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Innovating Your Life with Jennifer Byrne · Humanity Working

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we get stuck a little bit when we feel like there is a choice.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I never did.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, and it never was acceptable to me, you know, to not be able to raise my family, to not be able to do things to to, you know, to hang back and accept a lesser outcome.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: I guess now when we were both at Microsoft, but you've had a pretty interesting lead up to that point where you and I met at Microsoft.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: So do you want to just tell us a little bit about that?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was kind of a long lead-in.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Microsoft was in a pretty long career.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: And um, when I think about my story, I, although it didn't feel strange at the time because your life is just uh, you know, you're focused on whatever is right in front of you in any given moment, but in reflection, it was a fairly unlikely journey because it started in a completely different profession.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was in the nonprofit world and and really thought the beginning of my career that I would be in that space, helping people and be on you know, the planet to serve people, and ended up in the tech industry in the late 90s uh in cybersecurity, and um just always found my way to the next job, to the next thing, to the next thing.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and after about say 15, 18 years in the cybersecurity industry, I got a call from a friend who said there was a position at Microsoft that they thought I should really consider.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the chief security officer for the worldwide public sector group.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and it was uh not an internal security role, more of a an evangelist innovator role, working with companies around the world and governments specifically around the world to try to get them to adopt public cloud, which was a big trust issue for them at the time.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: This was in the era of uh WikiLeaks, the first WikiLeaks, uh Edward Snowden, and you know, no, no self-respecting government outside of the US thought it would be a good idea to let a US company hold their data when the US government might be able to uh get access to that data at any given time.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so I joined Microsoft in 2014 to address those issues as a chief security officer.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And um and then I ended up moving into the my boss's role, the chief technology officer role.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, first as an interim thing, I but just it was, you know, sometimes uh luck really matters.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I was asked to just fill in because it was an unexpected absence.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I ended up um applying for the role, and what I discovered was that a lot of the strategy skills and business skills I had acquired throughout my career actually lent themselves really well to a bigger role.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: So even though I had only been in cybersecurity, um, all of the broader skills I learned in that career uh helped me uh become a CTO.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: So there we go.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: So that that's an interesting kind of theme that I think has probably gone throughout your life as you think about like that early part in nonprofit.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: That wasn't even in in tech at all, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: It was um, you know, before you were uh in your previous security role in a nonprofit, very, very, very different on the surface, very different set of skills that somehow morphed into this career in tech.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: So how did that happen?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one thing that I learned early in my career, uh, and it's a maybe a survival tool in the beginning, although it became a little bit more strategic in later stages, is that you have to learn how to leverage everything you have.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And what I knew I learned in this nonprofit world.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I was the director of a nonprofit guardianship service in Seattle, and we uh helped people who had chronic mental illnesses and then later in their life had age-related disabilities, physical disabilities, and for a variety of reasons didn't have anyone to care for them.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, so it was, you know, on the surface, it was a very specific job in a specific sector with specific skills, but it was also a leadership role.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a role where I had to learn how to communicate with lots of different constituents, where I had to learn policy and process and a lot of business skills.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and those were the skills that I was able to translate into uh, you know, or able to move into a completely different sector.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: My first job in technology um quickly became a consulting engagement.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And although I didn't have the many of the technical skills that I needed at the time, I was uh, you know, looked at as some as a viable candidate for a lot of the positions that I um that I got because I had all the other requisite business skills that other people who had the same technical skills didn't have.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I was able to leverage a lot of um what a lot of what I learned in my first career into my second.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: And was that a deep-seated love of tech that got you into that?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: Or was it just uh just looking to reinvent yourself?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what was the what was the motivation that got you from that one world into the other?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I this is the part of the story, you know, that's sort of like when somebody says, Oh, how'd you break your ankle?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you want to say, Oh, I would jumped out of an airplane, but of course just like you tripped on the sidewalk.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the why you do things that sometimes you wish it was a better story.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I wish I could tell you that, you know, oh my gosh, I got my first computer when I was 10 and I loved a program.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it was not that.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I I had this very practical reality in the nonprofit world, it's very, very hard to make a living.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I needed to uh I need to make more money than I was making to support my family, my two little kids.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and I couldn't make that happen in the nonprofit world.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so at the time it was the late 90s, you know, you could kind of have a heartbeat and go back to school and get a few certifications and make literally three times as much uh as you could, or two and a half times as much as you could make in the nonprofit sector.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I made a very practical decision that at that point in my life, uh, in the absence of some kind of burning desire to pursue a particular career, the most important thing to me was to have the financial security and freedom to live my life and and raise my children in the way that I wanted to raise them.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And whatever I needed to do, uh, I was gonna do.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I went back to school and learned some tech and got into the industry.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: But at the same time, somebody with a you know, a degree in psychology, it's quite a it's quite a mental leap and quite a degree of confidence, I guess, that you need to be able to think that you're that you're able to do that.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: For many people, I would imagine the the idea of a dramatic shift like that would be very daunting.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: Did you find it scary at the time, or was it just something that where you kind of like backed yourself, knew that you had some, you know, core skills that you were able to transfer, or or what what gave you the confidence to be able to jump feet first into that entirely new world?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Of course I was scared.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know that there's been any major life decision I've made when I haven't been scared.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, fear is a constant.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a there's the survival thing.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you if you ask somebody, you know, uh, who is fleeing civil war and they're gonna get on a little boat that is not seaworthy to cross an ocean to land on the shore of an unknown land, are they scared?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Of course they're scared.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Does that mean they're not gonna, they're gonna do it?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Of course they're gonna do it.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like there is a survival um instinct that I think we all have when we, you know, sort of understand our circumstances that drives us forward anyway.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I just had the I had the young uh the upbringing, you know, as a child and and coming of age, where I'd had several times when I just had to survive.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had to make the right decision for myself.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and there never was a in my mind, there was never an option.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'd learned that feeling of, you know, you act even in the presence of great fear and you just hope for the best and you do the best you can.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really the only choice.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think what you know, we get stuck a little bit when we feel like there is a choice, you know, and but I never did.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, and it never was acceptable to me, you know, to not be able to raise my family, to not be able to do things to to, you know, to hang back and accept a lesser outcome.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: That just never seemed like an option to me.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I moved forward, uh, you know, in full of fear.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and then over it's kind of like Pavlov's dogs, behavioral psychology, maybe this is the psychology, you know, working to my benefit.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: You, you know, a feedback, the response mechanism, the feedback mechanism is very powerful.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you learn that when you move into a place of fear because you want something better for yourself and you get rewarded for that, like you don't get fired, or the job does work out, or the person does like you after all, then what you do is you associate the initial fear with an eventual reward.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And over time, that's what makes that work.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think by the time I was switching careers, I knew that being way out of my comfort zone, I knew what that felt like.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: I knew what it felt like to be sick to your stomach or to you smile and nod during the meeting because you want to act like you know what everyone's talking about, and then you spend all night learning the thing that you said that you knew.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like I already knew that, but I knew it was gonna work out if I just kept doing that and it was okay to be afraid.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's that period where you get yourself almost into the habit of choosing to do things that are slightly beyond your reach.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: And um, and in a sense, that's scary, but it's also a bit of a thrill as well at the same time, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: To always feel slightly out of your depth.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it can over time be kind of addictive in a good way.
• 11:04
  unknown: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it can go like you toward the end of my career, I had to make a different pivot, but yeah, it it fueled me all the way through all those very critical years where you know there really wasn't a lot of choice in my mind other than to keep moving up.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so you go through this very dramatic shift into the tech industry, and then after that period of time in the tech industry, working at a a bunch of you know well-known organizations, but eventually you moved from that into Microsoft, which did it feel different when you got into Microsoft than it did in some of those other organizations.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it didn't feel like I'd made it, it felt like um anybody who's played old school computer games, like Frogger, you know, I'm thinking of old school.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, where computer games used to have different levels and you master a level, and then the reward for mastering that level is you go to the next level.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like you know, Frogger, you get across the three-lane highway, and then you know, yay! So then the next levels, oh, it's four lanes, and now there's a bunch of semi-tracks, and you know, even it just gets harder.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the feeling.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think you know, it's easy to forget that when we're listening to other people's stories, like, oh, she made it, oh, he made it.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: You just made it to the next level of the game, and the next level game is harder, you know.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you can enjoy it for a second, and then you got to reorient yourself to a new landscape and figure out what you need to do to be successful there.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I never felt like I made it, uh, other than I just made it to the next level of the game.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing I had um learned, I know this isn't exactly your question, but I I love um I love to tell this story because it's a piece of advice that I've often given to people who were earlier in their career.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about learning how to figure out what your unique value is in any scenario that you're in.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of in Microsoft and other big companies, when you get to a senior position, you get a lot of people who are either on your team or they're asking for mentorship.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And in a company, as you know, Paul, Microsoft is like a whole universe unto itself, and you can get lost really fast, particularly if you don't have any corporate survival skills to start with.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so people, oh my God, how do we do it?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I would always say, look, get into the discipline, the mental discipline of any anything and everything you're doing, particularly when it's in a group setting, it could be a project, a conversation in a hallway, a meeting.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Get good at assessing everyone who's with you and figuring out what are they good at?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: What do they do, and what do I do?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And what's the thing that I could bring that brings the most value in that particular scenario?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it is you've got a provocative point of view.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you're the meeting convener.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes all you get to do is take notes because you don't know anything about what's going on.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you're the de facto leader for the group, but you know, it, but just you figure it out.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that skill is what I brought with me to Microsoft that really helped me make that transition because I'd gotten that piece of advice in a slightly different way, right?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Before I joined Microsoft.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, I was still in security, I was at Intel and in security, and I couldn't figure out how to get up to the next level.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was a senior director at that time, and I knew the next level would be a VP or something like that.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had a mentor uh tell me, look, Jennifer, the problem for you is that you were trying to be special in a company or particular vertical of the industry where there are a lot of people who have exactly your skills.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you really want to move up, go somewhere where you people, other people don't have your skills.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Go be a security person in a non-security company.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that was why I knew Microsoft was going to work and exactly why I was able to kind of integrate myself well, because I came to Microsoft with a set of cybersecurity skills that not a lot of other people in the company had at the time.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I was able to brand myself.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: So effectively, I was able to understand my unique value and what I brought to the company, what I brought to every scenario I was in.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then that really helped me kind of navigate from there.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting because I guess it probably also helps you deal with that fear aspect we were talking about before.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you know that, if you have an understanding of what the unique value is that you bring, then you can draw upon that at times when you feel intimidated or scared or something like that.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: I from my personal experience at being at Microsoft, the one thing that I remember distinctly was that prior to that point, um, I'd either been a technology consultant that was hired for a very specific set of skills.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I knew that I knew that I could provide value because I was being provided value or I was being asked to do a very specific thing that I knew how to do.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then the rest of my experience was being the tech guy in a non-tech organization.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: So therefore, again, there was obviously some unique value.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, when I joined Microsoft, the first thing that I remember is going from generally being accustomed to being one of the smartest people in the room to definitely not being, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that was awesome in terms of being able to learn and be curious and so on.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: But it was also scary because at that point, I'm questioning, am I providing value here?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: And when I'm questioning whether I'm providing value or whether I'm just, you know, basically the, you know, the guy that's sort of tagging on and learning from other people.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Then at that point you start to think about that in terms of job security.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: And are you going to be able to keep your job because you don't really belong here?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: That kind of imposter syndrome kind of thing starts to starts to kick in.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'd imagine that you're um for you, that idea of understanding that unique value provides that anchor at those times when you're when you do feel a bit like an imposter or you do feel like you you don't really deserve to be there.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: Is that accurate?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um, you know, you and I have worked together.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I I can say that you legitimately were often the smartest guy in the room, person in the room.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think I've ever been the smartest person in the room.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't, I don't take that in, you know, don't hear that in the wrong way.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I have a very healthy ego.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think I'm just fine.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I um but I've been in an industry where there's a certain kind of cognitive skill set around math and science that I was always pretty good at, but never the smart, never ever the smartest kid.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I wasn't a math major for a reason, you know.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I worked with a lot of people who were, you know, math majors and computer science majors.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm pretty good at not being the smartest person, you know, in the room.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think being comfortable understanding that your specific abilities don't aren't a reflection of your character, they're not a reflection of your potential, they're not they don't reflect your, you know, tot of total you know, impact that you can make on the world, they just reflect a very particular thing about you.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's not everything.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can be not the smartest person in the room and still have a ton to offer.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually, you know, this is a really important point because I think when people are trying to figure out what their career needs to be moving forward, and I talk a lot about this in the context of digital skills because the world is becoming more digital.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, everyone is in a tech job to some extent or another, whether it's officially called that, but there's a lot of fear around learning technology.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: What does that even mean?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there's a lot, there's a whole world, as you know, but you don't ever gonna get off the starting block if you feel like you're not capable of doing it, you're not smart enough.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, um, I never really was um constrained by that feeling.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I didn't feel like I needed to be smart enough in order to do something.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: I figured I could just figure it out.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I was smart enough, but I didn't need to be very smart, and that was good enough.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it turned out that it actually was good enough, uh, that I was able to be successful and never be the brightest tech mind in the room.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I had a lot of other things to offer, and I did know in any given scenario what my unique value was.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it didn't, it wasn't the tech skills, it was that I could always demonstrate value in any circumstance that that helped.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you or your team wants to discover how Billion Minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to BillionMinds.com slash learnmore today.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's billionminds.com slash L E A R N M O R E.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: So no longer at Microsoft, now in a in a very different world.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I know you've uh been writing a book, um, and actually I had a uh a great opportunity to uh to read a draft of that.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you very much.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm in the process of inventing the second half of my life.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's that's what it really is.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I um I got everything that I thought I could get out of corporate life.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I started the journey, as we've already talked about, um, in very practical terms.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was very motivated to to be um as good as I could be for all sorts of reasons, for all the you know, the perks that it gave me and and you know, my own purpose and wanting to do a good job.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I got to the end of that, you know, kids are grown and you don't need to, you just don't need to have that big job anymore.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, what else could I be doing?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I entered that whole phase of my life with these, you know, very um, very practical goals about what I could and should be achieving and I got there.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what are the other goals in life?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: What is there a deeper meaning or could there, should there be a deeper meaning and purpose to my life in the time that I have left here?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: So um I don't want it to sound too deep, right?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, that's really what.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: I decided I needed to go do.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so what does that meant?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's that's a really, it's been a journey.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've been uh out of the corporate world for you know just about a year.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and it's been kind of a wild ride.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a book, which is great, which took me all the way through the pandemic.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Every, you know, that's kind of what I did when I was hunkered down.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I tried to get very clear on, you know, what what kind of impact I could be making on the world in, you know, in a professional sense, and where I have focused and and I feel quite happy continuing to focus in the area of um broadly future of work, but more specifically, you know, how do we think about digital skills and what they mean in the context of a career?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And is there anything I can do, given my own experience, my own career journey, to help people get their heads around the fact that for uh success for many of them is going to mean acquiring some level of digital fluency or context that they don't have today?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what can they be doing about that?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big future of work problem that we think about from a policy government perspective.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Companies are thinking about that with respect to retraining their employees, schools are thinking about that with respect to the kinds of curriculum they develop and all the different ways that they deliver education to students, but all there isn't a lot of conversation directly to people.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of about these people who are going to need digital schools, but who's talking to people?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like that is a worthy place to spend my time.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's is what the book was about.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I spent a lot of time advising and investing in startups that are in that space.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I feel like that's you know, from a professional you know, perspective, where I will spend most of my time.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also traveling and just making space for life.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_03: You kind of talk about the fact that that we're all we're all good at certain things, we're not so good at certain things, um, and that's that that's normal.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: But our assessment of ourselves in terms of what we're good at and what we're not good at, or what we like and what we don't like, can sometimes be somewhat off because of the fact that we build this sort of convention.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: There's a conventional wisdom is the term you use in the book, which I love.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there's a conventional wisdom that that may exist about things outside ourselves, but there's also this kind of conventional wisdom that we build up about ourselves that can come from things that happened in our childhood or individual instances or something along those lines.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then that conventional wisdom can be somewhat constraining, and it can lead us to not be able to fully envision what we're capable of, what we can do, or what even we want to do.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: So, can you talk a little bit about how you think about this conventional wisdom issue and also um how you think about being able to pull yourself out of that and go back to first principles?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for asking that question.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I think um when we talk about mindset, it's a particular uh perspective that we don't that that I think should be included in the mindset conversation, and it's not included in the mindset conversation.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: It has to do with um all of the ways that we sort of subconsciously through you know force of habit constrain ourselves.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what I'm not good at math.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why do you think you're not good at math?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because I wasn't good at math.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so you weren't good at math.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: When was the last time you tried to do math?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe you're better.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to draw.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I was a kid, I got made fun of, you know, so many of the um truths that we hold so close to ourselves about ourselves are formed from incidents in our past, you know, just small circumstances that were clearly, you know, triggered us at the time were emotionally painful, but you hold those memories close to you and they become your own story that you tell about yourself.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's unfortunate because uh there's a lot more to you than just the highly edited version of the story that you carry around your pocket when you when you think about yourself.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So uh there's this principle in innovation, it's a physics principle.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Elon Musk uses it a lot, and that's kind of where I happened upon it.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's first principles thinking.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's this idea that you never accept anything as true.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: You always ask why, why, why, why, why, until you get down to the most basic truths about something.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how innovators often will approach a problem and how they get to kind of a fresh idea about how to solve the problem because they just don't accept the first answer as real.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's always, you know, more to the story, if you will.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and and it's been, you know, it's been very successful, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of you know, tech uh innovators who you know have changed the world and made a lot of money by thinking about that.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: But why can't you just apply that same principle to yourself?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like when you think about what you who you are, what you're good at, what you think is possible or not possible in your life, apply that notion of first principles to yourself.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Ask yourself why.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if you remember in the book, there's another section around uh how many hours you've been awake.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is fascinating.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: When you ask people, tell me all about yourself.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: We all have these stories, right?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: These ready-to-serve stories about ourselves.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: We have like the short version, the long version, the version you tell you your mother, the version you tell a colleague.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, you kind of have this little little tiny book of stories with several different versions.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's your story.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing is that, like, if you told all of your stories, if I recorded you, Paul, telling every story you could possibly think of about yourself, you could probably give me three or four hours of content.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then you'd be like, I don't really, honestly, I think I told you everything.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: I told you everything.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, that's not true.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you've lived to be 30 or 40, and if you think about all of your conscious hours when you were doing meaningful things in your life and all the different things that happened to you, you're talking about like tens of tens of thousands of hours of content.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you couldn't possibly have summarized yourself in three or four hours.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's a highly edited version, and that the versions of the stories that you tell are based on your beliefs about yourself.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: And your beliefs about yourself are this kind of conventional wisdom that you don't question ever, you just take it for truth.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: But if you stop and think about it, a lot of what you believe about yourself is is probably not nearly um as relevant as you think it is.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot more to you than than you give yourself credit for.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really important when you're gonna try to go do something new and you have the reaction of, I can't do that.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why can't you do that?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tell me why.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it just starts you down a different path where more things are possible, a path where more things are possible.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, interestingly, that actually ties into one of the other themes that I pulled from the book, which was that these skills that we uh that we have, the things that we're good at and not so good at, um the stories that we tell themselves about them may or may not be true, but there are probably two skills that whether we have them well honed or not, we need to own them.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: One of them being curiosity and the other being an innovator's mindset.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: And what I found myself thinking about was that this cure, there's a curiosity about the world, which is obviously very, very important to have as you're evaluating your place in it.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's also a curiosity that many of us probably need to cultivate about ourselves, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: And um, you know, as I I found myself questioning exactly what you were talking about and thinking, am I really that that curious about myself?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Funnily enough, the uh the thing that went through my head was um what's the uh Whitney Houston song, The Greatest Love of All, you know, where they say learning to love your learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all or whatever.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking, well, actually, maybe, maybe in this current world that should be reworded to like learning to know yourself or something along those lines is almost like a greater gift.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: Because um the sorts of of self, the the sort of deep self-introspection that I suppose is really necessary to understand who you are and therefore what your position in the rest of the world needs to be is a kind of introspection that most of us feel like we don't have time for, perhaps.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you did you find that writing the book was the trigger for understanding yourself better, or is that a skill that you've been able to cultivate um over time anyway?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: And and this idea of like sort of having curiosity about who you are, did that come naturally, or is there some guidance that you'd give people in terms of how to cultivate?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: If it was only one or the other, I certainly have always had some curiosity about myself.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: Some of it is just my own personal makeup and and uh some of it is just a result of the circumstances of my life, many of which I was not in control.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't choose my I didn't choose to grow up the way I did, but I grew up in a very alternative household.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh and I had an unlikely path.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I always thought, wow, this is I actually have an interesting life.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I have thought about it a lot, and um and I have always loved to write.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I've always taken copious notes and have kept journals and you know, all sorts of um recordings, one sort or another, throughout my life.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the book um it was a bit of a it felt like a deferred maintenance project, you know, that I always had an awareness that I was accumulating a story throughout my life that maybe was worth telling.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I had all these sort of notes and aphorisms and ideas about how I thought things should work.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And also, by the way, as an executive, when you are given the privilege to lead a team, which is absolutely a privilege, or mentor people, you do have to spend some time thinking about what you believe in.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I had some practice kind of thinking about that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: Part that.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then the book was the opportunity for me to make sense of it all, you know, because when it's all in your head, it doesn't make doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense to anyone else, but try to put it into a consumable format and to align the stories of your own life to the lessons that you want to discuss in the book is a it's a whole thing in and of itself.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, writing the book became um the truth serum, if you will, for the story, because it was when I had to really test my own beliefs and uh own feelings about um things that uh you know, to make that make sense in a book is a whole different thing.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that um for me personally, when the the first time I really kind of came across this idea of of having to learn more about your yourself than might, I don't know, might be comfortable for some people, or just as they say, something they just that maybe they feel it's self-indulgent or something along those lines, was when I encountered um a book called Business Model U, which uh for many of us that are in, you know, so tech or business will be familiar with business model canvas, which is a means of kind of getting a business model and putting on a page for large organizations or small organizations.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: But there's a companion book to that called Business Model U, uh, which is a great tool for anybody that's looking to reinvent themselves in any way, because um, what they effectively do is go through a set of exercises that are necessary to understand certain things about yourself, like for example, what do you like and what do you not like?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: Those are things that that for many of us are actually difficult questions to answer because we answer them too literally.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: We say, I like sales, or I like, we define them in almost in terms of our job, right?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_03: Of our job title, or I I like I like finance or I like accounting or something like that.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: And when you think about it in that superficial way, it may or may not, well, A, it may or may not be true.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe you like sales because at the time at which you were doing sales, everything else about your life was really settled and really, uh, or you were having a bunch of fun doing some side project or something on those lines, and therefore you have fond memories of that time, and it's got almost nothing to do with your job.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: But then also, as you mentioned in the book, almost every job we do is really a combination of things we like doing and things we don't like doing.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so if you can go a level deeper and you can understand what those what those things are within the context of your job that you um that you like or you don't like, then that can be a path to finding the ultimate destination whereby you're doing more of the things that you like and more of the things that you feel comfortable doing, and that it's stretching you in the right way, versus this sort of random way in which you can do that.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think so.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the just to with respect to effectiveness and how you how you can do this well, one of the big shifts that I discovered um after I left my corporate job that was very helpful for me to continue to do things, purposeful things and in a productive way, was to completely recast or redefine uh time.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is the purpose and the value of time?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because here's the thing when you're in a job and you're busy, time, increments of time, an hour.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: I got an hour, I have 10 minutes, I have a half a day, I've got a week, is you define the value of it with how much stuff you can stuff into it.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: How much can I get done?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: We don't even it's so yeah, it's such a um so ingrained we don't even need to say it.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like if we're we just assume that's what the value of time is.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Time is an increment the whose value is measured uh by how much you were able to stuff into that increment.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas time when you're not again up against a clock is for me, anyway, it's about how much space can I create.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Space time is if I have an hour, can I just have this hour be enough space for me just to do one thing really, really well without having the competing demands of everything else?
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's really just another way of thinking about mindfulness.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: But that's kind of what it is.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I found that to be extraordinarily uh helpful for me writing the book because when you write a book, you actually you're you have to follow all these trains of thought because when you're writing a book, you're telling a lot of different stories at the same time.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was telling my personal story throughout the chapters of the book.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: I also had a couple of themes that I wanted to follow that were very much about personal effectiveness and you know how you live a purpose-driven life.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I also wanted to talk about sort of the broader macroemic macroeconomic reality of this future of work and you know what it means to live in a more digital world.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had all these themes, and I it's really hard to follow that train of thought unless you just focus on that.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't do it when you also have another meeting and you got to go over here and over there, which is the way life is.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so, time for me had to be these increments where I created enough space just to relax and and figure out what it is I was trying to say and how I wanted to tell this story, and it really changed everything.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: That that notion of time and the way I was using it writing a book, sort of um it I it got kind of infused into the rest of my life too.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like I do live very differently now than I did six, nine, twelve months ago because I've learned how to use time as a way to say, you know what, all those other problems that I'm thinking about, I'm just gonna put them off.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna put them on the other end of this time thing, and they will be waiting for me at the door once I'm done with this thing I'm doing right now.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: But they can just wait because here is my space for doing this one thing.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's super interesting because um I remember when when we worked together that I would I kind of think of you as a professional plate spinner, um, in the sense that there was a there were always multiple things that you were having to deal with that were quite different to each other all at the same time.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_03: And looking at it from the outside, it was something that that you appeared to be able to do exceedingly well to manage a whole bunch of different uh commitments, if you like, at the same time.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, all I had visibility into was that in a was that in a professional capacity.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: But all of us have not only all of those plates that we're spinning in our day job, but we've got maybe the side interest that we're working on, maybe we're volunteering on the side, and then we've got our family and friend commitments and things like that.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um as you as you look back on how you've managed that in your career, I know it's something that a lot of people struggle with right now, and it's probably got worse during COVID because many of the traditional barriers between our work-life and our non-work life have broken down or become virtual.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: What did you was there anything concrete that you did to help you kind of manage those different uh commitments effectively to help it not drive you crazy?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: Are there things that you've learned since that you would have done differently at that time to help you manage those competing demands better?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I I think um the that is not a sustainable way to live or work for anyone, period.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's my belief about that.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is not, and it's one of the reasons why I don't do it anymore.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, I don't care who you are, and I don't care what company you are for.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Here's my provocative opinion.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is not a sustainable or effective way to work to have too many things to think about at any given time.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Having said that, it is most people's reality.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: So we can we can agree that it's not great, but we also can agree that that is, you know, there's not a lot, a lot of people can do to change that.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: So um, in that scenario, uh, you know, I come, I come back to mindfulness and you know, all the um techniques that we use for our personal health and and well-being, I think apply very, very well to the stress and anxiety of a corporate life.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have to do a very, very good job uh leaving everything at the door.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm walking into a meeting and I've got Paul and Ryan sitting in a conference room, and I haven't seen them in four weeks, and they've made tremendous amount of progress, and I can't remember what we last talked about, but I got to get up to speed like this.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you just have to put everything aside and be wherever you are, whenever you're there.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the only thing you can do.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there is one thing.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I learned this lesson um through a mentor when I was starting to write the book and trying to figure out, oh my god, how am I gonna do this?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: It just seems like such a big, huge task.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you've written books, and so you know that feeling at the beginning where you just don't know how you're gonna do it.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and the um the advice was uh that writing a book is like driving at night, where the headlights only ever shine 50 feet in front of you at any given time.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's as far ahead of you as you'll ever see at any given time, but somehow you always make it to your destination.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what writing a book is you get up and just write a little bit of the book, and you don't worry too much about the whole thing.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you just keep writing.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's exactly how you live a busy life.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you're building a career that, you know, it's not an excuse for not understanding what your bigger purpose is.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a whole conversation we could have around, you know, purpose to outcomes to goals, to strategies, to the things you do every day.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's a connection there that I think is key to being very effective as you as you.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Build a career, manage a career.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that, you know, in the context of your day, the anxiety comes when you start to think about everything you have to do.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: If I, you know, in my in my last ETO role, thought about, oh my God, if I thought, like you look at your calendar and it's all double booked and it's all filled in, and that is a level of anxiety that um is kind of untenable.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so you just focus on the thing in front of you.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do that one thing, well, go to the next thing, go to the next thing, somehow it manages to work itself out.
• 44:34
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• 44:41
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• 44:49
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• 44:54
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• 44:57
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• 45:01
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• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: Do you consider yourself to be particularly innovative?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um and are there skills that regular people can can cultivate to help them innovate their way out of a position into another one?
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: I consider myself to be very innovative.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean, I think I've been pretty innovative over the last year.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think necessity is the mother of innovation, right?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Invention or not just invention.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I to the extent that innovation is looking at an old problem a new way, and questioning everything that you think you know about it, so that you come down to some fundamental principles that you can kind of play around with.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think um I think yeah, I think I've been fairly innovative in some of the things that I've been doing.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, your question about what other people can do is your question around to to be to innovate their way out of their whatever their circumstances are.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean you know, using the examples of innovation around you, I like to tell the story in the book of you know, Uber and uh Airbnb, that really because we do, to your point, we do think innovation is really kind of SpaceX and it's you know shooting rockets into the sky and it's building brand new technology.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I don't do that.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not innovation is a process, it's not a thing, right?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's a mindset, it's not a thing, it's the ability to be very curious about a problem andor yourself and just try to find a different way of looking at it.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I think anybody can do that, but um, but to get started, it helps to look at some common examples because when you really, you know, look at them closely, you can see the process of thinking about, you know, Uber, for an example, and this is a you know, everybody knows Uber.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody ever thought transportation was a problem, right?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't like taxis, but didn't think you need to change it.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, I hate taxis.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Don't we all hate taxis?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: What's the problem?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're like, no, no, no.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: It could be better.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: It could be better, right?
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's the courage to say, no, no, no, I don't accept this reality.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think there might be a better way.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if I just really think deeply about the problem and get inside the problem, I might find my way back out of it.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: If I don't, if I just accept the problem as reality, I'm not gonna change it.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, you you did this work at Microsoft, and so did Ryan.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: Is that, and actually, a lot of what you guys did taught me some of this lesson that the best way to solve a problem is to get kind of a first-person perspective, immerse yourself in it.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because once you go all the way down and start to question everything, it's only from that point that you can figure out how to move yourself back out of it.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, what does that apply to a scenario?
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody's in a, you know, a job they hate.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the only thing they know how to do, they accept it as a given.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm in an accounting, because that's what I know how to do.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, is it though?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's talk about this for a second.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, where do you work?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: What industry are you in?
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're an accountant, and what, oh, in the healthcare industry.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's interesting.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you know a little bit about healthcare and you got into accounting how?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I see you have a degree in marketing.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but you just that was the job that you got.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so now you okay, but you did know something about marketing at some point.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you like to do?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh, and you coach your kids' soccer team.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you do there?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like there are all these, if you just stop and question, you know, and get really into you know, sort of into the problem uh space that you're in, you might find your path out.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a you know, the these are these are um windy paths that we all have to take through our own lives.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there's not one general five-step thing you can do, but it always does start with uh being deeply curious about whatever scenario in and being you were in and and being courageous enough to ask all the questions that need to be asked to find your true way out of it.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you kind of talk about it in the book as figure out what you want to do and figure out what the world wants from you.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then it's almost like finding a finding a match between those uh between those things.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um I guess one of my last questions for you here is around that that other piece about what the world wants from you.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, traditional ways in which many people think about their future, particularly in the work realm, but even beyond it, I think, is often like, well, I'm at this level inside this organization, and in five years' time, I want to be at this level.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it may even get more specific than that.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, uh, you know, I work in this group, and in five years' time I want to be the head of this group that I work in, or something like that, because our imagination is kind of constrained to that.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: I suppose one of the challenges in the rapidly moving world that we exist is that if those five-year plans are very are highly specific that we have for ourselves, the thing that we want to be might not even exist in five years' time, right?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: The world is changing so rapidly that making these, making certainly specific longer-term plans can often be for naught because we don't have a crystal ball to understand even whether the group that we're in will exist or the sector that we're in will exist, or the industry that we're in will exist in the way in which we think about it today.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: So how do you think, do you even think it's relevant professionally these days to make five-year goals or 10-year goals or anything like that?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: Or should people just be thinking about it more differently and in a more agile way?
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's extremely important to visualize very broadly what you think you want your life to be like in five or 10 years.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, getting to the specifics can be very tricky, but understanding and not what your job looks like, yeah, what your life looks like.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: And understanding you, you know, what kind of purpose you have and how does that manifest itself in the context of your life, which includes your career but is not limited to your career.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's extraordinarily important.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you will have to be very agile and adaptable, but uh have your own North Star so that regardless of the you know the windiness of the path you take, you always know you're going in generally the right direction.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think from a career, from a more practical perspective, I think it's better to think about a career as a series of short-term adventures where you opportunistically get to the end of an adventure and you're ready for whatever the next one is, and you don't have to make the decision about what the next one is.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: This is the twin-side opportunity challenge of the world changing.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they say there's a statistic floating out there somewhere that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't been invented yet, which can be a real bummer if you are the kind of person who just wants to do the same thing.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there are people out there, and we're gonna have to find ways for them to adapt too.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: But for the rest of us, you know, while that kind of can be scary, it also gives you a lot of um leeway to say, well, of course I don't know what I'm gonna do.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: Of course I don't know what I'm gonna be doing in five or 10 years.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no one else knows what they want to do or can be doing either.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in the absence of any kind of certainty, why don't I just have a bunch of shorter adventures?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: And every adventure I curate for myself based on what it is I want to learn, what it is I want to do, what it is I want to accomplish.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: And once I've done that, I can go to the next adventure.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know what the next adventure is gonna be, but I know I'll figure out when I get there and I will be more capable because of everything I'm learning during the adventure I'm on right now.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um okay, one final question for you.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um This podcast is largely about personal effectiveness.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think everybody listening to this will have picked up some really good tips from you about how you've become personally effective and how they can apply that to their lives.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_03: But if if you were to get introspective right now and you were to think about areas in which you still struggle today to be as effective personally as you could be, um what is the one thing that you wish you could do better in order to be personally effective on?
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: What's the thing that you almost like have to practice at hardest?
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: Saying no.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I um I'm a pretty curious person, and I also have a little bit of FOMO, you know, like there's a cool headline.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I gotta know what that is.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is this new AI thing?
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: I better, I better find out.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: And um, that's not always helpful.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that we all have this opportunity to curate our own lives and our own experiences and curating that, like if you're creating a collection for a museum, it's really 90% saying no to things so that you have enough space to say yes to the things that really matter.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would say no a lot more.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've, you know, I would read more in certain areas and less random news.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: I probably spent a little less time on social media to create space to focus on what really is important to me.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_03: Jennifer, thank you so much.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: Really appreciate it.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I'm sure everybody's learned a great deal.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Paul.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at Billion Minds.com.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.