"What Are the Scripts You Grew Up With About Work?"

For the past few years, I’ve been opening my podcast conversations with some version of the same question: What are the stories and scripts you grew up with around work, life, and success?

Thanks to an assist from AI transcript generation and sorting into themes, I was able to pull every answer and then start organizing them into some themes.

Over 50 guests answered this question between 2022 and 2024. Here’s what they said.

1. “Work hard, things will pay off”

Definitely a story I grew up with. “Hard work” is repeated so often, its become a suitcase phrase, with each person ascribing their own meaning to it.

The common thing about this script is that it’s inherently optimistic: things will work out, as long as you just put in the work.

Ali Greene (#117) grew up chasing A+‘s without ever asking what the payoff was:

“The script that I grew up with was always aspire to work really hard and to always want to succeed and climb that ladder for more. And so what that meant as a little kid was getting a B+ or an A- wasn’t enough. Why didn’t I get that A+? … But I didn’t stop to think what that top meant until I was way late in that game.”

Steve Schlafman (#170) got the script through watching his mom work two jobs:

“If you don’t work hard, then you’re going to run out of money and you’re going to be poor and you’re going to be living paycheck to paycheck, hand to mouth.”

Over time, Steve said, that script mutated: “Work means security” became “work means respect, wealth, power, prestige.”

Nick Maggiulli (#132) followed the path perfectly and still ended up questioning it:

“Growing up, everything was about, you know, work hard and you’ll be rewarded … I did that. I did it really well. Like I had straight A’s all through … was valedictorian in my high school class … went to Stanford University … went into consulting, right? … Just keep following the path, keep following the path. … And then you realize a lot of areas of life that’s not necessarily true.”

Claire Emerson (#111), growing up in Australia, absorbed a quieter version. Fulfillment wasn’t part of the deal:

“It was definitely, you know, you work because you have to, not necessarily because you love what you’re doing. … I’m not 100% sure that they were absolutely fulfilled from their jobs. But I didn’t really think that that was sort of part of it.”

Steph Smith (#138) grew up in a household of scarcity where only her mother worked. Her version of the script was shaped by a specific goal:

“I really was motivated by this idea of eventually unfettered wealth. Now, that doesn’t mean becoming a billionaire, but even just simple things like the idea of if I go to the mall, I can buy ice cream without thinking about it, without thinking about the $3.”

Ben Mercer (#158) grew up with two doctor parents in Bath. “My mum was a GP, sort of super available to the local community. And my dad was a surgeon, someone who was getting called in in the middle of the night. … It seemed tough, it seemed like really rewarding, it seemed very linear and kind of obvious in a way.” The other script came from school, pre-2008: “Get good grades, get to a good university, and you can take that degree and really do anything you want. … You could get a degree in English literature or geography or whatever, and you could take it to the City of London and go and work in finance or consultancy. … I suppose midway through our university studies, that sort of promise ceased.”

Justin Jackson (#168) grew up in Canada with two teachers who worked for a private school. His dad was his first client in almost every business he started: “One script that I did grow up with was that you’re going to go to university. That’s the path to a good job.”

Matt Bateman (#171) got a different script. As a gifted kid in public school in the Southeast, everything came easy:

“It wasn’t that hard for me to kind of do well in school. And so one of the premises or patterns that I learned was things aren’t that hard, things should be easy, and I can do them without trying. And that is a completely false script in life. And the first time you hit resistance to that … college and my first jobs and then graduate school, it was like very hard to deprogram that. I’m like, what is this effort thing that I have to put in and how do I make it not terrible for myself to do these things that I think I want to do?”

Erin Doppelt (#160): “One theme that was really present growing up was the importance of higher-level education. So not necessarily needing to pursue a doctorate or something like that, but success was going to school, staying in school, perfecting something within school.” What broke the script was living abroad: “What I’ve learned from living in India, living in Israel … they’re the people that have this life credibility. … You want to know how to write a book? Sit down, start writing the book.”

2. “Anything worthwhile requires suffering”

I grew up with a version of this, with the idea that working in a job wasn’t supposed to be something you enjoyed, but it was just something you were expected to do as an adult.

As a millennial, I think we came of age in an interesting time in which work actually did get better and more enjoyable while many people had not questioned this inherent script.

Alex Hardy (#145):

“The one that comes to mind is anything worthwhile requires suffering. That was one that was really, really engraved in just the culture that I grew up in. … That kind of achievement was put on a pedestal and the kind of buy-in price that you paid for that was to outwork other people and to tolerate a lot of unpleasant times.”

Paul asked if his parents pushed this. Alex said no: “It was really almost like the water that we were swimming in, honestly.”

Isabel Unraveled (#133) absorbed a similar script but attributed it entirely to herself:

“It wasn’t like being pressured by my environment to do things. I think it was just me observing the world and perceiving what was going to get me somewhere that I thought was quote unquote good or valuable. … I thought the harder the thing that you could do and that you could excel at, the better you were. And so you should always be pursuing the thing that is hardest if you can do it.”

She chose engineering not because she was interested in it, but because it was the hardest option available.

3. “You can do what you love (but it won’t make money)”

A version of the “struggling artist.” For me, I heard the inverse of this, with many iterations of “don’t be a teacher, they don’t make enough money.”

Tara McMullin (#109) got the clearest version of this:

“The main story that I grew up with around work was that I could do what I loved for a living and that I didn’t have to make a lot of money doing it. And my brain, as I think is true for a lot of people, interpreted that as you can do what you love for a living, which is not going to make you much money. … I come from what I would now call a working-class background. My mother worked for herself as a seamstress. So I had this model of extreme flexibility and ownership, but within the context of making very, very, very little money per year.”

Myles Snider (#147), raised in Cleveland: “The idea that you should find something practical and stable and that creativity or food or cooking was not that.”

Lawrence Yeo got the creativity version. Nobody told him not to be creative. They just never talked about creative people the same way:

“I actually do come from a family where there is a lot of artists on my mom’s side. And where creativity is kind of heralded as a virtue, but it was never really spoken about as such. It was just like, okay, that person is … she illustrates children’s books, that’s your cousin. And it kind of stopped there, right? Whereas if someone was a physician, they’d be like, oh, he’s a doctor, as a result, blah, blah, blah. There’s always a clause that’s added more to say about that than the person that may be a creative. So there were no values that were explicitly told, but it was just kind of implicit in the way that it was communicated.”

Justin Moore (#113) felt the pull between music and engineering directly. He chose engineering: “It’s that thing you talk about a lot, which is just like we have these creative and artistic ambitions growing up. But then somehow as we get closer to having to make a decision about what we’re going to do for our life, we always seem to kind of lock into the traditional route.”

Simone Stolzoff (#146) had four parents (divorced, both remarried). His biological parents are both psychologists, his stepdad founded San Francisco Jazz Festival, and his stepmom is a lawyer: “There’s sort of this spectrum of like art on one hand and like traditional professions on the other hand. … That tension between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce has been a theme throughout my whole life.” He went to University High School (“which tells you about everything that you need”) and then Penn. “Even though nothing was explicit about what I had to do or the path that I was on, there was like an implicit assumption that you go to private elementary school and then private high school and then go to the best college that you can possibly go to and then get the highest paying job that you can possibly get.”

Anna Gát (#151) grew up in Hungary with contradictory scripts. “On the one hand, definitely a narrative of success and of not being on the trodden path, of being a very autonomous creator and autonomous maker.” But alongside that was something gendered and more traditional. She compared it to religion: “At some point you realize that it’s impossible to do.”

A related script: play comes after work. Gary Ware (#112) named it directly: “You can only play once the work is done.” It served him as a kid. The problem came later: “It didn’t serve me so much when I got older when there’s an unlimited supply of work that could be done.” When work has no end, the permission to play never arrives.

4. Safety & responsibility above everything

For guests who grew up in immigrant families or families that had experienced instability, the script tends to be the dominant script. For me, with two parents who didn’t graduate college, getting that degree was all about security and it was one of the most important things.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff (#115):

“On my mom’s side, the script was very much that safety was what you had to optimize for. She had a very difficult upbringing. She worked in factories. She’s worked as a house cleaner. … So every single decision that they made when raising us was what is the safest path? … They were really happy when I ended up going to prep school and then studying marketing and working at Google. … Little did they know that I would just quit a few years after that.”

David Pakman (#169) moved from Argentina to the US at age 5 because the economy collapsed:

“There’s the immigrant part and there’s the Jewish part. So in general, even nonimmigrant Jews, often knowing the history of Jews being kicked out from so many places, you have this implicit sense of fragility. And even when things are good, you’ve got to be careful.”

Dror Poleg (#134) grew up in Israel, descended from Holocaust survivors on both sides. All four grandparents lost their first families in the war:

“That cloud of like, you know, you are a survivor, you always need to make sure there’s an escape path, you always have to both seek stability but be ready to change direction, never assume that where you were born is where you’re going to die, or that what you’re doing today is going to be there tomorrow. That was very much always in the air.”

Matt Yao (#170), whose parents immigrated from China:

“In order for them to even come here, they basically had to be the number one in their town, number one in their village, so on and so forth. And they both came to the US to get PhDs in chemistry, but then ended up basically never using it in their entire career. … I had the benefit of not having tiger parents. They very much encouraged me to try hard in school, but I never got rewarded or punished for report cards. And so I felt like I was always naturally following my curiosity. Even if they were in the background kind of like steering me along the way. But … I never questioned work. It was always like work is just something that you have to do.”

Andy Schoonover (#118) didn’t come from an immigrant family, but got a similar lesson:

“There was just kind of this thing that was ingrained in me that you would have to take care of yourself. Nobody else is going to take care of you. And so go out and work.”

Kevin Espiritu (#165) grew up half Filipino, half white, Catholic. The script was more ambient than explicit:

“You’re expected to get good grades, you’re expected to go to college, you’re expected to do something with that degree afterwards to pay for your life. But there wasn’t a deeper … it wasn’t much beyond that. It was like, if you can get a good job and pay for things, then you’re good.”

Bilal Zaidi (#159), who left Google, grew up in a working-class immigrant family in the UK. His parents came from Pakistan. “My dad literally worked in a factory, my mum worked in retail, and they both worked their ways up into different worlds. So they lived the equivalent of the American dream, but in England.” Money was the main script: “I remember doing like a spreadsheet, looking at a spreadsheet with my dad every month.”

Jenny Blake (#156) had encouraging parents, but the script she absorbed was about money:

“I could see that the fights that my parents did have were often around money, and I saw how hard my parents were working full-time to provide money for my brother and I. … Even at 8 years old, I started saving birthday money. … I was always kind of, I think I had more of a scarcity mindset until I knew what that word even meant, of acquiring money, saving money, hanging onto money, figuring out how to get money. … And therefore what comes with that is trying to get the right grades, get into the right school, get the right job, advance quickly at that job, and don’t do anything to disrupt the money cart, to put it bluntly.”

Michael Steiner (#114) grew up blue-collar in New Jersey, parents didn’t go to college. His script was simpler than most: “I just got fed the right information at the right pace. In order to just rock it through, not faster than anyone else, but rock it through school with a lot of great feedback and a lot of great inspiring teachers.” No grand narrative. Just keep going.

5. “Doctor, lawyer, engineer”

A very popular script in asian and immigrant communities. I think it’s popular because the path is so prescribed and clear. You can decode the rules and norms and then simply execute.

Trung Phan (#139) didn’t bother being subtle about it:

“Asian, man. Asian parents, dude. Like, you can guess right now, what did my parents want me to be when I grew up? Just, just guess.”

He went pre-med. Then almost failed calculus because the class was at 8 AM. “So I’m like, I got to find a major where all the classes start at noon. And sure enough, it was history and sociology.”

Melvin Varghese (#152), South Indian parents: “There’s kind of 4 options, right? Career-wise, which is doctor, lawyer, engineer, although I heard the 4th option recently, which was failure.” He was supposed to be a pediatrician. He struggled with AP Chem and AP Cal, ended up a psychology PhD instead: “I’m a doctor but not an MD, right? Which is like really … there’s actually a subtlety sometimes I feel like in Indian communities.”

Dr. Dawn Baker (#154): “One thing that was always emphasized in my family was academic excellence. Both of my parents were at the top of their high school classes. … There was also quite an air of upward mobility in my family. Both of my parents came from working class families, and they were very into climbing the success ladder in the outward terms of success.” Her dad modeled this directly. She watched him go from beginning manager to middle manager to executive: “He worked very long hours each day.”

Jessica Depatie (#148), half Korean, got the script at the pediatrician’s office: “They’d be like, oh, look at Dr. Chang. She’s so smart, so pretty. Don’t you want to be like that? I’m like, yeah, I do.” She took Latin in high school, fully committed to becoming a doctor. Then she failed college algebra three times. “It was very clear that I needed to take a different path.” She went into journalism. Years later, she apprenticed with a medicine woman in Costa Rica. Her mom called crying. Jessica’s response: “You guys instilled in me that I was here to help people, and I’m just gonna do it my own way.”

Amy Tangerine (#128) was the exception. Chinese parents who immigrated from India but broke the pattern:

“They raised me in a way where they truly believed I could do anything that I wanted. … And I think that’s different than a lot of Asian upbringings.”

6. Parents who showed a different way

Some guests grew up with parents who had already broken the script, which gave them a different starting point. I always find these people fascinating as it’s interesting to imagine how I might have thought about work differently in thees environments.

Aida Alston grew up in San Francisco with parents who met in a theater house. Her dad taught tai chi. Her mom would pull the kids out of school for a month:

“She told my teachers, ‘Aida’s going to be out of school for a month.’ Like, there’s not like a, ‘Can Aida leave for a month?’”

Dom Francks (#167) had parents who left their law careers in their 30s and traveled the world for two years. They returned to a more stable house and burb life when they had Dom, but as he said,

“They consistently look back on that despite the fact that it defined their careers. And they said that was the best decision they ever made.”

Nina Simon (#127) had a dad who has been in the same rock band (Sha Na Na) since he was 20. She saw both the glamour and the ugliness of that path, and her mom’s more practical entrepreneurship alongside it. Her takeaway: “I saw work as something I was excited about. I saw different versions of it, but definitely saw that it was connected to security and freedom.”

Derek Sivers (#135) absorbed his scripts from musicians, not parents:

“The way that Bob Dylan, for example, was known for one thing … and then at the Newport Folk Festival, he showed up with an electric band and somebody in the audience yelled, Judas. … And he had this lyric, ‘she’s an artist, she don’t look back.’ Little things like that would get into my soul. … Miles Davis kind of did the same thing, changing genres radically in his long music career. David Bowie changing personas. … So I think these music stories shaped how I think about my life.”

He ended up in a circus, dating the daughter of hippies, surrounded by jugglers and magicians: “And so I actually find it very alienating later when I meet normal people who had a normal life and they say things like, how did you get the courage to quit your job? And I look at them like, job? What do you mean?”

Adam Braff (#123), McKinsey partner turned indie freelancer, got his scripts from watching his parents:

“I grew up in a house where everybody was writing all the time. … I found an old trove of newsletters that my mother was writing for the local parent-teacher organization. And I think I was subconsciously copying the style of writing that she was doing.”

Danny Miranda (#149) got the simplest and most generous version: “The scripts that I grew up with was that life is something to be lived with love, with family, with hard work, you can achieve anything you want. And we will have my family. We will have the support behind you, and we believe in you to achieve whatever it is you are setting out to achieve.”

Billy Oppenheimer (#141), youngest of three with an entrepreneur dad: “My parents were supportive of whatever I wanted to do. … It was sort of just, I was on my own almost.”

Lauren Razavi grew up in a multicultural family in the UK. Her dad is a refugee from Iran, youngest of 8 children who all fled around the same time. Family vacations meant visiting diaspora relatives across Europe: “It wasn’t kind of visiting Germany and only seeing Germany. It was visiting Germany and seeing this pocket of the Iranian diaspora within Germany.” Her dad spent time in California before the UK, and she absorbed something from that: “I’ve always detected in him a huge, like, American dream kind of energy. You can make a path for yourself. You can be entrepreneurial. You can do stuff against the odds.”

Luke Burgis (#153) grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His dad was a 101st Airborne paratrooper who served in Vietnam, then spent 10 years skydiving: “You could pay my dad $100 and he’d jump out of a plane into your backyard during a backyard party or barbecue.” His mom was an artist. Both eventually settled down for stability. His dad became a long-haul truck driver, his mom became a teacher. The script Luke absorbed: “Get everything out of your system. And then at a certain point, you’re going to need to settle down and get serious and have a stable job. And the two things were somehow like you couldn’t do both at the same time.”

7. Wired for an unconventional path from an early age

Some people were just never going to fit into the default path and knew this much earlier than I did.

Tasshin Fogleman (#110) remembered being on a school bus in fifth grade and realizing the whole track felt wrong:

“I have a very strong memory of being on a bus in, I think maybe the 5th grade and noticing that I was like on track to finish elementary school and then go to middle school and then go to high school and then go to college, and then I’d be done with my learning. … It felt tragic to me. … Later, when I was considering graduate school, one of the things that felt also dissatisfying about that was specializing. It’s like, I don’t want to specialize. That seems gross. I don’t want to be the best at this. I want to learn a lot of different things. … I never felt compelled to have a traditional job. I’ve very briefly held, quote, traditional jobs, and then those also just bounced off me. It’s like, no, thank you. I don’t want to have 40-hour work weeks and a 9-to-5 and a 401(k). It just didn’t make any sense. It was like someone speaking a foreign language.”

He eventually found a script that did make sense: joining a monastery. “I didn’t know anyone that trained at a monastery. But I was like, that actually makes sense to me to do that.”

David Kadavy (#124) wanted to express himself creatively but had no models for it:

“There wasn’t really good examples around me of role models, people to follow, to do that. I wasn’t surrounded by people who were entrepreneurs or who had their own businesses really, or who did anything original or interesting. They just were sort of middle-class people with secure jobs in Middle America. And those were the scripts that I was surrounded by, and those were the ones that I had to notice and then deprogram myself of to go down the path of a creative career.”

Cate Hall (#174) followed the narrow path for years before looking around:

“I got a lot of messages of, here are some narrow ways to be successful and to make sure that you’re successful. And this is important because you don’t want to end up stuck here in Tucson, Arizona. … That put me on a track in life where I was continuously seeking success for its own sake until I got to my late 20s, early 30s, and took a step back and thought, whoa, what am I doing here? I don’t want the lives of anybody that’s around me. I should try to do something else.”

David Senra (#130) grew up with almost no script at all. First person in his family to graduate high school. His parents never mentioned college:

“He said, I thought the world was shit and I was sitting in the middle of it. So all I knew was that this, like, I did not like … I didn’t really have that many positive examples. I just saw a lot of negative examples. … Nobody in my family is educated. Like, I was the first person in my family to graduate high school. … My parents never mentioned the word college to me once.”

What took hold instead was reading: “We don’t choose our passions, our passions choose us. … I was just obsessed with reading from the time I was … I can’t remember a time before I learned how to read. And once I learned how to read, I just read obsessively.”

Kyla Scanlon (#121) didn’t overthink it: “I don’t think I really thought about it that much growing up. Like, I just really loved reading. I wanted to be an astronaut.”

Henry Oliver (#172): “I was fortunate that I did not have a lot of pressure from my parents. … I just followed my nose all the time really.”

Russ Roberts (#137) absorbed his script from watching his dad on the couch:

“My main memory of my dad growing up was him reading a book. So if you asked me what were my expectations for my adult life, I would say when I was really young, it was that someday I too would be able to read the books in his bookcase.”

Venkatesh Rao (#122) is the odd one here. He thrived on the default path. His dad was a classic organization man at Tata Steel, and that seemed like a fine plan. Venkatesh got three degrees, enjoyed school, enjoyed his job at Xerox:

“I was not one of the kids that hated school or particularly chafed against the controls. … I was a good student. And not only did I do well in school, I actually enjoyed my schooling. … And I enjoyed my job too. I don’t have the usual reasons for quitting, which is like hating your job. … So not only was I factory manufactured for this world, I actually enjoyed being in that world as well.”

He left anyway. He compared it to Nassim Taleb’s turkey: “99% of the days are great. You’re enjoying yourself and you fit the script and the world and the context and the environment and it’s fun. But when it breaks, it breaks really badly.” At Xerox, he had an irreconcilable run-in with corporate marketing over how his projects would be presented. The CMO outranked him. “It was like, this is not a crisis I can solve sticking around. … So I just took it and it worked.”

8. “This is how you should feel”

Some of the most interesting answers weren’t about career paths at all. They were about what emotions were allowed or not allowed.

Rick Lewis (#166), former child actor and professional juggler:

“My parents are very kind, super supportive, encouraging individuals. … But in terms of hidden scripts, my father, being raised as a ’50s male, was not expressive. … If there was tension, it was under the surface. It was not talked about. … I was very passionate about a lot of things. There’s a lot I think I just stuffed because I just didn’t know how to put it into a conversational atmosphere.”

He said this script kept him “imprisoned in a place where the form of relationship and connection I could have with people had to do with performance and being on stage.” It took him until the pandemic to fall apart and see it.

Joe Hudson (#164):

“The dominant story, like from 0 to 7, was that I was loved. And then from 7 to like … the two stories I grew up with when I was young was I was loved and there was something wrong with me. … The way it was taught was like my emotions weren’t okay.”

Corey Wilks (#116) grew up in rural Appalachia and tried to lose his accent because “none of the successful people ever sounded like me”:

“Any time my dad or my grandpa would be like, hey, come here and learn how to change your oil, or here’s how to skin a deer, I’ll be like, no, no, no, that’s for peasants or some shit, right? Like, I’m too good for that. And like, as an adult, I’m like, damn, I wish I knew how to do half that shit.”

David Perell (#126) grew up in San Francisco during the tech boom:

“I remember saying, dad, are we poor? And I remember that so vividly. I was in the front seat of the car and I think that that created the script of needing money.”

Sam Spurlin (#136) got his scripts from hockey, not family: “There’s like the really hockey-specific ones about like playing hurt and, you know, nobody’s bigger than the team, which in some ways are really positive scripts … and some that have been less helpful. I don’t know that playing hurt is the type of thing that I necessarily need to be bringing to my day to day as a soon to be 36-year-old.”

Kyle Kowalski (#143) had the most puzzling version. His parents never pressured him, but the script showed up anyway:

“When I really think about how I ended up on the default path in the first place, I have to think that a lot of it was a fear of disappointing my parents. And I’m not sure exactly where that fear came from. I think it was a self-imposed fear because my parents are two of the coolest people you’ll ever meet. … I don’t remember anything in my childhood where they told me specifically or explicitly, don’t disappoint us. But for some reason … I had this script in my head.”

Catherine Cusick (#120) had two selves from age 14. One was “very diligent at school and very motivated by grades and A’s and reward systems.” The other came alive in theater: “all about my social life and friends and doing things that were joyful.” That same year was 9/11. Her dad worked in the Empire State Building. He came home safe. Many of her peers’ parents did not. Then she graduated college into the 2008 financial crisis. Her script wasn’t handed to her by parents. It was shaped by “giant events I could not have predicted that many people did not predict. That changed everything about my future.”

Some reflections

Almost nobody was told what to believe about work directly. The scripts were absorbed through watching parents, or noticing which relatives got talked about at family dinners, what people saw in TV shows or movies, or even registering which career a guidance counselor’s face lit up for. Lawrence Yeo put it well: “There were no values that were explicitly told, but it was just kind of implicit in the way that it was communicated.”

The safety script means something different depending on where it came from. When Anne-Laure’s mom pushed safety, it was because she’d worked in factories. When David Pakman’s family saved aggressively, it was because they’d fled a collapsing economy. When Dror Poleg’s family kept their options open, it was because all four grandparents had lost everything in the Holocaust. These aren’t irrational. The question is whether the next generation needs the same level of caution.

The people who had parents modeling something different didn’t automatically have it easier. They had permission, which is not the same thing. Aida Alston’s parents gave her freedom. Dom Francks’ parents showed him that exploration was possible. But permission doesn’t tell you what to do with it.

The thing that surprised me most is how many people described scripts that had nothing to do with career choice. Rick Lewis wasn’t told to be a juggler or not be a juggler. He was told, implicitly, that connection happens through performance. Joe Hudson wasn’t told what job to get. He was told his emotions weren’t okay. Sam Spurlin wasn’t told to work in consulting. He was told to play hurt. These scripts shaped everything about how they worked, even though they were never about work.

And Kyle Kowalski also talked about something I think about a lot: the self-imposed script. His parents never said “don’t disappoint us.” He built that fear himself, from watching and absorbing, and then spent years trying to figure out where it came from. It was the same for me, something I talked about in The Pathless Path.

What about you?