When David Risher graduated from Princeton (BA, comparative literature, 1987), he picked a literary quote to serve as his yearbook epigram. His choice came from Marlow, the introspective narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “I don’t like work—no man does—but what I like is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”
Not too many people approach Conrad’s harrowing novella as a source of self-help insights, but inspiration can come from the strangest of places.
Let’s seize hold of Risher’s unusual starting point and see where it takes us. The impact of this quote resides in the final five words: seeing work as “the chance to find yourself.” Implicitly, this means transcending the economist’s view of work as a habitual exchange of labor for money. Yes, work provides paychecks, which translate into food, shelter, clothing, and modern-day luxuries. But something bigger is in play too. Work’s full significance touches on entirely different factors—simultaneously more ethereal and more essential.
Work is how you establish your identity. It’s how you enhance your sense of self when life is going well; how you redefine yourself when you’re feeling restless; and how you redeem your identity when fate has treated you cruelly. In the “tough love” self-esteem workshops of Joseph Conrad, when the sense of self has fallen apart, there’s only one thing for us to do. Get back to work, and find ourselves anew.
Never mind the opening of the Conrad quote and its perfunctory insistence that work is inherently unlikable. In the decades since Conrad set down his fountain pen, work has been transformed—at least for college graduates—into something safer, more comfortable, and more sustaining for the human spirit.
Until now, this book has focused most often on the career choices people make in the final stages of college and in the first few years after graduation. The Conrad quote nudges us into provocative new territory, with its implied insistence that work always becomes the crucible in which identity is created, melted down—and created again. Perhaps the process doesn’t stop when a person turns thirty.
Instead, Conrad invites us to see each new job as beginning a fresh chapter in our never-ending quest to define who we are. We’re always Josh Sucher, stringing Internet cables across a floor and wondering what comes next. We never stop being Bridget Connolly, listening to Ratatat on her headphones near midnight and trying to meet the toughest deadline of her life. We’re forever Oliver Meeker, returning from Vietnam and hoping his past journeys have helped him develop enough ingenuity to master this new language called blockchain. By implication, the spirit of exploration that carried us out of college and into our first few jobs must be a crucial part of our forties, fifties, and beyond.
I’m going to spend the rest of this chapter exploring the full implications of the roads we choose in college. I’ll start with what liberal arts educators hope is true, followed by the results of a comprehensive study of the ways we Americans relate to our jobs. After that, a series of life stories that speak to the long-term trajectories a liberal arts background can create. At the end, I will share the full—and quite remarkable—story of David Risher, the Princeton graduate who brought Joseph Conrad’s epigram into the conversation in the first place.
If you were born in 1990 or later, think of this chapter as reassurance that a strong grounding in the humanities or social sciences doesn’t have an expiration date. Not only have you gained strengths that help you win good internships at age nineteen and intriguing full-time jobs soon after graduation, you also possess critical-thinking strengths that will help you thrive in decades to come, no matter what social and economic transformations lie ahead.
If you’ve been out of college for a long time, think of this chapter as a nuanced look at how to relaunch your career at any point. Optimists end up being refreshingly happy with their ever-evolving choices; even the wariest people achieve a calmness that helps them deal with life’s ups and downs. Shrug off the ways advancing age brings gray hair and aching joints to your cohort; it’s still possible to stay in touch with the explorer’s spirit that has defined this book.
When university deans, provosts, and presidents talk about the liberal arts’ impact on life, it’s natural for them to take the conversation back to ancient Rome. Where did we get the term liberal arts? The right place to look is in the first century B.C., when Cicero positioned the artes quae libero sunt dignae (arts worthy of a free man) as being markedly different from the artes serviles (the servile arts of lower-class tradespeople). The elitist nature of Cicero’s distinction makes us squirm today, but we still cherish the implication that the liberal arts train us to take full advantage of our freedom, helping us be the most thoughtful, engaged citizens we can be.
A similar etymological argument is in play when we look at the word humanities. It derives from the Latin term humanitas, which, as writer Michael Lind points out, is meant to evoke “the higher, uniquely human faculties of the mind.” Practical disciplines can prepare people for next month’s work; the humanities are meant to prepare us for eternity.
Such antecedents help educational leaders position the liberal arts curriculum as an asset that brings rewards long past graduation day or the hunt for the first few jobs. It’s reassuring to hear George Forsythe, the president of Westminster College, define a liberal arts education as “the path to a lifetime of genuine success and fulfillment.” It’s inspiring to hear Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin, portray liberal arts values as the foundation for “a more fulfilling life.” And it’s enormously satisfying to visit the Internet’s home pages of liberal arts programs at schools as diverse as Youngstown State, Holy Cross, and the University of Texas. Such upbeat messages are expressed in a hundred variants. Get a liberal arts education, and you can expect all the benefits of “lifelong learning,” “a sense of wonder,” and “active engagement in the world.”
The skeptic within me wonders, though, if liberal arts’ biggest boosters are selling too hard. As a newspaper reporter, I have met people in the most unlikely professions—from actuaries to feedlot operators—who keep gaining new insights from their jobs. People strain too hard if they claim that studying the humanities and social sciences is the only way to understand the world and how one fits into it. Other paths may prove worthwhile too. Can we portray liberal arts training as measurably better than the alternatives?
Yes, we can.
In 2014, a joint polling initiative by the Gallup Organization and Purdue University asked 29,560 college graduates of all ages how they felt about their jobs. About 40 percent said they were enthusiastic about what they did for a living and emotionally connected to their jobs. (That’s noticeably higher than the 32 percent score for Americans across all levels of education.) Curious to learn more, researchers hunted for statistically significant differences between graduates of big universities and small colleges, and between alumni of highly selective schools and those that take almost everyone. None of those sorting methods uncovered a schism in respondents’ sense of fulfillment, but a different segmentation did.
Within the Gallup-Purdue survey, 41 percent of the humanities, arts, and social science majors said they felt fully engaged by their jobs. By contrast, science majors clocked in at a slightly lower 38 percent; business majors at 37 percent. That isn’t a gigantic gap, but it isn’t a rounding error either. What the researchers’ data shows is that a liberal arts degree provides at least a slightly better chance of long-term fulfillment in your job. “What I like is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”
Ask people what makes a great job so satisfying, bestselling author Daniel Pink writes in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and you will find the most powerful responses tie back to three intrinsic rewards: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Many of the examples that he cites turn out to be—surprise!—fields where liberal arts graduates predominate. Whether you are a writer, a musician, a business leader, or a social activist, you know how to find rewards in what you do. You are driven by a desire to control your life, learn about your world, and accomplish something that endures. Instead of obsessing about other people’s notions of success, you possess the confidence to build your own norms and stay true to them.
Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Those terms can guide us in a deeper exploration of Conrad’s fundamental theorem of work. Pink’s taxonomy also fits in nicely with this book’s five-part dissection of critical thinking. Each line of argument converges on the same essential truths.
• As we extend our careers into our forties and beyond, living on the frontier becomes less about staking out terrain that no one else has ever claimed before and more about creating the freedom to define work our way. We become more willing to ply our trades in proven territory, as long as we enjoy the flexibility and trust that are embodied by autonomy.
• Analyzing complex situations and finding the right solutions stop being two distinct skills. They fuse into something new, called mastery.
• Reading the room and inspiring people stop being talents that we share unhesitatingly. We become less likely to tolerate mismatches between an organization’s objectives and our private values. Instead, we look for clarity of purpose.
Let’s take a closer look at how these principles have played out in five people’s lives.
Autonomy
On a drizzly October weekend, Abe Dane is guiding me through a Candide-style tour of his work history. As far as I can tell, he is on his sixth career. Or perhaps his seventh. Way back when, he graduated from Pennsylvania’s Haverford College (BA, English, 1984) with scattered interests in British romantic poetry, the philosophy of science, and the writings of the Brontë sisters. He lacked any clear career plans. After a series of stops in New York and Boston, he eventually settled in Providence, Rhode Island, where he and his wife own a big, bohemian house. It’s late afternoon, and I’m chatting in the kitchen with Dane as he tries to get dinner ready.
Nothing in this kitchen fits into normal middle-class life. Elegant flourishes abound, including the giant copper-bottom skillet in which Abe is conjuring up a creamy version of sliced potatoes and sautéed spinach. Chaos abounds too. The Danes have decided to eat by candlelight, even though they don’t seem to own any candleholders. In an effort to help, I try to jam two long green tapers into wine bottles. Then I notice that neither candle has a visible wick. This doesn’t surprise anyone. We improvise a solution by squeezing half-burned matches into the tips of the candles, creating makeshift wicks. And why not? That’s how the Danes roll.
In about an hour, we will start discussing the serious stuff, including Dane’s current job as president of Tizra, a software company that specializes in getting educational and professional publications online. Since 2006, Dane and co-founder David Durand have built Tizra carefully, with notable achievements that include digitizing the complete papers of Albert Einstein. Eventually, Dane will tell me how he invented this high-profile job that provides all the autonomy (and purpose) he could want.
But we’re not there yet. First Dane wants to take me back to his awkward beginnings after college. “My self-esteem was all over the map,” he recalls. “I was so infatuated with my literary heroes that the only goal I could think of was someday to fill a couple feet of library-shelf space. On the other hand, I was supporting myself with yard work and living in a shared house with a bunch of friends. I’d eat most of my meals at bars’ happy hours. Thank God for Beer and Fear nights at pubs. If you played it right, you could pay a dollar to get in. They’d screen a bunch of horror movies. I’d hover at the buffet table and hog the free hot dogs.”
After eighteen months of aimlessness, Dane signed on as an editorial assistant at a newsletter company. He fetched coffee. He wrote news capsules about corporate governance. He tried freelancing for more exciting publications and got a few pieces published. When Popular Mechanics offered him an editorial assistant job, he jumped. A few months later, his new boss quit. Suddenly Dane was the interim science and technology editor. Making the most of the magazine’s gee-whiz culture, Dane drew up a long list of cool things that he wanted to report on. Could he ride in a jet fighter? Could he travel through ocean waters in a submarine? His editors said yes every time. He began to build a writing portfolio.
In 1993, Dane won a yearlong sabbatical to join an MIT program for science journalists. He headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, thinking he would bone up on systems engineering. Then he discovered the Internet was coming alive. “It was all that students were talking about,” Dane recalls. “I was about thirty and they were nineteen, but I was learning a ton from them.” When he returned to Popular Mechanics, he built a tiny website at home so he could pitch his boss on the idea of putting the publication online. “The magazine’s computers couldn’t run a web browser,” he says, so he went home, got his big old 486 computer, hailed a taxi, and lugged the machine into the office.
A few months later, Dane took charge of a magazine-website initiative for parent company Hearst Corporation. His salary doubled to $100,000. For a year or two, he was a big-league player in New York’s media scene. No longer confined to Popular Mechanics’ embryonic site, he helped build online versions of mass-readership titles such as Good Housekeeping and Redbook. As those projects took off, however, Hearst’s bosses decided to put editors with more subject expertise in charge. Dane was shunted aside. Now he needed to find something else.
During his time at Hearst, Dane found his professional destiny. He discovered he was good at getting editorial teams, marketing teams, and information-technology teams working together. And he was ready to cut loose from the big offices, high prestige, and shrinking fortunes of old media. Getting involved with scrappy new projects and rethinking everything from first principles delighted him, even if his new staffs and budgets were far smaller. “It felt great to do something that wasn’t in decline,” he explains, adding that it was as exciting as flying in an F-15.
All he needed was the right project.
This proved surprisingly difficult. In 1997, Dane and his brother Mike created E-Prints, a digital e-commerce company for professional photographers. They won 390 clients and filed patent applications for some of their technology. When the dot-com boom ended, however, E-Prints was too small to thrive on its own. The company’s intellectual property was sold to Kodak in 2001. Hunting for something new, Dane helped MIT build out its online education initiative (OpenCourseWare) for a few years. He also joined forces with some Rhode Island innovators who were taking apart encyclopedias and reassembling them for the web. Their talents and approach appealed to him, especially if he could have a hand in setting strategy.
Finally, in 2006, all the pieces came together. Dane teamed up with David Durand, a PhD computer scientist, and a couple of other colleagues to create a company that would help publishers make the jump from print to digital. They borrowed the name Tizra from Arabic; the word refers to the leaves of a shrub used to make bookbinding leather more pliable. Aided by some venture capital, they built a software platform suitable for niches such as textbooks and professional-society publications. They weren’t targeting a giant market, but their ability to adapt to the quirks of each customer kept competition away.
Today, Tizra has a few dozen clients, many on long-term contracts. Dane talks about them as if they were his friends—and as far as I can tell, the fellowship is mutual. Later, when I chat with some of Tizra’s customers, they express gentle wonder at Dane’s and Durand’s intense desire to fix every bug in the software even if there’s nothing in the contract language obliging them to do so. That is the kind of company that Tizra’s founders want to run.
In his early fifties, Dane finally is free to convene America’s digital tinkerers on his terms. He’s not much of a profit maximizer; at one point, he confides that Tizra’s clients haven’t ever protested that the software company is charging too much. “Perhaps that means we should raise our prices,” he tells me. Then again, customers are happy, and they recommend Tizra to their friends. Word of mouth keeps the business growing. In the two-income Dane household (Abe’s wife, Jan, runs a cooking-supply store), risk and reward somehow balance out each year. The Danes can afford a few pieces of original art on the walls and good schools and music lessons for their children. Silly luxuries like candleholders can wait.
For someone like Abe Dane, autonomy is the extra ingredient that transforms a turbulent but satisfying career into one that becomes a winner in all dimensions. Such well-paced shifts are wonderful when they happen. For other people, autonomy is more like a desperately needed gasp of air after being stuck under water too long. In career terms, it’s a lifesaver.
In 1993, Gregg Newby found himself stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Saudi Arabia, certified at age twenty-five as an Arabic-English translator. This wasn’t the usual destination for a recent graduate of Mississippi’s Millsaps College (BA, history and religion, 1991). But Newby wasn’t a typical college student. “I grew up living in foster homes,” Newby told me one afternoon as we chat in an office park just outside Jackson, Mississippi. “The government moved me five times, starting at age seven. I kept to myself and read a lot, mostly Victorian thrillers. I started with Oliver Twist. It resonated.”
Shaken by this hard-luck upbringing, Newby never felt in step with the easygoing rhythms of college life. He savored his classes but moved off-campus after freshman year because he didn’t want to shower in public. “The dorms felt like another boys’ home to me,” he confided. “I couldn’t stand it.” To pay his bills, he agreed to help other students with their term papers, either as an officially recognized tutor or… not. Unsure what to do after graduation in 1991, Newby seized on one certainty: he wanted to move as far away from Mississippi as possible.
For the next fifteen years, Newby careened through a series of stressful, highly constrained jobs. Regardless of whether he was translating phrases for the military or staffing a library’s help desk, he constantly was tasked with problems of other people’s making. He never got to be the boss or even an independent operator. Time and again, he became the unappreciated peacemaker, trying to create a good outcome in the face of anger or apathy on all sides.
Newby’s tour of duty as a military linguist lasted six years. (The translation dilemmas that he faced cannot be shared in a book intended for general audiences.) Eventually, he headed back to the United States and earned a master’s degree in history. He tried teaching at several universities but didn’t enjoy it. “I can’t learn for a student,” he told me resignedly. “They have to do it themselves.” A few years later, he became an in-house historian and archivist for the public libraries of Memphis, Tennessee. At least, that is what he thought his job entailed. Then he began meeting the library’s patrons. One woman insisted Newby show her how to play an online basketball game on the library’s computers. When he politely explained that he was a historian who didn’t know anything about her game, she erupted. “You’re responsible for it,” she shot back. “It’s on the Internet.”
Even when Newby retreated to his historian’s desk, on the top floor of the library, the eccentrics wouldn’t leave him be. One befuddled patron claimed to be a direct descendant of Ulysses S. Grant and wanted Newby to help prove this. Another insisted that she owned a mirror left in Memphis by Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, during his visit to the city. (No such visit ever took place.) “They always wanted me to authenticate what they had,” Newby told me. “They couldn’t imagine that they might be wrong.”
Battered by fate but never crushed, Newby eventually found a new line of work graced with the flexibility and dignity that his earlier jobs denied him. Now he takes on business-writing projects for clients whose values meet his expectations. In his most lucrative year, he earned six figures writing about diseases and cures on behalf of a major health insurer. At his current employer, a social-media company called EdgeTheory, he oversees a creative team cranking out Facebook posts on everything from restaurants to vacation rentals. Bosses appreciate his nimble way with words. He welcomes the freedom to choose tasks that appeal to him and avoid nightmares in the making.
By this point in our conversation, it was almost dusk. Just about everyone else at Newby’s company had gone home. We were sitting alone in a conference room, and as I gathered up my notepads, I asked one last question: Did his college education help? Newby took a while to answer. “We were taught to be passionate about big topics,” he said. That turned out to be a foundational strength, sustaining him through many lean years. He never lost his curiosity or his desire to learn more about new topics.
Mastery
Jessica Benjamin is about to give a master class in selling. We’ve been chatting on the phone for about half an hour. Much of our conversation covered her college days, back in the early 1990s. She started out studying philosophy at Penn State before transferring to Reed College and switching her major to English. We’ve shared respectful murmurings about the writings of Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. She has taken me through her rocky moments too, including a series of junior-year exams that went very badly. “Reed was like being on an ice floe, trying to figure out what was going on,” she confides.
I know Benjamin now works as a sales manager in Massachusetts on behalf of Monster.com, which sells recruitment advertising software and services. There’s big money involved; the packages that she and her team sell to corporate recruiters can total sixty thousand dollars or more. My fundamental question is obvious to both of us, even before I put it into words: What’s an English major like you doing in a job like this?
“I inadvertently got well prepared for this,” Benjamin tells me. “I can talk to people about almost anything. If they want to talk about art, we can talk art. If they want to talk about how to fix cars, I can give that a try, even if I don’t know a great deal about it. It’s just basic shooting the breeze. It’s very easy to be in sales if you can do that.”
There’s more. “Much of my job involves making sense of the unfamiliar,” she says. “A background in liberal arts helps when it comes to scoping out a new product. If we’re launching something new at Monster, I’m the one who asks: ‘Who would want to use this? How would they use it?’ That whole perspective builds on skills I developed at Reed.”
Finally, when Benjamin gets involved in a client presentation, she takes a moment to figure out the best way of connecting with this new person’s decision-making process. “Monster’s basic products can be explained in three different ways,” she tells me. “If people want to hear a technical version, I tell them about the ways we use cookies to track users, showing them job ads that are similar to what they’ve been looking at. If people are more comfortable with an analogy, I tell them that what we do is similar to the way that when you look at shoes online, the next site you visit will be showing you shoe ads. And if they just want data, I tell them our system will give you a twenty percent uplift in the number of people that click on your job ads.” She’s equally comfortable with all three explanations; she’s an expert in knowing which one will work best.
With her liberal arts background, Benjamin didn’t leave college expecting to migrate from A Room of One’s Own to “a sales quota of one’s own.” After graduation, she initially wanted to be a journalist. When she discovered how poorly that field paid, especially at the community newspapers that appealed to her, she reconsidered. Later, she spent three years in law school, thinking that new expertise in deal structuring and contract negotiations might qualify her to become a publishing executive. Those aspirations withered quickly too. She was trying to make a mark in a shrinking industry with too many publishing executives already. Whenever she landed an interesting job, a subsequent merger or restructuring would scramble her chances.
Over and over, though, Benjamin discovered that she could sell… and that she liked doing so. In college, she sold pizzas to pick up spare cash. At the Willamette Week, she sold newspaper ads. At Reed Elsevier, she sold recruitment ads for New Scientist magazine. Coming to Monster “has felt like a second resurgence in my career,” she tells me. Even when clients get angry about some perceived problem, she resolves matters quickly without getting dispirited.
“Nobody in the business world ever gets as mad as a person who got pizza with the wrong toppings,” she observes. “If you can sort out a pizza order gone wrong—at age twenty—you can deal with the mix-ups that happen when people buy a hundred thousand dollars of job ads.”
Does it matter that decades ago, Jessica Benjamin was an English major and the author of a senior thesis on Virginia Woolf? Is there any significance to Abe Dane’s college-age infatuation with the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge? Or would the two of them have journeyed toward the same sorts of multistage careers even if they had majored in business instead? We never know how all the different alternate-reality scenarios of our lives might have played out. Still, in this situation—and in many similar ones—we can make pretty good guesses.
In Dane’s case, people with vocational degrees don’t make so many wild, fortuitous leaps in the early years of their career. They certainly don’t win admission to select fellowship programs at MIT with well-thought-out programs of study in mind and then jettison those in favor of radically different alternatives that caught their eyes. Serendipity plays a large role in the full arc of many liberal arts graduates’ careers. Train in a more tightly defined discipline, and you are less likely to let the hunger for new experiences drive your career.
In Benjamin’s case, a business degree could have led her into a similar, sales-focused career with ease. Yet her version of mastery probably wouldn’t have been the same. Every time I’ve spoken with her, I’ve come away with the sense that her internal scorekeeping ranges well beyond business metrics that traditionally define sales success. She adheres to the Conrad test. Her ledger includes a lot of room for making work emotionally comfortable and satisfying too.
In Benjamin’s words: “I try to put a lot of fun into my work. I’ll send out handwritten notes to people, and I’ll tell them they are fun to work with, whether it’s true or not.” The payoff? “Often it will make them more fun to work with.”
A few years ago, I served on a middle-school board with David Satterwhite, a Berkeley history major (BA, 1989) who has been running software-sales teams in Silicon Valley for nearly twenty years. Like most people in this book, he bounced around in a variety of jobs early in life. He tried to make it as a musician; he briefly toiled as an accountant; he spent some time in frontline sales himself.
It wasn’t until 1997 that he tried overseeing teams of salespeople. As he later told me: “I knew two things at the end of the first week. I was completely underwater—and I loved it.”
Ever since, Satterwhite has become an unusual sort of specialist. He’s the sales-management expert that start-ups hire when they reach about fifteen million dollars a year in sales. Typically, he stays three or four years, helping to grow revenue rapidly. Then he moves on when the start-up becomes takeover bait and a giant corporate owner with its own sales-management team steps in. Stock-options payouts have been big enough to permit some long vacations, but that’s not his style. Work is where he finds himself, both in renewed opportunities to build winning teams and in the constant quest to do it better each time.
What’s his edge? Satterwhite takes me back to his college days, studying Germany’s destiny after World War II. “I learned in college that there’s never just one reason why things happen. Most people can’t accept that. Everyone wants there to be just one reason. But in Germany’s case, you had to keep an eye on Truman, Stalin, the Cold War, the French, and so on. In sales, you need to see the whole picture too. Your product, the competition, the industry cycle, and the role of each person in the negotiations. It’s complex. I like that.”
Purpose
After David Risher graduated from Princeton, he spent more than a decade acting like a “sleeper spy” trying to infiltrate an unfamiliar culture. Marching through a series of demanding corporate jobs, he met quarterly objectives and kept his bosses happy. Looking at his résumé from those days, you’ll find it hard to see any trace of the unsettled, restless literature major who drew inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s darkest work. Instead, Risher resembled the sort of person who kept Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors by his bedside for late-evening reassurance.
To pay off his student loans, Risher started with a two-year stint in the high-paying world of management consulting. His bosses encouraged him to try Harvard Business School next, and he did. That led him to Microsoft, where he spent six years, chiefly as a manager in charge of the software company’s first database product. His final place of employment during this corporate phase was Amazon.com in the late 1990s, just as the Internet retailer was coming of age. Risher thrived in each job. At Amazon, he rose to become one of the company’s five most important executives, overseeing the online sale of books and much more.
Then the searcher reawakened. In early 2002, Risher quit Amazon without offering much of a reason why. He recast himself as a business-school instructor at the University of Washington for a few years, and then grew restless again. He and his wife moved to Barcelona, thinking it would be interesting to raise their young daughters in a different culture. Settling into Spain, he lectured at times at the local business schools but stopped working at anything full-time.
After a few years, Risher took even bolder steps to unmoor himself from his past. The Rishers boxed up their possessions, headed to the Barcelona airport, and set off to see the world. They became philanthropy pilgrims, building a house in Vietnam one month, teaching English in China the next. They homeschooled (or road-schooled) their children, bringing Amazon Kindle readers on the trip and loading up the devices with worthy books. At age forty-three, the longtime corporate achiever was trying to find himself.
In Ecuador, Risher’s journey finally paid off. He was doing some volunteer work in an orphanage when he became intrigued by a padlocked building with books inside. “That’s our library,” the orphanage director told him. When he asked why it was closed, she explained that most of the books inside were misguided donations from far away with no relevance to her students. It was safer to keep the door locked so animals wouldn’t get in. When he asked to take a look anyway, she told him that wouldn’t be possible, explaining: “I think I’ve lost the key.”
Years later, Risher still describes that orphanage encounter as if it happened an hour ago. “Everything in my life came into focus in a different way,” he says. “I’d spent a lot of time sending millions of books to people who could afford them. My kids were reading on Kindles all around the world. I thought: Why not come up with a way to give books to people who can’t afford them, so their lives can be changed?”
A few months later, Risher was back in Spain forming a nonprofit that became known as Worldreader. He wheedled thirty free Kindles out of Amazon, to see if a Kindle donation program could work in a single school. When that pilot program clicked, Risher called on the U.S. Agency for International Development and lined up enough support to stock a half dozen schools in Ghana with Kindles. A few months later, Kenya.
By the end of 2016, more than five million people in Africa, India, and Latin America had started at least one Worldreader book via their smartphone apps. The company had placed more than 22,000 e-readers in schools across fourteen African countries. Worldreader’s library consisted of more than 50,000 digital books, chosen to satisfy a wide range of possible student readers. Early selections tilted heavily toward American staples such as Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series. More recently, Worldreader’s collection has been growing mostly through the addition of indigenous writers’ work, such as William Kamkwamba’s Malawi story of a farming village, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Decades ago, Risher himself was the family bookworm, savoring titles such as C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Edward Eager’s Half Magic. “I used to read books on the walk to school, with my nose down, oblivious to everything else,” he recalls. “People would call my parents, saying: ‘David could get run over!’” Now, he takes a vicarious delight in visiting African classrooms and meeting with each school’s top reader.
When the students want to chat him up, that’s even better. One Ghanaian, Okanta Kate, said she wanted to become the most famous writer in the world. She had already written an anthology of poems, including one called “Agony of a Woman.” Could Risher help get her poetry published? There was only one possible answer to that question. Kate’s poetry is now available in Worldreader’s digital library. The last time I checked, “Agony of a Woman” was the twentieth-most-downloaded work. (She has the gift. Take a look.)
In financial terms, of course, David Risher is an outlier. Thanks to his business success at Microsoft and Amazon, he enjoys an investment portfolio worth many millions of dollars. He can pay himself a nonprofit-size salary of $79,000—far less than he earned during his peak corporate years—and still live quite comfortably in San Francisco. He can pursue a line of work that’s rich in social purpose without making the economic sacrifices that someone from a more meager starting point would face. He doesn’t have to contend with a broken-down car, a heating bill that can’t be paid, or all the other hardships a social crusader from a less fortunate start would face.
Yet there’s another dimension of Risher’s journey that speaks to everyone’s career. To promote global literacy, he didn’t need to set up Worldreader himself. He could have accomplished nearly as much by sending checks to worthy organizations and letting them do all the work. He didn’t, though, and his reasons turn out to be intensely personal.
Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Risher constantly straddled two worlds. His mother is white; his father is black. As a result, something as simple as going to summer camp in the 1970s wasn’t simple at all. Over coffee one afternoon, Risher tells me of a fellow camper who confronted him the evening before parents were going to visit. The other boy’s comment: “It must be embarrassing for you, having one white parent and one black parent.” The incident happened more than forty years ago, and Risher recounts it quite calmly. At the end, though, he says: “I still remember his name.”
Being seen as an outsider can create an edgy, relentless internal drive that propels people to great heights. “I’m probably one of them,” Risher says. During his corporate days, he spent fifteen years working around the clock to get good at logistics, good at finance, good at negotiating and a dozen other business skills. In each setting, he needed to apply those skills to meet expectations defined by other people long before he showed up. Even his most creative work, ultimately, was just the implementation of someone else’s desires.
It’s different at Worldreader. “This is me,” Risher says. “This is what I do.” Every time he puts his corporate skills to work, he is trying to bring his own dream a little closer to fulfillment. With Worldreader, Risher gets to link the two most disparate parts of the earth, every day.
“What I like is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”