How Personal Artefacts Guide Your WorkLife Story: Her First Laboratory Notebook
A Story About How University Research Questions Revealed What Pharmaceutical Profits Had Obscured—And Why Curiosity About Healing Matters More Than Patents
How Personal Artefacts Guide Your WorkLife Story: Her First Laboratory Notebook tells the story of a Senior Research Scientist who had built an impressive career in pharmaceutical research — technically sophisticated projects, commercially promising results, a professional life built on delivering exactly what the industry rewarded.
Yet a battered university laboratory notebook she'd kept through three house moves and fifteen years kept finding its way back into her life. Through home office clear-outs. Through box-sorting weekends she'd been postponing for months. Through every sensible attempt to finally let it go. She'd carried it without quite knowing why.
What began as a home renovation clear-out — unplanned, unrelated to any career decision — became the confrontation that revealed what fifteen years of pharmaceutical success had been quietly costing her. The notebook wasn't sentimental clutter. Its margins were dense with questions about healing that her current research had stopped asking entirely — questions about whether science could help people who couldn't afford to be helped.
Priyanka's story is about what happens when we stop explaining away the objects that keep surviving every clear-out and start reading what they've been holding open. It's about the difference between research that generates returns and science that serves healing — and how a notebook full of twenty-year-old questions sometimes carries the clearest measure of what professional success has quietly replaced.
What you'll learn
- Why the questions we asked naturally before professional training taught us what our industries reward often reveal more sophisticated understanding of our field's fundamental purpose than the metrics we've spent careers optimising for
- How commercial structures systematically redirect professional expertise away from foundational purposes — and why each individual rationalisation makes the next one easier to accept
- What becomes visible when you apply your earliest purpose questions honestly to your current work — and why the gap between what you find and what you expected reveals more about professional integrity than any conventional success metric
- Why the question an early notebook keeps asking — does this serve healing, or just serve profits? — is often the most important professional question you've been learning not to ask
What's included
- Priyanka's complete story
- The Early Purpose Questions as Professional Compass Framework
- Reflection questions to help you identify your own early expressions of purpose, apply them honestly to your current work, and investigate what the gap between fundamental purpose and conventional reward reveals about the professional choices still available to you
The Reading Room — Where stories spark insight and learning begins. Read, reflect, and let the power of stories shape your perspective.
The Writer's Table — The power of the written word to clarify thought and purpose. A writing assignment that makes the lesson personal to your own experience.
The Workshop — Takes your thinking deeper, developing the technique into a systematic approach you can apply across your professional communications.
The Rehearsal Space — This is where you put it all into practice — the power of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries.
The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons explore how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work — our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for. Each lesson follows a protagonist who discovers that knowing how to find, shape, and share the right story at the right moment is one of the most powerful professional tools available. These lessons help you recognise the stories within your own experience and learn how to tell them with clarity, authenticity, and purpose.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
This lesson is part of The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons— a collection focused on how the stories we tell, and how we open them, shape the conversations, relationships, and opportunities that follow.
Author’s Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly.