Karen Swallow Prior helps us Mode/Switchers engage career shock and organizational change with the wisdom of some permanent things.

In the 90s, I thought that a career was a decently stable reality. In the 2020s, I no longer think that way. And I bet you don’t either. That vocational skepticism prompted our intergenerational team to ask Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, author of the new book You Have a Calling, to help us cope with the crazy-fast changeableness of career and life today.

We Mode/Switchers want to know: What if we’re not working at our current job for the next ten years? Heck, what if we’re out of work tomorrow? Our guest speaks to these questions with (to use her own Thomistic term) luminosity.

But I felt a tension in this podcast episode, a tension so great I couldn’t even name it during the conversation. Frankly, we were having too much fun. Professor Prior’s a very funny person, even when she’s talking about seriously unstable ground.

But if our conversation with Prior was enjoyable, the tension I was feeling wasn't.

One pole of the tension is this: we need to be creatively playful with our own lives. Our experience is way too dynamic for us to adopt the dull seriousness of boiled potatoes. Dr. Prior knows this first hand: she has just left a job and changed the career she thought she’d always be in. She’s had to mentor herself into being curious about her calling in an evolving set of work conditions.

Prior’s recommendations remind me of Anne Laure Le Cunff’s excellent new book Tiny Experiments, which says, in effecti: Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes! (I’m reading this book after hearing Lee C. Camp interview the author on No Small Endeavors.)

But the tension pulls the other way, too: we have to make very serious choices. When things go dark—when we lose our job, when the boss we loved leaves the org, when we feel bored by what we used to love—we need what the author James Williams calls “starlight,” the values that we navigate by. We need something more than an experimental mindset, in other words.

And here’s where Karen Swallow Prior offers light. She offers the wisdom of permanent (and she would say, universal) values: truth, goodness, beauty. Do you find yourself hesitating at that word “permanent”? Does anything hold still in a world whose changeableness accelerates every few weeks?

Good question. Let’s let it hang with it, while you press play on the pod.

But wait, let me say one more thing. The question, What if I lose my job next month? is a very focused question. But it also invites creative and far-ranging exploration about the biggest questions that come with being a person. That’s our Mode/Switch sweet spot. We look for tight practical pivots that orient us within bigger questions.

This is our 89th episode of making that move—from tight pivot to big questions. And it’s starting to feel like, well, a calling. I’m so grateful for how this podcast’s explorations of workplace culture. I’m just as grateful to be listening for callings in company with you.

-craig

Angela Gorrell addresses decision fatigue on the pod this week. Listen to this episode to find your way back to gumption.

You don’t have time for this podcast. You have 105 other emails just this morning, and you have 44 minutes till your next thing. (Make that 43 minutes.) But maybe you should skim it? Or maybe you should finalize this afternoon’s agenda? (Why did you schedule that meeting for 3:30?) Or maybe you should just delete a bunch of emails?

If you have too many tasks to do before mid-afternoon, you’re eventually going to suffer decision fatigue—aka, ego depletion, brain degradation, cognitive overload.

Sometimes the choices are big.

I wake up every morning with a weight in my chest—so, yeah, I kind of hate this job. But that other position I’ve been looking at has sucky health insurance. Maybe we could go on my partner’s plan, tho’. But I care about the mission here. Also, my hair’s falling out in the shower.

Other times, the choices are micro.

Should I hit the bathroom now? If I take my laptop with me, is that gross? Should I update my operating system like tech support’s been telling me to? Should I make a third cup of coffee?

But the scale of the choices matters less than the sheer fact of how many you have to make. And the longer the day, the less you can decide.

This week, the Mode/Switch’s intergenerational team—Emily, David, LaShone, Madeline, and I—talk with Dr. Angela Gorrell about her latest book, Braving Difficult Decisions: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. We’re stans for the book, mostly because Angela redirects attention to what lies beneath decision fatigue.

What’s the deep difficulty in your life that’s making these decisions difficult?

Angela says that that when you look beneath the surface, you find cor, which is Latin for heart and, if you follow the etymology long enough, you get to courage.

If it feels like you don’t have time for this Mode/Switch, let our team make just one decision for you today: put in your AirPods and let the Mode/Switch Pod take you towards courage, even in the teeth of too many choices.

Connect and consult with Dr. Angela Gorrell. She’s responsive to DMs on Instagram. She welcomes you to her website. And, yeah, you should buy her books.

Hey there, and welcome to the Mode/Switch! This week, we make sense of Gallup’s ⁠shockingly low job disengagement numbers⁠. It's tempting to ask, "Are people just lazy?" or "Are jobs just pointless?"

But to improve worker engagement, we need better questions.

Lee C. Camp of the celebrated ⁠No Small Endeavor⁠ podcast joins our roundtable this week to transform how we investigate pointlessness and purpose on the job.

I learned a lot from Lee’s questions about virtue in the workplace. But I also came away convinced that you can’t understand worker disengagement today without intergenerational exchange. Senior leaders, listen up! You need…

• Gen Xer David Wilstermann’s skepticism about corporate “purpose,” and…

• Xennial Emily Bosscher’s quest for meaning through brain fog, and…

• Millennial LaShone Manuel’s critique of exploding task lists, and…

• Gen Z Sheila Aupperlee’s stories about going to grad school while working three jobs—and still looking for some meaning in work.

My cohosts raise the question: Is it possible, in today’s economy, for a job to be anything more than just a job? A lot of people are asking the same thing:

Brene Brown’s turning from the self-help space to⁠ focus on the workplace⁠. Karen Sergeant’s asking about how AI enables us to ⁠rethink the workplace⁠. Meryl Herr’s asking about what to do ⁠When Work Hurts⁠. Anne Helen Peterson’s ⁠recent Substack⁠ engages “The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job.”

Look, if you're asking if you should quit your pointless job--or stick it out for the sake of your amazing coworkers, you’re not alone. But I don’t think you can answer those questions till you’ve addressed the one Lee C. Camp raises in this week’s Mode/Switch.

Here’s my professional recommendation. Find a part of your job today that requires only 7% of your brain power, and then do that while hitting up this podcast.