story. It's practice. It's iteration. And that's why it takes place over time. And every time you think you know, you realize how much more there is to know, but you're less uncomfortable with the fact that you don't know. Because I think that there is a pressure these days for people who begin to think that they should already know. They're just starting. You know, nothing.

• 32:19Esther Perel?

  Don't be afraid of being caught not knowing because you don't. I think for... as a therapist, which is really one of the professions that you can continue to learn till the day you drop dead. There's relatively little ageism in it, in that sense. It was finding teachers. I've always said to my students, "Don't just think about which approach and which theory. Find a teacher. A good teacher will make any approach and any theoretical model fascinating. A bad teacher can destroy the most fascinating subject." So, get good training. Then...

• 33:02Esther Perel?

  Together with training, it's get supervision groups, stay with other clinicians. But this is true for journalists to come together. In the profession of psychology, it's actually a fantastic thing that people continue to meet on a weekly basis with colleagues to discuss cases, to not feel alone with the weight of so much challenges that people bring to us, but to feel that we are supported. I have had supervision till today. People are very surprised that, A, I practice, that's another thing. The craft is something you stay connected to. Doesn't matter what else is happening to you, because it's the thing you can come back to, and it's the thing that gives you authenticity, and it's the thing where nobody claps.

• 33:47Esther Perel?

  The door closes, you sit with the patient, and you do the work, and you make mistakes, you try, but it is humble. To me, it's very important, the notion of staying close to the craft, not just knowing your craft and developing it, but staying close to it. And sometimes you're good at your craft, and sometimes you're not. That's another thing.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Well, especially at the beginning. Like, I feel like when I talk to a lot of young people now, they feel like the entry, there's so much pressure, that they feel like the entry into the career world has to be like one of those perfect Olympic dives, where there's like technical excellence and no splash, and if there's a splash, you know, like you, you get dinged or you don't win. And that's not the way craft worked. I mean, you have described to me with real vividness, when you first became a facilitator, like feeling awkward and uncomfortable, right? I mean, terrified. I, we would, we would get trained, and then you, basically, in the ways that we did it, I had 12 students in front of me for three hours, and we were supposed to talk about race.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  That all sounded good, you know, theoretically, and then I was sitting there and... Everyone's around me, my palms are sweating, my heart's beating, my hands are shaking. And it's like, how do you begin this conversation? What do I actually say? How do you create connection across difference? And so much, I mean, I think the writer David Brooks, I heard him say this at a conference years ago, and he said, "No question worthy of pursuit is answerable in a lifetime." And so as a facilitator, and I know Jody is like this, Astera is like this, Astera still sees clients every week. Jerry Seinfeld still writes jokes every day. And these are people who are driven forward in part because there's a craft that is interesting

• 35:38Speaker 01

  and curious. I mean, when I, one of my first jobs as a facilitator after I graduated was to work with Hal Saunders. And my job was, I was the baby facilitator in the room, and my job was to sit for, we'd go for three days at a time. There'd be a room of, a table of 18 senior officials across the Arab world, Arab, European, and American leaders. It was off the record, it wasn't allowed to be recorded, but it was allowed to have a transcript. And guess who got to write the transcript? And so what that meant was, for eight hours a day on the laptop, I would sit there with headphones through simultaneous translation and write as fast as I possibly could the notes of the meeting. And I did that for years and years and years.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And if I missed a word, people would be livid. "That is not what he said, that is not what the..." There was risks and stakes, and my, my hands would cramp, and I, and I was so terrified that I wouldn't get it right. And I took typing in high school, and I had no idea that that would have been, that was why I got the job. I knew how to type. And so, so, and yet, and today, 25 years later, if you, it's a really weird trick. But if you wanna, if we're ever in a room together and you wanna like, say, "Priya, can you just play back the last 120 minutes of dialogue?", I can literally just tell you exactly what happened. And as one of the elements that is my, one of my edges as a facilitator is specifically around dialogue. It's dialogic facilitation.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I understand communication, I understand craft, but not theoretically, but because I've listened to thousands and thousands and thousands... Thousands of hours of where and when does something change in a group? And how does this one moment of vulnerability or a word choice shift everything that we think is actually possible between these people? And so whether it's a therapist, or whether it's a journalist, or whether it's a painter, or whether it... One of the things I love about this book is you're so imaginative about all of the jobs that people can be: a chef, right? A firefighter, a policeman, if you are a person. And so much of what I think we can sometimes think about is, "Oh, everyone needs to be a consultant." It's like, what? Like, what does that mean? Find a craft!

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And then I think what you want to do is you want to pair your craft- With a need. With a need. Yeah. Like, in the sea of bad advice, and no advice, and intimidation, I wanted to give young people two really solid building materials, right? That would be powerful in combination. So if the first is craft, the second is need. Craft is authority, need is propulsion. Need is you looking around the world and saying, "What is going to be needed in my lifetime? In my working years, 40 or 50 years of working? What kind of goods? What kinds of services? What kinds of new things that haven't even been invented yet?"

• 38:34Speaker 01

  And the thing about need is that I want it to be a counter to the roller coaster of, like, hollow conventional wisdom about what you're supposed to study. I can tell my entire life story since I was 16 years old. Like, I can diagnose every era by remembering what the conventional wisdom was about the thing you had to study. Like, when I was in high school, it was learn Japanese. The Japanese were going to take over the world's economy, and if you didn't speak Japanese, you were, like, a loser. Japanese is an incredible thing to study, but it didn't turn out to be right.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  The Japanese stock market slumped and didn't recover for 30 years. Then it was genetics.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Then it was Mandarin. Then, of course, it was computer science, right? And listen, these are all great things to study. But the idea that any one of them is going to be a golden ticket, I think, is completely wrong. And so what I want to force you to do, what I want to ask you to do, is make a more independent need assessment on your own. Because I think with your own ideas, sometimes using tragedy, sometimes using the hardest things you have faced in life, you are going to find that propulsive force.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  It could be altruistic, it could have to do with business, but that is part of what is going to give your career velocity.

• 40:18Esther Perel?

  I'm thinking about romantic relationships. This is to you. And how often we find ourselves kind of waiting to be discovered, waiting to be found, to be met, for something to just land, or someone to just land in our life. And sometimes a similar approach is happening around work. I want somebody who knows my potential without my even knowing it exists.

• 40:50Esther Perel?

  And I wonder what you thought about, you know, how we switch from being a passenger to a pilot, from waiting to becoming the author of our own life. I mean, it is interesting that you chose two people here. I think neither of us have ever worked for anybody. That's not, except ourselves. We have worked with a ton of people, though. It's different. But we haven't been part of large structures. You are actually part of a large structure. And in that sense, we have been pilots for a long time.

• 41:31Esther Perel?

  But I think a lot of people need help to transition from waiting to acting.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Well, especially now. I mean, this very unfriendly employment environment is making young people feel like supplicants, you know? There's like that anxiety of not knowing whether you're wanted, of not feeling like you have a lot of control. So I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about making yourself the pilot.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  So about 20 years ago, there was a group of young writers in New York, and they were outsiders. You know, publishing, especially at that time, could be a very clubby industry. These were all women, a lot of them were freelancers. They didn't feel that connected. And so they formed a group and they started meeting. And most writers' groups are about what's on the page, right? They're looking at text together. This was different. They wanted to write books and they decided that they were going to figure out publishing together. So every meeting was devoted to a different topic like, how do you get an agent?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Or what's effective? Book publicity? Do you really need a book trailer? What makes for a good blurb? And they studied these things together. And they called themselves the Invisible Institute. And they, and you know, they initially considered themselves kind of nobodies. You know, the way this story ends. The members of the group were Rebecca Sklud, who wrote The Immortal Life of Henry Atalax, Gretchen Rubin, who wrote the Happiness Project books, Sherri Fink, who wrote Five Days at Memorial, Susan Cain, who wrote Quiet.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Pamela Paul had to leave the group because she became the editor of the New York Times Book Review. So these women went from feeling like outsiders to banding together in a collective to sort of climb together. And so, you know, I don't want to be overly prescriptive because different scenarios are right for different people. But, you know, I and a lot of people are tortured right now by this question of, like, if you're a young person who's applying for job after job and not getting any traction,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  what can you do to both improve the outcome and give yourself some agency during the process? And I think forming something like the Invisible Institute is a really good idea.

• 44:37Esther Perel?

  There is still so much to talk about. We need to take a brief break, so stay with us.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 45:16Speaker 03

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• 45:44Speaker 01

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• 46:16Speaker 01

  Esther, you said something amazing to me the other day. We were talking in your kitchen and you said, you know, Jody, this career thing is very parallel to what I say about relationships because your famous formulation in mating and captivity is that to thrive, romantic relationships need a balance between security and stability on the one hand and freedom and exploration on the other. You said, really, you know, career relationships work the same way. So I thought we could talk for a second about how to think about risk at this time.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  It's a big dilemma. Everybody's aching for stability. It's a chaotic world we live in right now. And yet, you don't really get anywhere in a career without taking on some risk. So how do you think through that problem?

• 47:19Esther Perel?

  I remember always saying, we all need security and we all need freedom. When it comes to work, I can tolerate the lack of security better than I can tolerate the lack of freedom. That's why I'm self-employed.

• 47:38Esther Perel?

  But I think that it's not which one do I need more. It's we need both. But some of us really need the security for a host of very important reasons that that work provides. And then risk comes second. And some of us can tolerate the lack of security better than they can tolerate the lack of freedom. I couldn't tolerate somebody telling me all the time what to do, because I had a lot of things I wanted to do. So first of all, I think this question applies beyond work. There is a risk aversion at this moment and a need to want to have predictability, you know, in one's life, like you have when you open your phone and the app tells you how to get someplace.

• 48:22Esther Perel?

  So in that sense, it's not limited to work. And I think the word "risk" at this point is not linked enough to the word "exploration", serendipity, spontaneity, improvisation, surprise, curiosity. All of that has to do with risk. The word "risk" at this point is about danger, uncertainty, and therefore, lack of safety. And I think if you redefine it as a major aspect of life that it has to do with growth, that it has to do with friction, then you begin to think about doing things for which you need the craft, for which you need time, and you're not just there to deal with anxiety management.

• 49:07Esther Perel?

  So much of work at this moment is about managing anxiety. It's actually not even about thinking about work. Work becomes a symptom of the uncertainty that is in the world. And I would add to that that one of the most important things that has happened to work is that because it is the place where most young people are going to spend 10 years before they deal with any of the other aspects of their life, since people date less, have less sex and everything else, work becomes this hub for belonging, for identity, for fulfillment, for continuity. I mean, it's like work has become a central place for those kinds of needs beyond just the job. J O B, fully spelt.

• 49:53Esther Perel?

  If you define risk as the thing that will make you fall, the thing that will make every parent feel like I invested so much, I spent my, I worked so hard to be able to have you go to school, to pay for it, or to at least pay a portion of it, or all of that. And this risk is the devaluing of this entire enterprise. Rather than you're young, you have plenty of time to find the thing. And how many of you people here are thinking that you chose what you do versus a bit of choice and a lot of life? Kind of life brought things to you.

• 50:35Esther Perel?

  And things began to develop and that's where you ended up doing the thing. Life may be a mentor, life may be an opportunity, it's life. Except for people with vocations, artists, musicians, you know, who, people who know from the beginning that that's what they're gonna do, then life doesn't really, I mean, life has a lot of influence too, but you have at least a sense, "I want to be X." But many of us, we didn't have a career that is based on "I want to be."

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Wonderful. Okay. So Priya's gonna close us out tonight. But I just wanna say that if there's one thing you take, especially for like the under 30 crowd here that's still sorting it out, if there's one thing I want you to take from this evening is a feeling of encouragement and warmth, and a feeling like, Esther, Priya, and I have confidence in you that there are other older people in this room who do too, that there are people you can ask questions of. Because I think your experience of entry into the work world has been too cold and too lonely, and I think people our age need to counteract that.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  So we began with a text, we're gonna end with a text, and we're gonna close with Jodi's words. Here are her tips at the end of the book. Exit the library. Do not let your parents decide your career. Look to your friends instead. Observe the obvious. Drop the assumption that your college experiences...

• 52:20Esther Perel?

  will dictate what becomes of you. Consult your demons. Relax about coherence.

• 52:30Esther Perel?

  Find by starting. Listen to your positive emotions. Find alternate doors. Make your pursuit a group exercise. You should not have to do any of this grappling alone.

• 52:54Esther Perel?

  We wanted to pass on the experience of three women who each had a story of how they started that was very far from where they had arrived or where they are currently, which may not be the end point for that matter. The intergenerational conversation around work isn't just between parents and children or bosses and people who work for them. Mentorship actually starts the moment you have one year longer experience than the person who comes after you. And mentorship is not just what the other person should do, but it is also the sharing of your own experience,

• 53:39Esther Perel?

  which is really what I thought we were doing as well, was to basically share a portion of the story of our career, to give a sense that where people arrive is often very, very far and different from where they started and where they imagined they would get to. And to introduce a little bit more flexibility in the thinking about work, or what Jo DiCantor called coherence, kind of linearity, that it's not just one straight line. When you mentor, when you pass on the experience, when you share names of people, when you introduce relationships, when you introduce need with craft,

• 54:23Esther Perel?

  resources with aspirations, all these encounters actually highlight something that is ultra dear to my own work, which is the importance of relationships. Work is rooted in relationships. And relationships travel to work.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destri Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristin Muller, and Julianne. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul. Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.