The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills For A Resilient Career In The Tech World With Mark Herschberg

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

On today's episode of the Change Proof podcast, I have Mark Hirschberg. Mark is the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures and startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He's developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Mark helped create MIT's Career Success Accelerator, where he's taught for more than 20 years. You're going to love this conversation today with Mark Hershberg. Enjoy. All right, Mark. So I'm rubbing my hands together because I already can tell that there's going to be so much meat to what you and I can talk about today. And it's just going to be a question of how much is going to be enough to satiate us without either of us becoming so bloated that we want to take a nap afterward. And I don't know.

I'm not just eating dinner for you.

Yeah, but everybody that's listening too. So your bio is extensive and your history is impressive and all that. My question to you is, what's one thing that is not a part of that introduction, your standard bio, that you would like for people to know about you at the start of our conversation?

Throw in a little extra. I don't know if you really need to know it, but I do some standup comedy. I started doing it a couple years ago just to challenge myself. I've done a lot of public speaking. But comedy is a different type of public speaking I had never done before, and I always like to push myself. I always like to grow. So I started doing that.

Wow. You're surprising me. I didn't know that. I didn't expect to hear you say that. And I can feel, I can feel the terror. It's like I am a keynote speaker on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. I speak to audiences all over the globe by the thousands. And yet the thought, just the thought of standing up in front of a room full of people and with the goal that I lead them in laughter other than saying, okay, now let's all— and I've done this with audiences before. It's actually did this with an audience of lawyers at a bar association meeting that I led, one of these continuing legal ed things. And these stiff lawyers in their suits and their ties. And by the way, I'm a recovered, fully recovered attorney myself now, having Spent 18 years doing that work. So I led them in an intentional laughter session, like literally for just a couple of minutes that we would be laughing together. But otherwise, to just create laughter in a space through storytelling and things, that terrifies me. You gotta let me know, or let us know, Mark, how has that been going for you? What has that been like?

It really shook— took me by surprise when I started because I thought I'm a reasonably funny guy. I post funny comments on Facebook sometimes. So I'm going to go do this. And I've done public speaking. I have no problem doing that. Let me go up and do some comedy. What I learned very quickly is a few things are subtly different. First, stand-up comedy, as one of my coaches said, you're not going for smiles, you're going for belly laughs. You have to have a laugh-out-loud moment. Every roughly 30, 60 seconds to just keep them going, keep them going. Not just, oh yeah, that was cute. Nope, laugh out loud. The other thing, as public speakers, we know our content, but we also know you don't memorize it word for word. You have your flow and needs to feel natural. But when it comes to comedy, you need to have it memorized, not just word for word, Syllable for syllable and emphasizing the right syllable, increasing or decreasing a pause, or even changing a word from a one-syllable word. Those subtle changes can make or break a joke. And I never appreciated that before. It's working with a bunch of other great comedians that over the years I learned this. I learned to get my timing better. My timing is still my biggest weakness, but it's been Very informative. And what's great, of course, is that when I do my more commercial speaking gigs, when I speak to companies or conferences, I've always had some humor. I could fire off a quip. But now when I have more intentional humor, I've learned how to construct that part better and just bring in these new additional skills to elevate the other work that I do.

Yeah. All right. I got to keep going down this track for a little while longer. I know we have an agenda. It's on the business conversation. We're going to talk about tech startups. We're going to talk about tools. Career tools and business tools for leadership management. And yet we are not gonna go there yet. All right. First of all, what kind of content when you do a set? I wanna know how long is a typical set for you when you get up there and go, and what is the typical content that you're bringing out?

Yep. This is an important question.

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I don't go to traditional comedy clubs, and so I don't know how well I would deal with hecklers. And that's a very important skill that I have not yet tested. I typically do sets that are— sometimes I have to keep them short when I'm part of a group of a lot of us doing it. It might be as short as 3 minutes. We try to go for about 5 or 6 minutes or 8 minutes, and that's usually a good set for me. So it's not the professional comedians who are doing 20-minute sets, 30, or obviously hour-long sets. The comedy I do is a lot of monologue. I've got friends who do different types of things, but I do— imagine I was just standing up on that late-night talk show and I am pulling in from the headlines things that have gone on, and that goes into my monologue, which means I'm changing it very rapidly because it gets stale, it gets out of date. You might be able to use something for weeks or months. The other thing, the group that I primarily do this with is a group similar to a TED Talk audience. So the great thing is I can make references to, say, the periodic table or Chaucer or some other reference that probably would not work in your average comedy club, but works well for this very educated audience.

I love it. That— so it's a bit like a curated karaoke night for a group of folks that are there to support one another. Is That's fair.

That is fair. I do it with a group called Renaissance Weekends, which is like a version of TED Talks, and you've got extremely educated people and very supportive people. They're never going to boo me. They're never going to pull me off the stage. They will applaud even if I screw up. So there is a safety net, which is nice because I'm still early in my comedy— I don't know if career is the right word, but comedy progression.

Yeah. It's— I've— have you ever done a TED Talk?

I have not.

Okay.

And don't necessarily have a desire to.

You don't have a desire to?

No.

Okay. I'll just say this, whether you don't or maybe someday you do, I'll just, for you, you chose this as a challenge. And I think comedy, standup comedy is probably one of the greatest feats, like of a daredevil that I can imagine, like literally walking on a tightrope. To me, it's that, it's at that level. Doing a TED Talk is something I have had the experience of doing. And actually our company trains people, a part of our company trains people to deliver TED Talks. And in part because that was a challenge for me, like similar to the one that you chose for yourself. I've been speaking to audiences for years and years, many years all over the globe. But to have a set, in this case, a TED Talk for that time period was 18 minutes. Now they're 8 minutes and they're 12 minutes and stuff like that. But when I did mine, it was pretty standard with 18 minutes. And to have an 18-minute talk end to end completely Not just memorize. It's not just memorizing. It's embodiment is really what it is. You're embodying the words, the message, the intonation, the— all the variants, all the pauses, all the dynamics, every aspect of it, the facial expressions, the whole thing. At a certain point, maybe midway through the process of crafting it, figuring out what I wanted to talk about, all of it, I said to my wife, I don't think— I don't know if I I don't know if I can go through this. I don't know if I could do that. I, I don't know if I have enough brain cells left, frankly, to actually pull this thing off. But, but it was just magical. And it was just such a different, completely different dynamic than other forms of public speaking. Wow. I'm gonna give this some consideration. I think for a lot of reasons is a very strong process. So people right now going, all right, so when are we gonna get to the business stuff? Or maybe the, tell me, this is interesting, but tell me how, gimme something I can use with my team.

Totally. What was that? In fact, if you think about what we've just done, we talked about we're both professional speakers, and so we're used to going up and having unstructured. But whether it's a TED Talk or a comedy set, it's very structured. And we're stretching ourselves in new directions. Just like before you go onto the field, before you play a sport, what are you doing? You're stretching yourself. You're pushing your muscles in new directions so you're warmed up, you're ready to play and be active. By stretching yourself, by putting yourself in certain arbitrary constraints. I have to have this word for word. The pauses really do matter here. That feels artificial, but what happens is when we're in a meeting or just standing up before our peers at the whiteboard and we're doing a more spontaneous talk, we've stretched ourselves, we've pushed ourselves in these directions, and we've got some of that latent muscle memory within us that we can apply to our daily practice in work. So what we've just been talking about, it seems like it was fun. But really, we're talking about building up skills. We haven't talked about with speaking and comedy and formal prepared talks, but this idea applies in all sorts of areas. Pushing yourself in some direction gives you the flexibility to be more productive and more agile in your work.

It does. And it's not an either/or as well. It's yes and both. So this ability to get into a structured mode and be able to succeed with a structure is so vitally important, as well as the capacity to utilize what is in the space. Because one of the things that we'll— we, when we are working with folks that wanna do less structured talks, like for example, a talk where you're not memorizing every word, even in a keynote, as you said, all of us that do keynote work, we understand there's a structure, there's a theme, there's a following a certain through line, but we're not gonna say exactly the same thing each and every time. You have to read the energy in a room. And the most effective public speakers are those that don't just come out there like a robot, but rather truly read the energy in the room and then can adjust or be agile, as you said, be able to— shameless plug for my book Pivot— be able to pivot in the moment and utilize what is. And that principle comes from improv. So one of the other things that, that might challenge you, and I've done a bit of but want to certainly do more of, is getting involved in improv groups because it's the concept That you basically take everything as yes. And so somebody says something and you say yes, and you move with that thing. You utilize what is in the moment, whether it's physically, the physicality of this, of what's happening, or the words or the tone or any of those things, the pace. And you just simply take it to the next level. And you think about as an entrepreneur, so here's our segue into business entrepreneurship, being an inventor, being a startup founder, all aspects of innovation. It really involved that same capacity to yes, and in other words, to plus whatever is happening, not to waste any of what's going on, but actually utilize it. And when we're living in a world of tremendous change and disruption like we are now, at least some of the conversation is how do you yes, and how do you plus everything that's happening in the world now so that 3 years and 5 years from now, you, your business, your teams are thriving Well beyond even the point that they might be thriving today. I'd love to get a sense from you of, 'cause you've been a tech startup, you are a founder, you've, you've not just studied at MIT, but you've been a professor there, you've taught there. I'd love to get a sense if you are educating a group of young founders right now, let's tease out some of the most important tools that, that young founders may need to have that they don't maybe have because they weren't It wasn't taught to them. It's certainly not maybe taught in business school or what have you. Can we start there? Is that okay, Mark?

Sure. Let's start with a high-level set of skills, but also a mentality particular to founders. There are 10 skills that we have seen over and over again when universities survey employers, when large recruiting firms survey employers, when companies just internally do assessments over and over we see a consistent set of skills listed. And if you look from one list to another, they might use slightly different terms. They might say, oh, it's 14 things, it's 8 things— depends how they break it down. What we've done in the class I teach at MIT, referred to as MIT's Career Success Accelerator, and in the book I created, I break them into 10 different skills. 3 sections, 10 skills. So let's run through what those are. Section 1, careers. Chapter 1, career planning. How to create and execute a career plan. Now, even if you're a founder, by the way, you still need one. You might say, I'm not getting promoted. There's no new title. But it's not just about the title. It's about your capabilities and competencies. So creating a plan to improve and get there. Chapter 2, working effectively. We've been taught in school how to get the right answer. And stick it in a box, but in the real world there is no box. So dealing with knowing the right questions to ask, dealing with corporate culture and politics—very important skills that we never talk about. Chapter three: Interviewing. Now there's lots of content. How do you answer this question? How do you make a good resume? But we're never trained how to interview other people, and many of us, certainly founders, but not just leaders, even peers—we have to interview our peers. No one's taught us how to do that. Second section, leadership and management, basics of leadership, and then management. I look at from the people side and the process side. The third section has 4 chapters: communication, networking, negotiations, and ethics. And time and again, we see these skills come up. But if you're a founder in particular, most important thing is to recognize that whatever you are doing, It's not just you. It feels that way. We're the person trying to get everything done and the buck stops here. But you need to recognize that it is your team and it's not just what you can do, it's what the whole team can do, whatever anyone on the team can lead you forward to. And you have to take more of that team mentality.

That makes total sense. Now, I probably missed something, and this is taking me back to my college days when I would literally be looking at my right or my left, and my left, actually my wife— now my wife, then my only hopeful girlfriend— I would have looked at her and said, did you get 10 things? I only got 8. So here's what I got. All right, Mark, I got career planning, working effectively, interviewing, leadership and management— maybe that was 2 things, not one— communications, networking, negotiations, and ethics. So what did I miss?

Leadership, people management, process management.

Got it. Thank you. All right. This is good. Somebody out there's going, yeah, I didn't get it either. So that's perfect. All right. I'm gonna ask you some questions about this, professore. If you had to pick one thing, this is, you're on a desert island and there's only one thing, one tool, one skill you could take with you. What do you, is there one that would just be more important than anything else there?

I get asked this a lot and in fact, oh shit. One of my most popular articles. No, but it's a really important question. One of my most popular articles is titled Leadership Is Not Atomic because it's not leadership more important than communication, more important than something else. If you are going to be a good leader, you need to learn how to negotiate with other parties. But if you're going to be a good negotiator, you need to learn how to communicate, how to set your position, how to listen to others. All these skills build upon each other, and you can't just say this one skill in isolation. So I know I'm bypassing a question a bit, but they really do build upon each other.

Yes. All right. So now I get to do what I did pretty well as an attorney for many years, and that is to take the opposite side of it. Please do. The contrary position. All right. So I'm going to pick ethics, which is an interesting thing for me. I had a conversation earlier today. I'm just drawing on, on what's again, as is what, what's in the space for me when I was a lawyer. I made a lot of money, and I don't have any shame about saying that. I was not terribly fulfilled. I was at the beginning of my career. I actually was a bankruptcy attorney at the start. And it might sound funny because you go, all you're doing is dealing with people and situations that went bad, went sideways, and that's how it ended up in bankruptcy. What's so great about that? I'll just say that the relief that I was able to provide to business owners, and folks in that space was phenomenal. I understand now why they created the bankruptcy code, because it truly is a way to clean the slate. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, hey, I want to scuttle my business today. I want to ruin all my relationships with everybody I borrowed money from. I want to lose everybody's money. Nobody does that, right? So everything starts out as a great idea, and then reality is that it's not always a great idea, or the execution was off, or whatever. And sometimes those things end up in bankruptcy court. But the relief was great. I felt fulfillment from that. I moved out of that into more commercial litigation. And ultimately, I would say there was a trade-off between the fulfillment side of things, including the financial fulfillment, and the ethical compromises that showed up in the space for me. And when I transitioned out of the law after 18 years and began to do different work, which is what that book Pivot is really all about. It's about reinvention, career reinvention. What I found and what has sustained me, really buoyed me ever since then, even make sometimes more, sometimes less money than I did previously, that not being the most important thing, but having a mag— 10x fulfillment factor involved. Now, I'm so fulfilled by the work that I do. And, and this is interesting, right? Like in finance, you want to move your bottom line exponentially. Increase your turnover and decrease your expenses. Very simple stuff. To me, I increased my fulfillment and I decreased my ethical compromises in the work that I currently do, which is why as a career was a great fit for me. I want to hear your thoughts on how deeply do you dive into ethics with your folks and how important do you actually feel it is to the success of a, of a startup?

Sadly, our society is set up that ethics aren't important and sometimes get in the way. If you think about a lot of companies, if you think about cryptocurrencies, for example, think about companies like Airbnb or Uber, they very intentionally cross lines. So Uber, for example, said, we're going to start up effectively a taxi service. Now, taxi services are regulated by cities. I can't just say I want to be a taxi driver. I have to go pass certain tests. Background checks, I have to show I'm competent, and then get a license. Now, there's some arguments about— there's a term called rent-seeking in economics, that they create these barriers. A New York taxi medallion, the license you need to drive a New York taxicab, before 2008, it was going for, I think, around $750,000. Think about what a taxi driver earns. They can't afford to buy that. You take out a mortgage on it, effectively. These are assets. And just like you got a mortgage for your house, you get a mortgage for this. And we can You can argue about whether they were too restrictive and there were some inefficiencies in the space, and those might be valid arguments. But this company, Uber and others, just said, we're just going to outright ignore the rules and we're just going to put drivers in cars. And here's the thing, we're so small, who cares? Maybe they shut us down 2 weeks from now. Okay. Probably we're not even on anyone's radar. And then by the time they got big enough and they got on people's radars, They had made enough money, raised enough if not earned enough, that they could then hire a team of lawyers to push back against it. So what we've seen is unfortunately a lot of startups will say, I'm just going to flout the law and hope I get away with it long enough until I can afford the lawyers who can give me a defense against it and push the boundaries.

Instead Yeah.

But I would say I do not do that. There's a reason we have these rules. And one of the things we're seeing is there's reasons we see problems with Uber drivers who assault their victims because we didn't do background checks. And this is a problem. Every regulation we have is because someone at some point did something wrong and we needed to be explicit about it. But as you grow up, whatever stage you are in a business, Ethics are always the last thing that we think about. Are we making money? Is this sustainable? Can we do all these things? By the way, is this illegal? Is there a problem? It's a little bit of a problem, but the amount of money compared to the amount of problem, I'm willing to overlook it. And really what we need to do is set up ethical guardrails, lines where we say, here are the boundaries. And if we start to get near that boundary, We take a pause. We say, wait a second, we're getting close to this guardrail here. Let's think about this. Should we be doing this? Maybe the guardrail is in the wrong place. We hadn't thought about this case, and it's okay to move it, but you want to be conscientious. So you need to a priori set up those guardrails and talk about with your teams, as we get close to these boundaries, this is where we trip something, and then we have a discussion.

Do you have an example in any of the startups that you've been involved in? I know there have been several where this has been a real consideration, not just, again, a thing that we teach in a class, let's say.

I'm trying to think about ones I can speak about.

I was thinking that too, though I still wear the lawyer hat often. So yes, scan and see if there's something comes up.

Mentioned, here's one mistake I made. I do talk about, I was at a company and the VP of product sexually harassed One of his employees. It was a case I remember, he and I, I knew something was going on. I didn't have the details. He and I went out for a beer, said, do you know what's going on? I'm like, no, I just like, clearly something's off. And he told me a story and his statement. He had gotten a young woman to transfer into his group from a different group. They had been friendly. She transferred into his group and then he apparently asked her out on a date and she said no. And it spiraled from there. His statement to me, I will never forget this. He said, it wasn't my fault. She was sending me signals. Now, this is like stupid defense 101, right? It's, oh, not my fault. It's all her fault. I was horrified by this and I thought, this is an open and shut case. He's not denying it. It's very clear. And there were some electronic records of this. Okay, I'll wait for inevitably him to get fired. And I was a few months into this job. I just started. The investigation went on and they gave him a slap on the wrist. In fact, he just temporarily was removed from his position. He was just not running a team. She left the company. A few months later, he's running the team again. And it just shocked me. How did this not get resolved with he gets fired? I was still relatively new to the company. I thought, I don't want to change jobs, and I stayed. And it was just a bad situation, one, for me personally, because he and I just— I lost respect for him and that was evident. But also, this was a not good organization to be part of.

Exactly. Yeah.

And I should have walked away earlier. And that was a mistake on my part. That my guardrail should have been: if there is sexual harassment and there is not a clear, strong consequence for the person who created the infraction, what does that say about other decisions this company will make? Just as a slight epilogue, he and One of the CEO and this guy went on to do another company. He sexually harassed someone there. I happened to be talking about it, about this first incident with some friends years later at a conference, and they had no idea. When word got out he was at this other company, it came out he actually was dating an employee there as well, which got him still only a slap on the wrist. And then later, when he crossed some other lines, he eventually got fired. But We see this pattern. If someone is willing to cross one line, I don't mean, oh, I didn't realize, not with sexual harassment, with other things. I didn't realize this wasn't allowed, or it's a gray area. It's not obvious. Their intention was reasonable. That's different. But when someone is clearly crossing a line, as was this case, no, just walk away because they will do it again.

I went to a movie with our youngest daughter the other day evening, and we saw this movie, She Said. I think it's She Said, perhaps, is the full title. But— and I won't ruin anything for people who haven't seen it, but it is about the New York Times coverage of Harvey Weinstein at the same time when New York Magazine was also, I think with Ronan Farrow, was also investigating then allegations, today facts. And I think it— what's interesting there is that the people around Weinstein— Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5 business leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Many of the people were aware, were— so similar situation to the one you just described, that people were aware, perhaps enabling, not perhaps, in many cases enabling that behavior because there were no consequences. And that there's a— it's not just the not doing something about it, it's the what the not doing something about it actually contributes to the damage. To the ongoing damage, and so clearly the board of directors—I don't know that the board of directors or the organization itself have ever been brought up on any kind of charges as a result of it—and that's a conversation for a different podcast. But just in seeing the movie, and of course the movie is still a work of—it's an artistic expression, someone's opinion—all that I get—that's not necessarily black or white. But from everything that we can tell, that's this is. factually what occurred, that people turned their back on something and violated that ethical code. And I think what I want to bring to the table for this discussion, in addition to the 10 skills that you identified, I think there's something that could be an 11th that I want to bring up in a second. But I think I want to ask you, where does culture fit into this? Because as you said, in an organization where there's some lack of vigilance about Ethics, for example, where you're willing to just something because somebody's a performer, like they're great at their job, but they just happen to also be a misogynist or whatever, or a racist or whatever, but they're great. The best salesperson we've got, right? Or whatever the case might be, or they're the founder like that. You go, that ethical violation or that sensibility creates a certain kind of culture. I think that's what you were speaking to. The culture then takes on the smell of that sort of thing. Yes,

it does. And I talk about culture in chapter 2, Working Effectively. But if you think about how companies approach culture, if you were to ask someone during the interview process, what's your company culture, they're going to point to their website where they say, here are our 6 values: customer first, always innovate, blah blah blah. Maybe that's your culture, maybe not. Sometimes it's just what marketing put up there. Sometimes they intend it, they don't always live it. Sometimes they do live it, but that's not your full culture. Those are your values, but it's not your culture. Your culture is how you day-to-day operate. Your culture is, come on, you don't challenge the boss in the meeting. He doesn't like it. Your culture is, we like to have open debate during meetings versus a culture of, you should really resolve this before the meeting and the meeting is a fait accompli where I'll just come together and rubber stamp it. They're both valid cultures, but they're very different. I have one colleague who said his culture was whoever yelled the loudest won. That's how it works. Your culture may be one of, we don't really plan and everything is fighting fires, or a culture of, we have 17 meetings to have the pre-meeting before the meeting for the planning meeting for the 17 meetings afterwards.

Some people are nodding their head right now and going, oh, that's the culture I work in.

Those are our cultures, and none of those are listed on your website.

Right.

Most of them are not intentionally designed. They grow up organically, and it's fine to start organically, but then you want to be intentional in saying, is this a culture we want, or do we need to intentionally change it?

Yeah, that intentionality is so powerful. So the thing that I want to offer that maybe you make like a, an asterisk or a bonus, a bonus skill. And I wanna talk to you about is resilience. So what's— I don't know if resilience shows up in any of these other 10 or whether it's truly a separate category, but I wanna get your take on that, Mark. And let's start with how you define it, if you don't mind. And the reason I'm doing that selfishly is cuz I can add you to the list of people we've asked that question to, which now at this point is over 5,000 folks who've taken our resilient leader assessment. And there's a way that we get to determine their definition through this 3-minute assessment they take. But I'm going to ask you more directly, how do you define resilience for yourself?

My definition comes from my friend DJ Skelton. If you don't know who DJ is, he is— he was named GQ's Badass of the Year. DJ is just an incredible guy. Went to West Point, got wounded in Iraq, is, I believe, the most wounded soldier to go back into the field. And yet he is still one of the nicest people despite all the challenges he's gone through. He is one of the nicest people I have ever had the privilege to know. Just an amazing person. And from all the physical and emotional setbacks that he had to get back on the battlefield, from literally having his life nearly taken from him to get back on the battlefield, We've talked about resilience and he's definitely a better expert on it than I am. And he gave me just a very simple definition, which is resilience is how quickly you can get back to where you were. That's how I think about resilience. And I say quick, but implied in that word is perhaps other costs. I might be able to do it in a few weeks, but what's the emotional toll it took to do it in a few weeks versus a few months? To get back to where I am, is it just, okay, physically I'm able to do something, or a company's back up to its revenue level, or is it some of that other, but are we emotionally there, or do we still have anxiety? So there's some subtleties in those words, but I think that starting definition is a good macro way to look at it.

Okay, so part 2 of the— part B of the question is, where does it fit in the list of 10, if at all? And can I influence you to include that in your curriculum going forward? So let's talk about that.

The 10 skills that I list, first, we said these are fuzzy. It's not even clear where does leadership end and communication begin.

Sure.

And we also know some people say, no, these are 6 skills. No, they're 23 skills. Depends where you draw the lines. But I would say there's A lot of other skills that either fall under these buckets or maybe not even under these buckets that are still important, but we just don't see them come up as much. And resilience would be one of them. You could argue flexibility, innovation. Certainly we don't want robots. We want people who can innovate. And you might be saying, yeah, you didn't mention innovation. So I would say there are a number of other skills But in some sense, they're not quite as universal. If you think about— and I'm not saying resilience, it's a niche skill, but when you think about certain jobs, when you think about someone who's a waiter, resilience probably is not quite as important to them, whereas communication, being able to communicate with your customers, would be. Understanding how to deliver customer value, understanding the culture and the value you provide, that would be from chapter 2. Would be. Now, you could argue today's waitstaff, they get yelled at by customers daily, and you need the resilience to deal with it. So it might just be what lens you're looking through.

Sure. And being on your feet for hours on end and making very little money and then making ends meet is even in the face of that, which a lot of these folks have multiple jobs and maybe have kids at home. And, but I don't want to digress there for now. I want to ask you, in your career, what was the most challenging time, and if it was a time or an event, to me, what I really want to get at is, was there a moment when you just thought, I may not make it through this, I may not get through this, might be the end of me, the end of my career, the end of my whatever? What's scanning your own experience in life? Is there a moment that comes out for that?

I'll give you 2. I think there are lessons from both.

Good.

So one of them, I happened to I took off the summer of 2008. I was consulting at the time, said, you know what, it's the summer, labor market slows down, I've got savings, I'm just going to relax this summer. I'll start looking after Labor Day. What happened September 2008?

Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That's what happened.

Financial meltdown, start of the Great Recession, the biggest financial challenge, the biggest labor challenge. In a generation.

Oh, maybe since the Great Depression, perhaps.

Yes, maybe since the Great Depression. It has just— labor market dried up and there were just not jobs to be had. Thinking, huh, I don't have a job, just used some of my savings. I have more savings, thankfully, but boy, this is not good. And I was walking along the street and I saw a street performer, a busker, someone who plays music on the street. and you put money in the cup. And as I'm thinking, what's going to happen to me? How long am I going to be unemployed? Is this a Great Depression? Am I going to be out of work for 5 years? And there goes all my savings and I'll have to give up my home. And I walked past this busker and looked and said, wow, you know what? I am so much better off than this person. And I don't mean that in a condescending way, but I thought, okay, I have a college degree, I can always take a lower-level job. I do have some savings. I've got my long-term retirement savings. I also have friends and family who are part of my support system. I'm lucky I still have a good relationship with my parents and they're still alive. I know if the option was sleep on the street or sleep on their couch, they don't want me moving back home, but they're not going to have me sleep on the street. And I have built up a safety net, not just financially, not just educationally, but with my support system. And that was going to protect me. I said, no matter how bad it gets, I've put in the work to put myself in a relatively better position economically, not in terms of our own self-worth and value, that I will be okay. As a side note, the other thing is I realize every time I walk past a busker now, I always give them money. So I just said, you know what? They are working harder than I am in some situations and have a lot less certainty. So I always give them a dollar.

Yes. So that's the first scenario.

First one.

Yeah.

The second one, I moved to New York. I had been living in Boston for about 14 years, and when I moved to New York, that was really a big transition for me. And I moved in, I was having trouble finding an apartment. It was the apartment I thought I found, it was taking weeks for them to get back to me. I'm like, oh, I don't even have a place now. I might not get this one. I was staying with my girlfriend who didn't want me living with her at the time. And the job I took, on day 2, there were some strong red flags. I just knew on day 2 this was not going to work out. So I thought, I just gave up my apartment, I gave up the stability, the life I knew, came down for a job that I know isn't going to last. My girlfriend actually tried to break up with me. We had a volatile relationship on and off. I remember saying to her, I gave up my apartment, this job may not work, you can't break up with me right now.

I said, okay, fine. Wait a few weeks if you don't mind.

That's basically what I said.

If you'd be kind.

The job lasted a month and it was just, was I going to find a new job or was he going to just fire me? It was just a race for what that would be. And he fired me first. So everything in my life was changing. It was a scary time, but thankfully, again, I had built up All these support networks. It's not just money. In this case, through my girlfriend, I got connected to a guy who connected me to a guy, and I got a VP of engineering job that was even better than the job I came down for. If you do the work, if you build up your network, if you build up your experience, build up your education, your skillset, you build this capability, what you're doing is you are creating a cushion You're creating a safety net for when this volatility does hit you.

So the way that we— and this is— you couldn't have done any better as a lead, and I appreciate your, your doing that. The scenarios that you just described were the kind of scenarios that I envisioned when we started to research this book, Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty as a Catalyst for Our Long-Term Resilience. So it's how do you utilize The unknowns, the uncertainty that is ever more present in our experience today. You shared with us some of the more common ways that we experience uncertainty in both of those cases. And you also gave us, I think, a very tangible way that you can deal with uncertainty, and that is to be creating a resilience. And I'm going to use that word before you need it, because as you described it as a safety net, if some things are just language, and I'm using different language, but the principle is really very similar. That's the time when you work on your resilience is not after the crisis has occurred, as so many people got really taken out by the pandemic cuz it just came completely unexpected. And then they didn't know what to do when things all of a sudden, similar to the global financial crisis, when in 2000, September 2008, the world as we know it changed and there was tremendous fear and great uncertainty and some people froze and panicked. and, and others had been planning for that eventuality. I know it sounds strange because it's not that anybody has to be a soothsayer, have a crystal ball, certainly in business or in any aspect of life. It's the way that I think I have a crystal ball is to assume that the shit is going to hit the fan. There is going to be chaos. In fact, chaos is the norm. It's the exception to that rule when things are When everything is calm and peaceful and whatnot. And even in those times, I can't be sure that we're really, that we're maximizing our potential for growth because our greatest growth often comes when we're the most unsure and uncertain, like what you just described. So for that reason, Professor, I would say that resilience is one of those things that's baked into every success story. Because when you look at your own success, It in many ways is your capacity to have been resilient time and time again, and that is to actually develop strength out of adversity, like an adversity gain, if you will, or an uncertainty gain that others might be struggling simply to get back to normal. There's no normal, right? There's no going back to a normal. There's today's normal. Tomorrow will be a new normal, a next normal after that. It's how do we continue to leverage everything that's going on for some advantage, for some net gain, I'd say. And I think that's how we leverage the future. That's how it seems as though no matter what happens, we always land on our feet. Some organizations are constantly finding opportunities, are so opportunistic because there's— they're prepared ahead of time to do those pivots. Does that make some sense to you?

Absolutely. If you think about how the world works, when there is a change, the change may be net negative for some, but will be net positive for others. Consider, for example, the travel space. Going back to when you and I were growing up, times like the 1980s, there were travel agencies. If you wanted to book a trip and not just, I have to go fly to San Francisco, but, oh, I want to do a vacation, you would call a travel agency. And people who were not in the travel field who want to get into it said, oh, I have to build a travel agency. So I have to go get connections to all the different booking systems. And then I have to go market and convince people, call my travel agency, even though we look just like everyone else, really, we're better. And that's hard. That's a lot of work. But then in the '90s, as the web grew up, all of a sudden people said, there's a new way to do this. We can move everything online. You don't need people. We'll let The end consumer, the people booking a vacation, directly manage their vacation planning. If you were running a travel agency at a time, you were in trouble. And today, travel agents are far less common. Travel agencies are much smaller. But there are a bunch of people who are not in the travel industry who said, I can go in and I can capitalize on this opportunity. So whenever there is a disruption, could come from a technological change, It could come from a sociological change, an economic change. It could just come from legal changes. There's all sorts of things that cause a change, but every time there is a change, it can be painful, typically for incumbents, in some cases, certain incumbents. And you might be one of those incumbents. It can be an opportunity for other people. And if you see yourself as one of those other people, you can not only get back to where you were in the definition of resilience we used, But go further, as you've suggested. Get ahead. Change is opportunity.

Exactly. Not bounce back, but bounce forward. And as you said, without naming all the places, or that would be silly, but to even name a few, we don't have to look much further than just the EV space. And the fact of the matter is you could be invested both with your money or with your job or with other things in terms of combustion engines, gasoline, petroleum, oil, et cetera. All that's good. Just know that the disruption of the EV, of changes to battery power and solar and other renewable energy sources, these are not bad things. They may be disruptive things to you personally, but there are opportunities in all of those situations that are profound. And the only question is whether or not there'll be a moment when You are actually moving toward opportunity, or you're resisting that change and holding on to what it is that you've invested in thus far. In the book Change Proof, what we use at the beginning is a rip current as the analogy that kind of runs throughout the book as being an example of just that thing, that when we're caught in that rip current of change, many people, the first instinct that they have is to resist it, meaning to swim against the current. I was a lifeguard for many years, so I come from personal experience in that area. That's why we use that as the running analogy. And ultimately, when you do that, when you try to resist that current, which you cannot successfully do, you will become depleted, you become exhausted, and that's when you are, of course, more likely to drown. And that's where lifeguards, they recognize, that's why we get in the water in that moment, because we know what's coming. But in life and in other areas of life and business, there's not always a lifeguard around to help Pull you out when you're doing that, when you're wasting your energy in essence fighting something you cannot actually change, as opposed to doing the things you said earlier, which is you can simply pivot and swim parallel to the shore, and then you swim out of that current of change perpendicular to the current of change. It's a different; it's an agile approach to it, or you can literally lie on your back and relax and look at the clouds and look at the sun because that rip current. will spit you out at a certain point, which is what it always does. And yes, you'll have a little bit further to swim to get back to shore, but now you will not have any current that's interfering with you. And of course, you will have saved your energy, so you'll be ready to do it. I gotta tell you, I've really so enjoyed our conversation, Mark. Your book is called The Career Toolkit, is that correct?

That's right. The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.

Phenomenal. And there'll be full show notes, Folks, so that you can go in there and not only click links, find out more about Mark and his work at MIT and the book itself. I know there's a lot of very important resources that you get access to through the book. So the book, yes, there'll be a small investment to purchase the book, but a lot of free resources that come along with it. Mark is really doing this from a very much a heart-centered place, a place of as an educator, as somebody who wants to see people succeed. He's very busy in the startups that he's currently involved in, as well as teaching, as well as that we are in the entrepreneurial space. We know what that's But that's also, it's so thank you for the work that you're doing on behalf of others that want to succeed as well. Mark, thank you so much for everything you brought to us today. And my last, very last question for you, is there one thing that you do on a ritual basis to help yourself recharge each day? I'd say

nothing on a daily basis that's structured. I just make sure maybe there's some downtime, there's some time between meetings. I just relax. I let my mind go. watch TV or do something where it's not just constantly on, you get that little bit of recharge.

Yeah. So you take the cognitive load, which we're all having some sort of increasing cognitive load for a variety of reasons that we speak about with some brain scientists that we've had on the show. So we won't revisit that now, but to take, to just let that cognitive load down, to unload, whether it's for 5 or 10 minutes, even 5 minutes. This research is very clear. 5-minute breaks between your meetings will cool your brain down. It's amazing when they map this out, you get to see the different colors that represent the changes in our, in the dendrites and neuropathways in our brains, that when we just have 5 to 10 minutes of break in between things, our brains cool down. It's blue. And when we don't have those breaks, those meetings just one after another, our brains are, are orange and red. We're literally hotheaded. We cannot think as well. Cognitively, we're in decline, we're depleted, and ultimately, it, it depletes our resilience. And so right now, I think what you said, Mark, just magnificent. We all should be thinking about how we place those breaks, intentionally speaking. Put those breaks into your day so that you know that you just don't have to get to the level of mental exhaustion that so many of us feel at the end of a typical day. Again, if this conversation was meaningful, we so wanna hear about it. So you can leave a comment, feedback of any kind at adammarkel.com/podcast. If this is an episode that you think some other folks in your world, other leaders, other people who might benefit from hearing some of these things, please feel free to share this episode. We love it when you do that. We love it when you tell us that you've shared it with your community. And of course, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're consuming this particular episode, please leave a review. They're very helpful to us. Of course, just about the algorithm in some respects, when you leave a 5-star review and you leave up one of those kind of things, What ends up happening is that this content gets shared more frequently with other folks, and we very much appreciate your help in getting the message out. With that, I will say have a beautiful day, whatever you're doing. Just so many, too many blessings to wish you, but we'll wish you that you feel grateful in this moment for your life and for how things are going, and that whatever work you're doing to make things even better, just think about the things that Mark shared with us today. Communicate effectively with people. Keep ethics at the front of mind. Be grateful for all the things that are happening, whether they're positive or maybe they're not positive. Everything is net positive if we are preparing for any eventuality and making ourselves resilient to whatever change-proof, if you will, then everything will be net positive. But with that, I'll just say goodbye. And again, Mark, thank you so much for your time today.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Well, Mark and I certainly got into it today. Lots of interesting twists and turns to this conversation. I absolutely loved it. I love the fact that he was so prepared to unpack those 10 essential career skills and the fact that we were able to even supplement it. I thought he was very flexible in his approach, and we talked a lot about those particular skills. We dove into specifically one of the, the skills and tools that is, is often underrated undervalued, underused, underutilized, and that is with respect to ethics. So I love how that came about, as well as talking in depth about resilience and, and what that looks like in the tech world, in the startup world, in the world of innovation where Mark spends so much of his time. We talked about comedy and improv, which was a, a very interesting way to start our conversation. I absolutely loved it. We really dove into, into some aspects of culture and culture theory that I think is very, very important as well. From a business perspective, from a leadership perspective, from an entrepreneurial perspective, I think this was a vital, a vital conversation and one that people will be enjoying and gaining a dividend from for years to come. That, that's a prediction because I think these are the kind of things that are not often taught in business schools that probably should be. Mark is certainly changing that at MIT. And, uh, actually loved really where, where we were able to, to take our, our discussion today. Uh, I hope you enjoy the episode. If you love it, share it with a friend, share it with somebody, uh, that you feel just could use this kind of insight. And of course, as always, we appreciate your comments. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment. If you've not established your own resilience level, found out what your, where your current baseline is, for mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resilience. It's as simple as going to rankmyresilience.com and get your own score in less than 3 minutes. That's the best part. rankmyresilience.com. Get your score and get the resources and, and tools after that, many of which are, are simply gonna come to you in email form for free. So it's kind of a no-brainer to do it. Figure out where you're starting from so that you can learn a little bit more about what it means to close the gap. Regain some of your motivation, your inspiration, your mojo, your productivity, of course, and take care of yourself even better on the road ahead.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.