The Work

The Work, also titled The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, is a 2014 self-help book by Wes Moore. A former delinquent youth who fixed his life and ended up a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then a writer, Moore compiles his thoughts on a selection of inspirational stories about people who found a satisfying life in public service. Moore also includes his own experiences, such as looking for purpose in Afghanistan, on Wall Street, and in the White House. A sequel to his first book The Other, The Work follows his formative working life experiences as he learns to mold his own model of success.

The Work begins where Moore’s earlier book ends, acknowledging his fatherless childhood, delinquent status, and personal transformation into a successful scholar. At this juncture in life he posed a question to himself: “What is your work?” Having emerged from a childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore that was full of hardship, he now found himself at a tumultuous moment in United States and global politics. He argues that more important than finding a job is finding the type of work one is really meant to do. In his first decade after graduating from Oxford, he deliberately placed himself in a diverse array of difficult working environments, hoping to deepen his understanding of himself.

He chose his first job by following his desire to help defend America in the wake of the September 11th attacks. This galvanized him to join the United States Army as a combat officer during wartime. In Afghanistan, he underwent rigorous athletic and emotional training, learning the unique positions soldiers are placed in far from their homes. While in Afghanistan, Moore met a local translator who imparted him with some wisdom about making a passionate life, telling him to “find his fight.”

After returning from the war in the Middle East, Moore went to work at the White House as a fellow at the end of George W. Bush’s tenure as president. He recalls a distinct experience meeting residents of Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of huge regions of the southeast U.S. in August 2005. Visiting their destroyed homes, he gained a sense of the grit many Americans possess, having faced physical and emotional trauma as bad as a warzone. He recalls thinking at this time about his grandfather, now deceased, who urged him to find himself in public service.

After his time in the White House, Moore got a job working as an organizer for what would be Barack Obama’s successful election campaign. He notes the stark contrast between the people who populated the Bush administration and the Obama team, but humanizes both, asserting that it is only natural both contained plenty of people who were passionate about making lives better. After his political era, Moore became a Wall Street banker at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. At this point, Moore decided to return to his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, hoping to synthesize everything he learned into local government work.

Moore interweaves his personal narrative with the stories of numerous other agents of change in the past several decades who inspire him. These include Daniel Lubetzky, the Jewish and Mexican-American entrepreneur and founder of KIND, a healthy snack company, who previously worked on Israeli-Arab diplomacy and founded KIND to tackle the obesity epidemic. He also includes the story of Esther Benjamin, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who rose through the ranks of the Peace Corps to a leadership position. Though each of the people he profiles has a starkly different narrative from the others, they all find ways to reframe questions about industry, the role of the economy, and the use of political power, to be inclusive of the whole public, refusing to reject anyone from their disparate ideal worlds. All of them are different from the average adult because they recognize in themselves a human necessity to help others. Moore states that contrary to the common perception that public service us sacrificial, it actually enriches one’s life in ways no other experience can.

Moore’s work invokes many different perspectives, tied by the common thread of public service, to articulate his conception of a “successful” life as one where one is principally concerned and in discourse with the vulnerable, marginalized, and underprivileged people who make up the vast majority of the world. He acknowledges that it is difficult to undergo the kind of mindset shift that he had, lamenting the many distractions of society, most of them in the forms of economic incentives, that lure people away from roles in which they might contribute to the betterment of society. The Work is a validation of public work as a powerful feedback mechanism for improving not only other people’s lives, but also the life of the individual carrying out the service.