Skip NavigationSAN JOSE, CA – FEBRUARY 23: Investigative reporter, The New York Times, Jodi Kantor speaks onstage at the Watermark Conference for Women 2018 at San Jose Convention Center on February 23, 2018 in San Jose, California. (Photo by Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images for Watermark Conference for Women 2018)Marla Aufmuth | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jodi Kantor recognizes that the job market looks exceptionally bleak for young people right now. But she doesn’t want them to give up hope of finding a fulfilling career.
“The world is sending young people a terrible message right now, which is, ‘You’re not needed,’” she tells CNBC Make It. “I don’t think that’s true. Anybody who’s spent time in the workplace knows that we depend on the next generation of talent.”
Kantor, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, is determined to help young professionals maintain “a sense of aspiration” about work, she says. Her latest book, “How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work,” was inspired by conversations she had with Columbia University students as she prepared to deliver the undergraduate commencement address in 2025.
“The students asked me one of the best questions I’d ever heard, which is, ‘How do we find our life’s work in this environment?’” she recalls. To find an answer, Kantor says she reflected on her years of reporting on the workplace and asked herself, “Who is successful and happy?”
The people who came to mind — among them a pediatric psychiatrist, a conflict resolution facilitator and a cookbook author — had something in common: Their work involved both “craft” and “need,” she says.
Kantor defines “craft” as a combination of expertise and human skill. “Craft guides the hand of the surgeon restoring an accident victim’s body. It’s how a writer, composer, or director holds an audience’s attention for hours at a time. It’s why restaurant meals cooked by experts taste so good,” she writes in “How to Start.”
Mastering a craft prevents workers from “being treated as disposable or interchangeable,” according to Kantor, which is particularly crucial as AI threatens the viability of some jobs. She believes human skills are irreplaceable, arguing in her book that even an accurate AI summary “feels blank” in comparison to one written by a person, “because it’s missing an author’s voice and intelligence.”
Additionally, successful people are always “chasing a need,” Kantor says: They pinpoint a problem in their community or field and dedicate their skills to solving it.
The best way to identify a need is through “independent observation,” Kantor says: “Using your own eyes and ears, can you articulate what human needs you might be able to fulfill, what’s going to be needed over the course of your working life — what kind of care, what kind of products, what kind of information?”
Kantor says she “very much had the AI age in mind” while writing “How to Start,” and she acknowledges that AI’s impact on jobs is a major worry for young professionals today.
The share of employees who rated AI-related job loss as their biggest workplace concern rose from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, according to a February report from consultancy firm Mercer, based on a survey of over 12,000 people worldwide. A Gallup report published in April found that nearly half (48%) of Gen Z workers believe the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the potential benefits.
Still, Kantor cautions against making significant career decisions based on fears around new technology. “I truly believe that we don’t know what the workplace is going to look like in five or 10 years. There’s too much prognostication, and the truth is that things are very uncertain,” she says.
Her aim, she says, is to provide “time-tested, durable knowledge” that will help young people choose fulfilling careers in any era.
Finding your life’s work doesn’t mean throwing caution and logic to the wind, Kantor says. In her view, “follow your passion” is impractical advice for today’s young professionals. Instead, she says, young people should focus on how they can “match their interests with what the world needs.”
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