What's Your Ghost Job?

It's one of your five jobs. And if you want to find meaning at work, you must identify all of them.

- BRUCE FEILER

Cornell Thomas lost his police officer father in New Jersey to cancer when he was four, and he grew up watching his dental assistant mother struggle to support her family. "Once, in sixth grade, I asked if we could order pizza," he says. "Mom gave me a look that said, No. Don't ask again."

To help out, Cornell turned to entrepreneurship. "My mother had these packs of WeightWatchers cookies that tasted like death," he says. Cornell put on his baseball uniform and sold the cookies to his neighbors for 50 cents a pack. "I made $50. It was like a million bucks."

After his dream of playing pro basketball was cut short, Cornell returned to his entrepreneurial roots, opening a youth academy and giving motivational speeches. But his childhood fear of deprivation still haunted him: "I was an adult before I realized I had a horrible relationship with money. I would cry rather than ask people to pay me." 

Money was Cornell Thomas' ghost job. We all have one.

We may also have four more jobs. But before we discuss those, we must look at the way we work now - and how it's changed in ways we may not have noticed.

Over the last six years, I've collected and analyzed 400 life stories of Americans of all backgrounds and vocations, looking for patterns that could help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. For the last three years, I've been looking specifically at the future of work. What I've found is that today's workers - younger, more female, more diverse - are busting through old myths and discovering new possibilities for individuals to write their own stories of success.

Specifically, Americans are debunking the three lies about work.

LIE #1 You have a career.