3 Lies We Need to Stop Telling Ourselves About Work I analyzed hundreds of Americans professional stories, over six years. Here's what I learned.

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.

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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

For most of human history, humans lived where they worked and worked where they lived. There was no word for "career" because no one had one. The idea of a career was invented in the 19th century as millions of Americans fled farms for cities, and millions more joined them from overseas.

In 1908, Frank Parsons, a journeyman engineer and writer, opened the first career training center in the U.S. Overnight, schools across the country started offering career counseling. Parsons popularized the idea that you chose a career when you were young and stuck with it the rest of your life (at least if you were male; his program was not offered to women). Within a few decades, another new invention, the résumé, normalized the idea that a career was a linear progression of jobs, each one more important than the last.

Few ideas have squandered more human potential. Sure, some people lock into a dream early and follow it for decades. But far more of us rethink our choices, find new passions, and break away from stifling expectations. In my study, 85% of people did not "follow their passion" when they were young; they discovered it along the way.

Related: A Successful Career Path Doesn't Have to Be Linear

Lie #2: You have a path

All the metaphors we've used to describe a career — the track, the path, the ladder — have one thing in common: They reinforce the idea that work is linear. By contrast, our work lives today are nonlinear. They're marked by an endless stream of pivots and swerves. I call these destabilizing events "workquakes" — moments of disruption, inflection, or reevaluation that redirect our work in meaningful ways.

The average person goes through 20 workquakes in their life — that's one every 2.85 years. But younger workers go through them more frequently than older workers; women more than men; and diverse workers more than nondiverse workers — which means that number is only going to rise. We simply must begin to think of our lives as more unsettled and serpentine than we already do.

Lie #3: You have a job

At first glance, it may seem inaccurate to say that this is a lie. Of course I have a job! How else do I pay my bills? Still, it's true.

Today, no one has one job anymore. As I said above, everyone now has up to five.

I asked everyone in my conversations a simple question: "How many jobs do you have?" The average answer was three and a half. A quarter said five or more. At first, I was surprised by these numbers. The more I probed, the more surprised I became.

Economists have traditionally defined a job as work you perform for money. But even by this definition, 63% in my cohort have more than one job. And the full picture is even more complex.

The emerging way that people use the word "job" goes well beyond paid work and is closer to the original definition of a job as a task. The first of the five jobs is a main job — which sounds simple, but is not. Today, fewer than half of all workers even have a main job; in my research group, it was 39%. But is a main job the one where you spend the most time, earn the most income, or derive the most meaning? For many people, those jobs are different and change over time.

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The second type of job, which two-thirds of us have, is a care job, like caring for children or aging relatives.

The third type of job, a side job, gets a lot of attention, and that's no wonder: Three-quarters of us have a side job. Half of all side jobs involve entrepreneurship. They allow someone to either experiment with self-employment while supporting themselves with a main job, or sustain themselves with self-employment by using the side job for extra cash. In both cases, the side job provides the primary source of meaning while the main job provides the primary source of cash.

The fourth type of job also appeals to would-be entrepreneurs: a hope job. This type of job is something you do that you hope becomes something else, like writing a screenplay or selling jewelry on Etsy. Eighty-nine percent of us have a hope job, including many people who feel stuck in a main job that drains them of energy. These are the people who get through their days by dreaming of starting a company.

The fifth and final job brings us back to Cornell Thomas. It's a ghost job: an invisible time suck like battling self-doubt, struggling with mental health, or worrying about money. It is so pervasive that it feels like a job. Ninety-three percent of us have a ghost job.

While at first glance having all these jobs might seem to be a drain, in most cases the opposite is true. We use these various jobs to get the meaning we crave from our work. Maybe we do one job for income and benefits, but we do another job for meaning and purpose — and for most of us that allotment changes over time in response to fluctuations in our circumstances, our family situations, or our health.

It's precisely this fluctuation that gives rise to the one big truth about work today: Only you can decide what story you want to tell. Only you can decide what brings you meaning.

Like Cornell Thomas and hundreds of others I've interviewed, only you can tap into your childhood longings and dreams, evaluate the priorities you hold at the moment, and begin to reshape a future made only for yourself.

Only you can tell the most important story you'll ever tell: the story of what makes you a success.

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