MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Last year, the journalist Jodi Kantor faced an unenviable assignment. She'd been invited to deliver the commencement address at Columbia University, her alma mater. So a huge honor. But recall that 2025 had seen Columbia and other campuses convulsed by protests over the war in Gaza, and then President Trump had launched his assault on higher ed, cutting hundreds of millions in federal funding to Columbia. The school, according to Kantor, had an air of doom. So what to say? How to offer hope? What she came up with became the seed for a book - advice for launching a career - indeed, launching a life - in uncertain times. It's titled "How To Start." Jodi Kantor, welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JODI KANTOR: Thank you for having me.
KELLY: So this book was born, as you put it, with an invitation onto a battlefield. Say more about what that felt like you were walking into, delivering the commencement address.
KANTOR: Oh, when I got the invitation, my friends were like, call in sick. Don't go.
KELLY: (Laughter) Yeah.
KANTOR: You're going to get booed. But my response was a little different. Mary Louise, I felt like, give me those kids for 15 minutes because I'm a mom and I'm a Columbia alum, and I was just concerned about the level of negativity and rancor. And then the students gave me an incredible assignment. They gave me the gift of a very hard question. They said, we chose you because of your career, and our entire class - no matter our political differences - we are actually unified in anxiety over one question, which is, in this crazy environment, how do we find and start our life's work? And, you know, I had been speaking to students for years, visiting a lot of campuses, and what I understood was that their question was generational. The workplace is changing. It's becoming digitized. Applying for a job - people your and my age need a real memo and update on what's going on out there.
KELLY: You just said you were told they chose you to deliver the commencement address because of your career, and I will fill in, by way of backdrop, your career, your day job is you are a reporter at The New York Times. So I gather to come up with what you were going to say at the graduation speech, you started reporting. Let's get to what you came up with. And I realize it's a whole book, and I encourage people...
KANTOR: Yeah, yeah.
KELLY: ...To read the whole book, but it boils down to two words. Just in a few sentences, talk to me about craft and need. Start with craft. What do you mean by that?
KANTOR: So I want to give young people two things to look for. And listen, the workplace is changing. We don't know what the workplace is going to look like in five or 10 years, so we have to work with very durable and time-tested materials. Let's start with craft. I looked around my life. I looked around all the people I'd covered over the years, and I said to myself, you know what? The really happy and successful people are practicing a craft. They know how to do something that other people don't do. It's skill. It's expertise. I mean, Mary Louise, listen to, you know, all of your radio work over the years. Look at the way a surgeon repairs somebody's body. Look at the way a really expert advertising executive crafts a campaign. You want something like that that you're really, really...
KELLY: A skill set, a toolbox that you have to develop over years that other people don't have?
KANTOR: Exactly. It's a slow accumulation, and the reason you want that is that, A, the mastery is, like, very satisfying and enjoyable. And also, it protects you a little bit against the cruelties of the job market. I mean, the employment world is ugly. Any of us can be fired at any time, but your craft can never be taken away from you.
KELLY: And then the flip side, the other piece, is need. Meaning what? Figure out what society is going to need over the next four, five decades of your primary working life?
KANTOR: Correct. If craft is authority, need is propulsion. Part of the way I came up with need is that I saw this, like, procession of bad advice over the course of my lifetime over the thing you, quote-unquote, "have to go into." When I was in high school, it was learn Japanese. Like, the Japanese are going to take over...
KELLY: (Laughter) Yeah.
KANTOR: ...The world economy, and if you don't speak Japanese, you're in trouble. You know, then it was genetics. Then it was learn Mandarin. And then more recently it's been computer science. And...
KELLY: Yeah, coding. You have to know how to code. I still don't know how to code (laughter).
KANTOR: Listen, all of these pursuits are great. You know, these are all wonderful things to study, but they're not golden tickets, and you should only do them if you're really passionate about them.
KELLY: You invite us, toward the end of the book, to picture a room. And I loved this image. Like, picture ourselves a few years from now walking into a room. Just pick up the story there 'cause you write it could be an art studio. It could be a hospital operating room. I guess for you and me, it was a newsroom.
KANTOR: Here's why I'm describing the room because I see how negative the messages are about work right now. And some of those are true. But the workplace can also be a place of growth and wonder and fellowship and progress and even protection from negative forces in the outside world.
KELLY: When you describe this room to the young people you're talking to, do you get any pushback with people saying that must have been nice, but those rooms, they ain't here anymore. They're gone. Like, the whole world feels scary. The whole workforce I thought I was prepping for is crumbling. Did you get that pushback? And what would you say?
KANTOR: A little bit. I mean, Mary Louise, I have to be honest with you. When I was a senior at Columbia, I was kicked off the Columbia Daily Spectator.
KELLY: (Laughter).
KANTOR: Not only did I think I couldn't succeed, but I had...
KELLY: I'm sorry to laugh, but it turned out OK.
KANTOR: But young Jodi had actual evidence that she could not succeed as a journalist, right? And I never could have anticipated the places where work would bring me, how much better I would get at journalism, what the - I didn't even really understand that journalism was a craft that you worked at for many, many, many years. And so, having experienced some of those satisfactions for myself, I really, really want them for other people.
KELLY: Yeah. Did you send a photo of your Pulitzer to the Columbia student journalism newsroom?
KANTOR: No. But they keep asking me to speak at fundraisers for the Columbia Daily Spectator. So I have decided that the mature Jodi should not hold a grudge and, of course, should help student journalists.
KELLY: The book is "How To Start." The author is New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor. Jodi Kantor, thank you.
KANTOR: Thank you so much.
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