Finding Vera
After my master’s degree in France, I thought I was finally ready to start the career I had been dreaming about. Instead, I spent months sending out applications and hearing nothing back. Somewhere in the middle of that silence, I started asking myself a different question. Not “how do I get hired” but “why do we even do this in the first place.”
That question is what led me to Vera Fields, a woman who just turned 100 years old and spent 86 of those years working in the medical field. I did not go looking for career advice. I went looking for perspective, and she gave me more of it than I expected.
“The greatest job you can have on this earth is to be a witness to anything,” Vera told me, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.
Three Families, One Workplace
Vera started working as a freshman in high school, back in the 1940s. She simply knocked on a hospital door one day and asked for a job. What stayed with me was not the story of how she got hired. It was what she said about why work matters at all.
She talked about three “families” that every person is given in life. The family we are born into, the family we work with, and the family we worship with. To Vera, the workplace was never just a place to trade hours for a paycheck. It was where character gets built, tested, and passed down. That idea reshaped how I think about my own job search. I had been treating rejection as a verdict on my worth. Vera helped me see it differently, as one more room in a much bigger house.
The Checklist That Never Fails
One of the most practical things Vera shared was a simple routine she was taught early in her nursing career. Go in, observe everything, ask questions, record what you hear, make an assessment, and then make a plan. It sounds like basic clinical procedure, but she said the same steps apply to any problem in life, big or small. The details change every time, but the objective never does.
I found myself applying that framework almost immediately, not to patients but to my own stalled job search. Look at what is actually happening, ask honest questions, and make a plan instead of spiraling.
Learning to Witness
Vera is still looking for something to keep her busy. Not because she needs the money, but because stopping completely never made sense to her. She said the highest calling is simply to witness the good in other people and help pull it out of them when you see it.
That is close to what we are trying to do with this channel. Every person we sit down with has spent years, sometimes decades, learning things about work and life that never make it into a resume. Our job is just to notice, ask, and pass it along.
Work in progress.
You can watch the full interview on the Life at Work channel.