How to Start

In early 2025, investigative journalist Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter known for exposing Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse, is invited by Columbia University students to deliver the undergraduate commencement speech. The campus is in turmoil: protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict have brought police raids and locked gates, and the Trump administration has stripped federal funding and jailed a student for political speech. When Kantor reaches out to seniors, she finds they share a single worry: how to find and start their life's work in such a hostile environment. Nearly every field feels like a bad bet, with AI compounding the panic by threatening to eliminate entry-level jobs. At Texas Woman's University (TWU) near Dallas, professors reported that students were holding full-time jobs during full-time coursework and unable to pursue internships. At Stanford, students jokingly spelled "job" as "j*b" because the word provoked such anxiety.

Kantor introduces Xxaria Makely, a senior from an economically distressed town in upstate New York whose mother commuted two hours each way to train as a medical technician. Xxaria was about to graduate with a 4.0 GPA and a fierce desire to become a clinical psychologist, driven by the death of her older brother Keith from an overdose when she was 11. Her work-study position in a Columbia psychology lab was defunded, and dozens of résumés yielded zero responses. The modern application process, Kantor notes, has turned digital and sterile, with many employers using AI to conduct initial interviews with no human contact. Xxaria considered giving up and returning home.

Kantor establishes her authority through her reporting history: she has covered Amazon's 150 percent annual warehouse turnover, companies tracking the productivity of hospice chaplains, and, with colleague Megan Twohey, Weinstein's decades of abuse enabled by workplace power. She acknowledges that collective dreams about work have decayed but refuses to accept defeat. She frames the book as a letter from an older ally and introduces her central framework: two durable forces, craft and need, which when combined can produce work that serves both the individual and others.

Kantor defines craft as a combination of expertise and skill, "the special thing they know how to do that other people do not" (20). She opens with her own failure at Columbia's student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, where a classmate's published attack left her convinced journalism was too bruising to pursue. She enrolled at Harvard Law School but found legal tasks deadening. At 3 a.m. during her first semester, she admitted she yearned to be a journalist and dropped out. She identifies that decision as the moment she became the author of her own life. Her craft took 20 years to mature, from those early struggles to breaking the Weinstein story with Twohey.

To illustrate how craft develops through patient work, Kantor profiles Arjav Ezekiel and Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel, the married co-proprietors of Birdie's, a restaurant in Austin, Texas, that won nationwide restaurant-of-the-year awards despite being a small operation launched during the pandemic. Arjav had hoped for law or politics but could not complete employment paperwork because his parents had brought him from India on a tourist visa when he was 12 and overstayed. He took a server job and over years mastered wine, service technique, and how to read a dining room. He and Tracy designed Birdie's to reengineer the industry's punishing model, with shorter weeks, paid vacations, healthcare, and family leave, built on the insight that diners remember how a restaurant made them feel rather than minor mistakes.

In the chapter on need, Kantor argues that identifying a genuine societal need through independent observation provides the propulsion that drives the best careers. She recalls her New Jersey high school, where students were told to master Japanese because Japan's economy would dominate; the market then slumped for 30 years. She profiles Priya Parker, who during freshman orientation at the University of Virginia walked into a racially segregated party and, as the daughter of one Indian American parent and one white parent, did not know where she belonged. Parker trained in dialogue facilitation, and 25 years later she is an expert on gathering, paid to help organizations turn painful internal conversations into moments of connection.

Returning to Xxaria, Kantor traces her path after graduation. Xxaria moved back upstate and worked at a halfway house for people in recovery. What troubled her most was how people spoke about those with addiction: school health classes after Keith's death had characterized people with addiction as villains, leaving her wondering how to grieve someone portrayed as bad. She knew Keith, a playful, protective rugby player, had not been bad but ill, living with addiction and bipolar disorder that ran in the family. She identified a PhD in clinical psychology as her best route to understanding what works in addiction treatment. After months of stalled hiring processes, she interviewed at a Boston hospital for a position studying whether prescribing opioids to minors for post-surgical pain raises long-term addiction risk. Days later, she received an email with logistical details, her first confirmation from the world of psychology that her ideas and drive were welcome. Kantor frames Xxaria's story as illustrating how craft and need create a virtuous cycle: The craft she is learning will refine her assessment of need, driving her toward higher skills in turn.

The chapter on money challenges the assumed dichotomy between admirable-but-poor and lucrative-but-soulless careers. Kantor shares salaries of top arts administrators, including $1.4 million at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to disprove the idea that meaningful work and financial reward are mutually exclusive. She profiles Paola Alonso, a 27-year-old TWU alumna who grew up receiving clothes from a JCPenney charity program. Paola arrived at college assuming nursing was her best option but hated anatomy class. A history class gripped her instead, and at TWU she encountered the archives of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), female aviators who during World War II flew domestic non-combat missions. Paola switched majors and became archives coordinator at a history museum in Irving, Texas, where she helped host an exhibit about the Green Book, a mid-20th-century guide that helped Black travelers find safe accommodations, and coordinated the largest exhibition of LGBTQ-related historical artifacts ever shown in Texas. She earns about $60,000 a year and, Kantor observes, takes more palpable joy in discussing her career than anyone else in the book.

In "How to Start," Kantor offers concrete directives: exit the library and seek stimulation, resist letting parents dictate career choices, keep a notebook tracking which daily actions bring satisfaction, and form mutual-aid groups like the Invisible Institute, a circle of young nonfiction writers whose members went on to write bestsellers including Quiet and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She argues that the biggest differentiator in long-term success is the character of one's bosses, illustrating the point through her own first boss, Michael Kinsley, founding editor of Slate, then a tiny Microsoft-owned start-up exploring online journalism. When Kinsley offered her a promotion to Seattle and learned her boyfriend, Ron Lieber, was on the East Coast, he withdrew the offer rather than risk breaking up a promising relationship and moved her to the New York office instead. Kantor and Lieber have been married 24 years. She also addresses older adults directly, urging them to reestablish the tradition that those with experience serve as advocates and protectors for people starting out.

In the closing chapter, Kantor asks readers to picture themselves in a room where they feel pride and the energy of opportunity. She argues the current crisis may contain hidden wellsprings, citing precedents: Hewlett-Packard was founded during the Great Depression, Airbnb launched after the 2008 financial crisis, and Signal, a secure messaging app, was created in response to revelations about mass surveillance. She contends that if AI becomes dominant, it will open vast needs for what no computer can provide: ethical guidance, artistic inspiration, and human connection. Kantor closes by recapping pivotal decisions: Xxaria could have taken a psychology job without research, Paola could have stuck with nursing, and Kantor could have stayed in law school, in which case the global MeToo movement, the worldwide reckoning against sexual harassment sparked by her Weinstein reporting, might never have happened. She urges readers to refuse to settle, to take themselves seriously, and to find their own room, for their own sake and for everyone else's.