But what if we made the attempt the entire point of work: To teach our kids and our college graduates, our workers young and old, our people in the second decade of their first career and our people in the first year of their third career, how to use the raw material of work to find their very own red threads and then to take responsibility for weaving them into something fine and strong?

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

Here’s another key element when you’re wayfinding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive. Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. Well, there are parts of any job or any career that are hard and annoying—but if most of what you do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you. It’s your career, after all, and you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it— we calculate it at 90,000 to 125,000 hours during the course of your lifetime. If it’s not fun, a lot of your life is going to suck.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

We found scant evidence that the people in our study had an explicit goal of working until a target retirement age to be followed by a life dominated by leisure. The vast majority of people in this study remained engaged in some permutation of a hedgehog well past the age of 60, in some cases into their 70s, 80s, even 90s. That said, nearly half the people in our study had a “retirement” from one hedgehog partway through their lives and faced the challenge of transitioning to the next one. Sometimes these were relatively smooth transitions, such as Tenley Albright’s shift from skating to surgery.