Since the 9th grade, I hoped to become an author. Like many ambitions, there was an inspiring teacher, Mrs. Barkely, behind it. One day after submitting an essay on Moby Dick, she advised, “You should think about being a writer.”

At twenty-two, I was partly there, working as a journalist overseas. At thirty, I sold my first boo…

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“Purpose is about what you’re wired to do that makes your work meaningful. Different people are wired to find different types of work meaningful.”

So begins Aaron Hurst, the master of helping people—and organizations—discover purpose in their jobs. We recently met in Seattle to discuss his own work, our interview held on a park bench overlooking Lake Washington on an extraordinarily beautiful day that one appreciates more for being in the Pacific Northwest.

Purpose is not about happiness, Aaron advises early in our talk. “Happiness is weird, and people put a lot of definitions on it. I think about it as a parent. You’re not always happy as a parent. Sure, there are moments—your kid farts and makes you giggle, they score a goal in soccer, they cuddle with you on the couch while watching a movie. Most of the time though you’re not happy, but it’s fulfilling, right? Think of teaching your child how to ride a bike, all the struggles and crying and falls, but then it feels great when they finally glide down the street. The hard parts are what makes parenting fulfilling, that sense of doing something that matters, caring for and raising a child to navigate the world on their own. For parents, that’s the number one job we all have, and the question is how can you have a job that mirrors that level of fulfillment, and that is the goal of identifying your purpose.

Recently, I read some studies about what is called the hedonic baseline. The basic premise is that we naturally have a certain level of happiness, and everyone’s different. So, you have this baseline. As a Jew, one of the most significant accomplishments in life is getting an Op-ed in the New York Times. That’s a thing.” Aaron laughs. “Years ago, I had my first one published, and I was in Boston, and I drove around the city with my father-in-law handing out copies to friends. I was on cloud nine. A week later, I was like ‘whatever’ and I snapped back to my baseline. The same is true of tragedy. If you’re in prison, once you adjust to your new reality, you come back to your baseline. People who chase happiness are on a treadmill because you always snap back to this level. It’s like the old saying, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’

Now, the only thing that studies show change your baseline is focusing a lot of your time on altruism and helping others. That creates a sustained increase. That shows you the power of purpose. If you feel like what you’re doing matters and that you’re adding value, then it’s a way to elevate your baseline.”

More important, Aaron makes clear that the world would be a better, more connected, and kinder place if everyone lived and embraced their specific purpose in life.

The obvious question I then ask: if purpose is individual to each of us, how do I know what mine is? That is when Aaron gets going…

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Aaron Hurst comes from a rather storied family of entrepreneurs and academics. His grandfather Joe Slater conceived the idea of the Peace Corps. His uncle Marc Porat coined the term “Information Economy.” Aaron followed early—and eagerly--in their footsteps.

While at the University of Michigan, he created a program to teach creative writing at local prisons. Upon graduation, he worked at a non-profit in Chicago focused on inner-city education. The work was important, and the level of need was tremendous, but he was frustrated by the inability of his organization to scale to meet that need. “The problems were too big for us to continue handing out checks for teachers to buy materials for their classroom,” Aaron recounts. “That wasn’t changing the issue, and I asked myself how can I actually make a difference that matters, how can we scale nonprofits to have a chance in hell of making a real impact?”

This was the late 1990s, and Aaron decided to join the dot.com boom in Silicon Valley to learn how to build a start-up, then bring those entrepreneurial skills and lessons to the non-profit sector. After five years at two fast-growing early-stage companies, he left his stock grants and soaring salary to do exactly that.

“I started going around talking to non-profit leaders, asking, ‘How can I help you? I know all this business stuff. I’m here to save you like Jesus,’” Aaron chuckles at the memory of his youthful self. “I thought I had so much to offer, but the reality was they didn’t want me…or have a job for me. Instead, they needed someone to help with their website or branding or with technology. That led to one of those chocolate and peanut butter moments where everything just comes together. One, nonprofits need all these services. Two, I knew all these people in business who wanted to get involved in the community but found volunteering to be a waste of time. And I thought, what if I could connect non-profits with what they need, not just raw manpower? It’s crazy to get a marketer who gets paid $200 an hour and you want them to do $8 work. It's not because they're better than that, but you’re economically depriving a non-profit of valuable skills.”

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But I am fascinated by Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue. Her fearsome reputation. Her look. Her iconic command of fashion and media. Her longevity. That’s why I’m so glad to open my new series, THE WORKSHOP, with Wintour’s biographer Amy Odell. In this series, I’ll interview authors and other experts to draw out lessons on success, happiness, creativity, motivation, and general ‘work-life’ achievement.

A fashion journalist, Odell spent years interviewing Anna Wintour’s friends and associates. Her biography ANNA has earned critical (and bestselling) acclaim for its incisive, revealing profile of this cultural giant. The chronicle of Wintour’s rise to the top of Vogue provides many lessons. Her ability to maintain that position for decades—and grow her influence—provides still more. 

This is my conversation with Amy, condensed and edited to avoid my incessant interruptions…No conversation can match reading the book. I recommend it highly. Also, Amy has her own fashion Substack, BackRow, which is wonderful.

Who is Anna Wintour? In my world, fashion, this is impossible not to know. But the first time I met my mother-in-law, and I brought up Anna, she said, “Who’s that?” I was stunned. How I would explain it today would be that Anna is the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who is most famous for the Meryl Streep depiction in The Devil Wears Prada.

I find that the work people choose to do is often channeled by their families. Tell me about Anna’s… Her father was a famous newspaper editor of the Evening Standard in London. He was very well respected. It was the place where a young, talented journalist on Fleet Street wanted to work. People really admired him. His background was as a political editor and reporter, but he took culture seriously. From a young age, Anna had exposure to a glamorous and intellectual sort of world. Her parents would throw dinner parties with journalists, artists, politicians, and other influential people, and Anna was at the table.

Her mother came from money on the East Coast. She was interested in journalism and did some writing. But after she had kids, she turned to social work, particularly helping pregnant teens. She devoted herself to this work. In reporting on Anna, I was surprised to learn she wants her legacy to be her philanthropy more than anything she did as an editor. I suspect that comes from her mother.

How did her interest in fashion develop?

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A few months ago, my 16-year-old daughter decided she wanted a job. She had her newly minted driver’s license and needed cash to spend. Unbeknownst to her parents, she knocked out a resume, drove out to a large suburban mall, and came back with a $10 an hour retail gig. Given we live in downtown Philadelphia, she probably could have found a job that didn’t cost her so much in gas money to get to, but since I pay for the gas, and she wishes she lived in the suburbs, I understood her thinking. What surprised me was how much she loved the job. She’d go to school, then hit a coffee shop to study, head to work, and finally come home late soaring. One night I asked her why: “I get crazy discounts on swimsuits,” she said. “And they really like me. They put me upfront because I don’t mind the pushy customers. I’m good at it.”

As a parent, you wish you could bottle up such moments to have them on hand between the teenage mood swings, minor/major rebellions, and worst of all, the quick ‘Hi-Byes’ that too often stand in for daily interaction.

Since my daughter got her first job, I’ve had to stop myself from offering advice, but it’s prompted me to think a lot about what I want to pass on to my kids about their approach to work. I know that it’s not something I can hash out as a list and just hand it to them. Like most parenting, they learn by example, a slow accretion of watching us and extended family and absorbing what to do or not do.

Given it’s Father’s Day weekend, I wanted to reflect on what I took in from my own father and grandfathers about work ethic (mothers will get a future issue, promise!). As context, my Dad and his father Sumpter chose somewhat similar career paths. They both studied accounting, then used this to climb the corporate ladder and later build their own businesses. My grandfather on my mother’s side, Lester, was a photographer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch throughout his career. That is after he was a semi-professional bodybuilder, of all things.

The very phrase ‘work ethic’ first conjures in my mind one thing: work hard. Put in the hours, brute force, and don’t sleep until the job is done. Work ethic = Work hard. These are often exchanged as one in the same thing. Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it that way. “Work Ethic: a set of values reflected especially in a desire or determination to work hard.”

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