Ashley is a zookeeper at the Detroit Zoo, where she cares for giraffes, kangaroos, and wallabies. It’s a role she knew she wanted to play from a young age. One of her earliest memories is of driving through a safari park in Canada when she was three years old. As her family’s station wagon motored along through the park, a giraffe approached the vehicle and suddenly stuck its large head into the open window. “Everyone—all of my sisters—were screaming, but I was laughing and trying to stick my hand in his mouth,” she said. “I’ve had a strong draw to animals since the beginning.” When Ashley was six, a neighbor hatched a pet chick for a class project. Ashley was riveted. She wanted to grow up, she remembers thinking, so she could take biology and have the opportunity to care for an egg—to be “the reason why it hatched.” Just a few years later, she took charge of caring for and training her family’s pet dogs.
When Ashley was nine, a relative who had noticed her affinity for animals told her that she should consider becoming a zookeeper as an adult. It was the first time Ashley had heard of zookeeping as a career, but after she learned more about it, she knew that it was what she was meant to do. In the sixth grade, when she was assigned to write an essay on how she would like her life to unfold in five, ten, and fifteen years, Ashley wrote that she wanted to enroll at Michigan State University, get her degree in zoology, and work at the Detroit Zoo.
She graduated from Michigan State with a degree in zoology in 2006 and has been working at the Detroit Zoo ever since.
When I first met Ashley at the Giraffe Encounter, a feeding platform overlooking the giraffe habitat at the Detroit Zoo, her hands were covered in dirt, and she was carrying a bundle of branches in one arm. “Sorry I’m a mess,” she said. She threw the branches on the ground, picked one up, and held it straight up in the air.
“Grab one from the pile,” she said, “and hold on to it tightly with both hands.”
A giraffe named Jabari galloped toward us. His geometric spots were chestnut brown, and they radiated in the October sun.
“Jabari is friendly. But,” Ashley said as I lifted my hand toward his muzzle, “he doesn’t like to be petted.” On the other end of the habitat stood Jabari’s mate Kivuli and their son Mpenzi, a one-year-old calf named after the Swahili word for “love.” Jabari sniffed my stalk of leaves and snorted. Then he galloped away.
Ashley rustled her branch and called out Jabari’s name to coax him back. He returned and examined my branch again. He bit into the leaves at the top of the branch, nearly pulling the stalk out of my hand. In a matter of seconds, he had stripped it clean of leaves. I put the branch down and turned my attention to my notebook. Jabari bent his neck over the wooden fence of the feeding platform and dragged his nose along the edge of the page I was writing on. He lifted his head and looked directly at me, his long and muscular neck curved like a wave. The tip of his nose was an inch away from my face.
“He’s such a curious guy,” Ashley said.
This feeding exercise is an example of what’s known in the zoo community as “enrichment.” In a zoo environment, life is easy for wild animals like giraffes. They are fed regularly, protected from disease, and do not encounter predators. Though the animals lead longer lives as a result, those lives may not be as interesting as they would be in the wild. Ashley’s role at the zoo, she told me, is to do everything in her power to make the lives of animals she oversees—none of whom chose to be in captivity, she pointed out—richer, happier, and more exciting. “I can’t re-create the wild for them,” she said, “but I can try to help them live somewhat normal lives.”
Enrichment is one way for zookeepers and staff to try to achieve that goal. By moving rocks or tree branches around to create a different environment for the animals to explore, hiding food so that the animals have to search for it, or giving the animals objects to manipulate, they help make life in the zoo more unpredictable and, therefore, more stimulating. Enrichment also helps animals feel a sense of control over their environment, which is critical to their well-being. Jabari chose to participate in the feeding activity, for example, while Kivuli and Mpenzi chose not to.
“We try to give them opportunities to behave in natural ways,” Ashley said. “Giraffes spend most of their time eating, so I try to find ways to feed them that are new and challenging for them.” It’s a challenge for Ashley, too: she has to constantly think of new methods to spice up their environment so that the animals do not get bored.
The keepers know their animals are doing well when they see them act naturally. Toward the end of our discussion, for example, one-year-old Mpenzi rammed the side of his body into Jabari, who rammed the young giraffe right back. Mpenzi’s neck swayed to the left with the force of his father’s hit. Then the two of them slapped their necks together. When I asked Ashley what they were doing, she said, “They’re necking. Jabari is showing his son how to be a boy. This is what they’d be doing in the wild.”
Ashley joined the Detroit Zoo at a watershed moment. Over the last four decades, zoos have undergone a major shift in purpose. It used to be that the primary mission of zoos was entertaining the public, and the animals were a means to that end. As late as the 1980s, the Detroit Zoo had an enormously popular chimpanzee show featuring the primates dressed up in clownish outfits doing silly stunts like riding tricycles and drinking from teacups. Today, top zoos like the one in Detroit define their purpose as ensuring animal welfare and contributing to the conservation of species and natural habitats around the world. A chimp show—or anything like it—would be considered an unacceptable violation of the animals’ dignity and a distortion of nature.
That mission—to put the animals first—is always at the forefront of Ashley’s mind. And she isn’t alone. According to social scientists Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery Thompson, zookeepers have an unusually strong sense of purpose. They often describe their work as a calling—as something they were destined to do from a very young age because of a preternatural ability to connect with, understand, and care for animals. Zookeepers, the researchers found, are willing to sacrifice pay, time, comfort, and status because they believe they have a duty to use their gifts to help vulnerable creatures in captivity lead better lives. And they derive an enormous sense of meaning from living out that purpose.
Ashley shares this mindset. She spends only 20 percent of her time doing fun or intellectually challenging work, like training the animals or providing them with enrichment. The other 80 percent of her time is devoted to far less glamorous tasks, like cleaning the habitats. But even menial tasks are meaningful for Ashley, because they are tied to her broader purpose. “Keeping the yards and stalls clean is important,” Ashley said, “because that helps the animals. It keeps them healthy. My goal every day is to make sure they are enjoying their environment—and a big part of that is giving them a clean place to live.”
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Purpose sounds big—ending world hunger big or eliminating nuclear weapons big. But it doesn’t have to be. You can also find purpose in being a good parent to your children, creating a more cheerful environment at your office, or making a giraffe’s life more pleasant.
According to William Damon, a developmental psychologist at Stanford, purpose has two important dimensions. First, purpose is a “stable and far-reaching” goal. Most of our goals are mundane and immediate, like getting to work on time, going to the gym, or doing the dishes. Purpose, by contrast, is a goal toward which we are always working. It is the forward-pointing arrow that motivates our behavior and serves as the organizing principle of our lives.
Second, purpose involves a contribution to the world. It is, Damon writes with his colleagues, “a part of one’s personal search for meaning, but it also has an external component, the desire to make a difference in the world, to contribute to matters larger than the self.” That could mean advancing human rights or working to close the achievement gap in education, but it works on a smaller level, too. Teens who help their families with tasks like cleaning, cooking, and caring for s
iblings, for example, also feel a greater sense of purpose.
People who have such a purpose believe that their lives are more meaningful and more satisfying. They are more resilient and motivated, and they have the drive to muddle through the good and the bad of life in order to accomplish their goals. People who fail to find purpose in their daily activities, however, tend to drift through life aimlessly. When Damon looked closely at emerging adults 12 to 22 years old in a major study he conducted with his colleagues between 2003 and 2007, he found that only 20 percent of them had a fully developed, prosocial purpose that they were actively working toward. Purposeful youth are more motivated at school, get better grades, and are less likely to engage in risky behaviors like drug use. But 8 out of 10 of the young people Damon studied did not yet have a clear sense of where their lives were going. Many of them had made some progress toward setting long-term goals, but they did not know how they would pursue those goals or whether their aspirations were personally meaningful to them. A quarter of the emerging adults were “disengaged, expressing virtually no purpose.”
Twenty years ago, Coss Marte was one of those purposeless children. Coss grew up on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s with his parents and three siblings—two older sisters and a younger brother. As a kid, he was mischievous and got into trouble. He attended four different high schools, having been kicked out of three for offenses like smoking and fighting. Even so, he graduated at the top of his class. “I did well in school without trying,” he said. He was smart, ambitious, and—when he wanted to be—a hard worker.
Coss’s father, a Dominican immigrant, ran a bodega, and Coss worked there as a cashier, cleaner, and stocker. He also collected cans and bottles to exchange for cash. Coss hated that he was poor and wanted desperately to change that fact. “I was always on the hustle,” he said. “I saw the other kids have better stuff than me and I wanted that stuff. I was hungry to make money.”
With his drive and smarts, he could have gone to college like his siblings, who ended up working at companies like Goldman Sachs and IBM. Instead, he started selling drugs.
In the eighties and nineties, the crime rate in New York was spiking, and the Lower East Side was one of the epicenters of the drug trade. Coss recalls that people would line up on street corners waiting to buy drugs. A dealer in the apartments above would lower a bucket on a rope filled with drugs to the buyer below, who would fill the bucket with money before the dealer would pull the bucket back up.
Coss soon joined their ranks. He had started smoking weed when he was eleven years old. By the time he was thirteen, he was selling it. A few years later, he began selling crack and powder cocaine, too. At sixteen, he inherited the lucrative street corner at Eldridge and Broome from a respected drug dealer and began managing the other dealers who came with the corner.
Coss was a natural entrepreneur—a savvy businessman—and he saw that the Lower East Side was gentrifying. By 2000, young professionals in law and finance were flocking into his neighborhood, and Coss realized that if he expanded his market to them, his business would soar. He printed ten thousand business cards that listed his phone number underneath the words “Festival Party Services: No Event Too Large or Too Small 24/7.” Then he put on a nice suit and tie and headed to Happy Ending, a trendy new bar in the area, to hand them out to the yuppies. He created, as he put it, a “private, bougie delivery service” for cocaine and marijuana. Clients placed orders over the phone, and Coss’s workers delivered the drugs to them in luxury cars.
At nineteen years old, Coss was making $2 million a year. He had nice clothes, wore expensive shoes, drove a fancy car, and split his time between multiple apartments in New York. A decade after he had decided not to be another poor kid from the hood, he was living his dream. But living your dream, as Coss would soon find out, is not necessarily the same thing as finding your purpose.
The dream ended one evening in April of 2009. Coss, then twenty-three, was trying to reach his workers, but no one was picking up their phones. “So I’m wondering what the hell is going on,” Coss said. “I stepped out of my house with a package to deliver myself.” The feds were outside his door, ready to raid the apartment. Coss tried to run, but the agents caught him and searched the apartment, where they found over two pounds of cocaine and $5,000 in cash. He and eight other members of his operation were arrested in one of that year’s biggest drug busts in New York.
Coss was sentenced to seven years in prison. He wasn’t too worried. He had been in and out of correctional institutions since he was thirteen and figured this would be “just another road trip.” But when he got upstate to the penitentiary, the doctors there gave him some unsettling news: he would probably die before he was released. He had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and would likely have a heart attack if he did not start eating more healthily. Coss, who was five foot eight, weighed 230 pounds.
The prognosis was a wake-up call. Coss had never exercised. Even in New York, he used to drive to the corner store twenty feet away and double-park. “I just paid the tickets,” he said. “I was super arrogant.” In prison, Coss started working out and eating better. At first, the other inmates laughed at him—he couldn’t even do one pull-up. But he pressed on. He began by doing cardio for ten to fifteen minutes each day. Within a few months, he was working out for two hours straight. He ultimately lost 70 pounds.
With his healthier lifestyle came a new insight: he wanted a different life from the one he had been living. But wanting and doing are not the same thing. In prison, Coss continued to deal drugs and sold moonshine made from fermented fruit.
When he wasn’t working the black market, he took on the role of the prison’s personal trainer, teaching inmates exercises they could do in their cells. “Helping other people,” Coss said, “it was empowering: just to have people come up to you and ask you for knowledge of how to do something and to share my knowledge of how to do it.” He helped over twenty inmates climb out of obesity. One man, whose 320-pound girth inspired the nickname “Big Papi,” lost over 80 pounds with Coss. “He actually cried,” Coss said, “saying, ‘Thank you, I have never been this fit. I was one of the fat boys.’ ”
These experiences were fulfilling, but Coss had to hit rock bottom before he recognized his true purpose in life. Just before his release date, Coss landed in solitary confinement for thirty days after an altercation with an officer. In solitary, he was given only a pen, paper, an envelope, and a Bible. He used the pen and paper to write a ten-page letter to his family explaining that he wasn’t going to be coming home as planned and telling them that he had “really fucked up this time.” When he finished the letter, though, he realized that he couldn’t send it. He didn’t have a stamp.
As the days wore on, Coss obsessed over how to get the letter to his family. Then he received a letter from his sister, a devout Catholic. In the letter, she suggested that Coss read Psalm 91, a beautiful poem about God watching over his flock during danger and turmoil. “I didn’t believe in God or religion,” Coss said, “and I said, ‘Hell no, I’m not reading that. That’s a waste of time.’ ” But then he reconsidered. “I realized all I had was time,” he said, “so I decided to pick up the Bible.” He flipped to Psalm 91. “When I opened to that page, a stamp fell out of the Bible. I got goose bumps. It was a supernatural moment for me.”
That moment changed Coss’s life. “I read the Bible from front to back,” he said, “and understood I was fucking up. I was not doing anything to help society. Before, I didn’t think selling drugs was a problem. I thought it was another job. All I thought about was getting paid. But I realized that I was affecting my family and these people I was selling drugs to. I thought, ‘I fucked up so many lives and I don’t know how to pay it back.’ ”
But then he realized that he was beginning to pay it back—by encouraging other people to get in shape and lead better lives. Helping other people improve themselves through fitness, he decided, was the unique contribution he co
uld make to society. That thought motivated him. He wrote out a business plan for a fitness center. “I used the side of the Bible as a ruler and made a spreadsheet,” he said. “I used the nutritional info from the milk carton they gave me to devise a nutritional plan for people.” When he came out of solitary confinement, he made a vow to himself to never sell drugs again. He served an additional year in prison and then went home in March 2013.
Back in New York, he had nothing. He had run out of money in jail, and the government had seized most of his assets. He slept on his mom’s couch as he rebuilt his life. “I went to a whole bunch of nonprofits to help me out, and I would never have gone to any before,” he said. “But I was super humble and started asking for help.” He got a day job at Goodwill doing clerical work and in his spare time thought about how to launch his business.
One of the nonprofits he encountered was Defy Ventures, whose mission is to help entrepreneurs from the street turn into legal entrepreneurs—to “transform the hustle.” They offered a business education program, which Coss completed. They also hosted a business competition. Just two months after he was released, Coss won first place in that competition for the business plan he initiated in solitary confinement.
With his award money, he opened Coss Athletics in 2014, a fitness studio on the Lower East Side that specializes in a prison-style workout. The workout he created relies exclusively on body weight and is designed for small spaces, like a prison cell—or an urban apartment. When I first spoke with Coss in 2014, he had 350 clients and was working full-time at Goodwill to support himself. When I followed up one month later, he had doubled his client list and was hoping to raise money from private investors. By 2016, he had attracted over 5,000 clients and raised $125,000. He rebranded the company ConBody, and he left his job at Goodwill to run it full-time.
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