Journalist Jodi Kantor on why the linear career path is dead and how to find a great job in the age of AI.
For white-collar workers, the recent headlines about AI are more than a little bit fear-inducing. The CEO of Microsoft AI recently predicted that white-collar jobs — accounting, legal, marketing, project management — could be fully automated within 18 months. Google DeepMind’s CEO declared we are standing in “the foothills of the singularity.” And on college campuses across the country, students are booing commencement speakers who bring up AI.
The fear is real. But so is the opportunity, if you know where to look.
That’s exactly what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jodi Kantor set out to explore in her new book, How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work. It began as a commencement address at Columbia University, where students asked her a question that stopped her cold: How, in this crazy environment, are we supposed to find our life’s work?
The answer, it turns out, applies just as much to a woman in her 50s reinventing herself as it does to a 22-year-old just starting out. Here’s what Kantor told Jean Chatzky this week on the HerMoney podcast.
Why Finding a Great Job Feels So Hard Right Now
Before we talk solutions, Kantor wants us to understand why this moment feels so uniquely brutal.
“The hiring process has become cold and digital and lonely and unrecognizable from when many of us were young,” she said. “These kids who are looking for jobs now, and older people too, are dealing with giant job portals that give out very little information, ghost listings, AI interviews where companies are screening potential employees essentially with robots.”
When successful executives stand on a podium and tell graduates that AI is the greatest invention of our time, it lands as tone-deaf. “Their direct experience of AI is often a very negative, degrading one,” Kantor says. “So they don’t buy it.”
And yet, she’s not willing to let cynicism win. “I don’t think we can afford to give up on the workplace or become totally cynical about it,” she said. “A sense of aspiration has been replaced by a sense of cynicism, and I want to fight back on that.”
The Two Things You Need to Build a Great Career
Kantor’s framework is refreshingly simple and built to last even as the workplace keeps shifting. It comes down to two words: craft and need.
Craft: Your Expertise Is Your Job Security
“The really happy and successful people are practicing a craft,” Kantor says. “They know how to do something that other people don’t.”
Craft is expertise, a special skill, and authority. It could be surgery or flower arranging, teaching, or writing recipes. The point is that mastery makes you less disposable. “Any of us who are employees can be fired,” Kantor says. “But your craft is yours forever.”
Need: Harness Yourself to Something That Matters
The second piece is finding a need, your own independent assessment of what the world will require over the course of your working life.
“I don’t want careers to be like lonely paddles against the current,” Kantor says. “I want rushing rivers to come up behind them.” When you’re creating something that other human beings genuinely need, you will be much more successful and much more fulfilled.
This is also a direct rejoinder to the message that people are being replaced. “Anybody who’s worked for five minutes knows that human beings are needed in the workplace,” she says. “We need fresh blood, renewal, ideas. The question is: what need are you going to yoke yourself to?”
The Bottom Line
The world of work is changing faster than any of us anticipated. But Jodi Kantor’s message is not one of doom; it’s one of possibility. Find your craft. Identify a need. Stop apologizing for the zigzags in your path. And get out from behind the screen and make a real human connection.
As she puts it: “My field has been in existential and business crisis for my entire career. And I’m happy.”
MORE ON HERMONEY:
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- “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Agrees with Emma Grede: There Is A Cost To Success
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