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 Barkel and his inspiring guest 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, and it's just going to be a question of how much, how much, how much is going to be enough. Right, right. To satiate us without, without us, either of us becoming so bloated that, that we want to take a nap afterward.

And I don't know, Thanksgiving dinner for you.

Yeah, but, but everybody that's listening too. So your, your bio is, 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, I'll throw.

In a little extra. I don't know if you really need to know it, but I do some stand up comedy I started doing 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. I mean, you surprising me, but I didn't, I didn't know that. I didn't expect to hear you say that. And I can feel the terror. Like I, I am a resilience keynote speaker on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. I speak to audiences all over the globe by the, 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, that I lead them in laughter other than saying, okay, now let's all. And I've done this with audiences before. It's, it's kind of actually did this with an audience of lawyers at a, at a bar association meeting that I led was a, one of these continuing legal ed things and these, these stiff lawyers, you know, in their suits and their ties. And by the way, I am 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 sort of create, create laughter in a space through storytelling and things that terrifies me. You gotta, you gotta let me know or let us know. Mark, how has that been going for you? What has that been like?

It's. 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. 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, 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 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'm. I got to keep going down this track for a little while longer. I know we have an agenda, so 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 going to go there yet. So. All right, first of all, what kind of content and when you do a set? I want to 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?

This is an important question. 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 three minutes. We try to go for about five or six minutes or eight 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 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. So it's a bit like a curated karaoke night for a group of folks that are there to support one another. Like, is that fair?

That is fair. I do it with a group called Renaissance Weekends, which is kind of 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, I mean, it's, it's. I. Have you ever done a TED Talk?

I have not.

Okay.

And.

You don't have a desire to know? Okay, well, I'll just say this. Whether you don't or, or Maybe someday you do. I'll just for you, you chose this as a challenge. And, and the, and I think comedy, stand up comedy is, is probably one of the greatest, you know, sort of feats, you know, like of a daredevil that I can imagine like literally walking on a tightrope. To me it's that, it's, it's at that level. Doing a TED Talk is something I have, I have had the experience of doing and actually our company trains people, 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, in part. I've been speaking to audiences for years and years, many years all over the globe. But to have a, a set in that, in the, in, in this case a TED Talk for, for that time period was 18 minutes. You know, now they are 8 minutes and they're 12 minutes and stuff like that. But when I did mine, it was pretty standard, was 18 minutes. And to have an 18 minute talk end to end completely, not just memorize, 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, 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 don't know if I can go through this. I don't know if I could do that. 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, and it was just such a different, completely different dynamic than, than other forms of public speaking. So. Wow. I'm going to give this some consideration. I mean, I think for a lot of reasons improv is a very, is a very strong process. So people right now going, all right, so when are we going to get to the business stuff? Or maybe like, tell me, tell me, this is interesting, but tell me how, you know, like give me something I can.

This all relates this. If you think about what we've just done, we talk 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, 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, you know, it's not an either or as well. It's yes and it's. It's both. So this ability to get into a structured mode and be able to succeed in. In with a structure is, Is so vitally important as well as the capacity to utilize what is in the space. Because one of the things that will. We. We when we're working with folks that want to 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. There's a structure, there's a theme, there's a following, a certain. A certain through line. But we' to 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, it's the concept that you basically take everything as yes, and so somebody says something and you say yes and. And you move with that thing. You utilize what is in the moment. You know, whether it's physic physically the physicality of this, of what's happening or the words or the tone or, or any of those things 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. You know, all aspects of innovation invite it really involve that same capacity to. Yes. And in other words to plus whatever is happening, not to, 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 three years and five years from now you are 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. Because you've been a tech startup, you are a founder, not just studied at mit, but you've been a professor there, you've taught there. I'd love to get a sense of if you're educating a group of young founders right now, I'd like to. Let's tease out some of the most important tools that young founders may, may need to have that they don't maybe have because they weren't, weren't, it wasn't taught to them. It's certainly not maybe taught in business school or what have you. Can we, can we start there? Is that okay, Mark?

Or 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 eight 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. Three sections, 10 skills. Let's run through what those are. Section one careers. Chapter one 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, well, I'm not, 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 two, 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 to 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 four 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're 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. My only hopeful girlfriend. I would have looked at her and said, did you. Did you get 10 things? I only got eight. So here's what I got. All right, Mark, I got career planning, working effectively, interviewing leadership and management. Maybe that was two things, not one. Communications, networking, negotiations and ethics. So what did I miss?

Leadership, people, management, process, management.

Got it. Thank you. All right, well, this is good. Somebody out there is going, yeah, I didn't get it either, so that's perfect. All right, so I'm going to ask you some questions about this Professor. If you had to pick one thing, like, I mean, 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, sorry.

No, no, but it's a really important question. One of my most popular articles is titled Leadership is Not Atomic. Because it's not, well, leadership. More Important than communication. More important, 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, many, many years, and that is to take the opposite side of it. Contrary position. All right, so I want to pick ethics, which is an interesting. An interesting thing for me. Had a conversation earlier today. I'm just drawing on, you know, on what's. Again, as is what. What's in the space for me, and that is that 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, well, 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, you know, folks in that space was phenomenal. I understand now why they created a bankruptcy code, because it truly is a way to clean your. Clean the slate. Nobody, nobody wakes up in the morning, goes, hey, I want to. I want to scuttle my business today. I want to. I want to ruin all my relationships with everybody. I borrowed money, you know, like, 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. And sometimes those things end up in bankruptcy court. But the relief was. 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, reinvention, career reinvention, what I found and what has sustained me really buoyed me ever since then. Even making sometimes More, sometimes less money than I did previously, that not being the most important thing, but having a mag, you know, a 10x fulfillment factor involved. Now I so fulfilled by the work that I do. And, and this is interesting, right? Like in, in finance, you want to move your bottom line exponentially, increase, increase your turnover and decrease your, your, your expenses. Very, very simple stuff, right? To me, I increase my fulfillment and I decrease my ethical compromises in the work that I currently do, which is why as a career was a great fit for me. So I want to hear your thoughts on how, how deeply do you dive into ethics with your, 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 are some arguments about, there's a term called rent seeking 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 three quarters of a million dollars. 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 got a mortgage for this. And we 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 two weeks from now. Well, 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 of for permission. Yeah, but I would say I do not do that. I fall strictly on I. There's a reason we have these rules, and one of the things we're seeing is there's reasons we, we see problems with Uber drivers who assault their victims because we didn't do background checks, and this is a problem. So there's reasons we have all, 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. Really. What we need to do is set up ethical guardrails lines where we say, here are the boundaries. If we start to get near that boundary, we take a pause and 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 is been a real, 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, I, I was thinking that too, though I still wear the lawyer hat often. So, yes, scan and see if there's something comes up.

And, well, I'll mention, here's one mistake I made. They 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. He didn't have the details. He and I went out for a beer, said, you know, do you know what's going on? 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. 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. I thought well this is an open and shut case. He's not denying it. He had very clear and there were some electronic records of this. So okay, I'll wait for inevitably him to get fired. And I was a few months into this job. I just started. Well, 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 I. It just kind of shocked me how. How did this not get resolved with he gets fired. I was still relatively new to the company. I thought well I. 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 take 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 was that say about other decisions this company will make. Just as a slight epilogue. He and one of the 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 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 parent. If someone is willing to cross one line, I don't mean like oh I didn't realize. Not with sexual harassment. With other things. Like I didn't realize this wasn't allowed or it was 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. She said perhaps is the full title. But and, 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, when New York magazine was also I think with Ronan Farrow was also investigating then allegations today facts. And, and I think it. What's interesting there is that the, the. The people around Weinstein, 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, to the damage to the ongoing damage. And so clearly the board of directors, I don't know that the, that the board of directors or the organization itself have ever been brought up on any kind of, you know, charges as a result of it. And that's a conversation for, for different, a different podcast, I suppose. But just in seeing the movie and of course the movie is still, is still a, a work of you know, it's, it's an artistic expression, someone's opinion all that I get that it's not, not necessarily black or white, but, but from everything that we can tell that's, you know, this is, this is factually what occurred that people turned turned their, their back on something and, and violated that, that ethical code. And, and I think what, what I want to bring to the table for this discussion in addition to the 10 skill something that 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, where does culture fit into this? Because as you said, in an organization where there's some lack of, of. Of vigilance about ethics, for example, where you're willing to just sort of overlook something because somebody's a, a performer. You know, like they're, they're, they're, they're great at their job, but they just happen to be also be a misogynist or whatever or a racist or what. You know, but they're great. They're the best salesperson we've got, right? Or, or whatever the case might be, or they're the founder, you know, like that you go that ethical violation or that, that, that sensibility creates a certain kind of culture. And I think that's what you were speaking to that the culture then Takes on the smell of that sort of thing.

Yes, it does. And I talk about culture in chapter two, working effectively. But if you think about how companies approach culture, if you were to ask someone during the entry process, what's your company culture? They're going to point to their website where they say, here are six values, customer first, always innovate, blah, blah, blah. Maybe that's their 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 know, 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 one. That's how it works. Your culture may be one of we don't really plan and everything is fighting fires or 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, 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, is so powerful. So the, the thing that I want to offer that maybe you make like a, an asterisk or a bonus, you know, a bonus skill. And I want to talk to you about his 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 want to 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 because 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, we get to determine their definition through this three 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.

Okay, so part two of the part B. The question is, where does it fit in the list of 10, if at all? And, and can I, 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. These are fuzzy. It's not even clear where does leadership end and communication begin.

Sure.

And we also knew some people say, no, these are six 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, 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 two 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. And being on your feet for hours on end and making, Making very little money and then making ends meet is even, Even in the, in the face of that, which a lot of these folks have multiple jobs and maybe have kids at home. And. But, but I, I don't want to digress there for now. I want to ask you in your, in your career, what. 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. This might be the end of me, the end of my career, the end of my. Whatever. What's scanning your. Your. Your own experience in life. Is there a moment that. That comes out for that? I'll.

I'll give you two. 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 gonna relax this summer. I'll start looking after labor day. What happened September 2008, we just went bankrupt.

That's what happens.

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

And maybe since the Great Depression, perhaps.

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 use 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 unemployed? Is this a great depression? Am I going to be out of work for five years and there goes all my savings and I'll have to give up my home. And 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. I said, no matter how bad it gets, I've put in the work to put myself in a relatively bare 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, that's the first scenario.

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 him 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 two, there were some strong red flags. I just knew on day two 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.

What I said, 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 it was. 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, connected to me to a guy. And I got a VP of engineering job that was even better than the job I came down for. So if you do the work, if you build up your network, if you build up your experience, build up your education, your skill set, you build this capability, what you're doing is you're creating a cushion, you're creating a safety net for when this volatility does hit you.

Yeah. 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, when we started to research this book, Change Proof, Leveraging the power of uncertainty as a, 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, in our experience today? You were, you, you shared with us some of the more common ways that we experience uncertainty in both of those, 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, a resilience. And I'm going to use that word before you need it because as you described it as a safety net. I mean some, some things are, are just language and I'm, I'm using different language, but the principle is really very similar that you create, that's the time when you work on your resilience is not after the crisis has occurred. As so many people, you know, got really taken out by the pandemic because 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 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, and certainly in business or in any aspect of life is the, 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 sort of 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, when we're the most unsure and uncertain, like what you just described. So for that reason, Professor, I would say that resilience is, is, 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, your capacity to have been resilient time and time again. And, and that is to, to actually develop strength out of, out of adversity, like an adversity gain, if you will, or an uncertainty gain that others might be. 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, that's how we leverage the future. That's how, how it seems as though no matter what happens, we always kind of land on our feet. Some organizations are constantly finding opportunities are so opportunistic because there's, there's. They're prepared ahead of time to do those pivots. Does that, 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 I want to do a vacation, you would call eight 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, you know, 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, 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, well, 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 can, 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, in terms of combustion engines, gasoline, petroleum, oil, etc, all that's good. Just know that, 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, that are profound. And the only question is whether or not there'll be a moment when you're actually moving toward opportunity or you're resisting that change and holding on to what it is that you've invested in thus far. And 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, 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, 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. You know, is. But in life and in other areas of life and business is 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, you cannot actually change, as opposed to doing the things you said earlier, which is, you know, you can simply pivot and swim parallel to the shore and then you swim out of that current of change perpendicular to the, to the current of change. It's a different, it's an agile approach to it, or you can literally lie in 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 will 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 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 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. You know that we are in the entrepreneurial space, we know what that's what that's all like. So it's. So thank you for the work that you're doing on behalf of, of others that want to succeed as well. Mark, thank you so much for everything you brought to us today. And, and my last, very last question for you is, 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, you know, having some sort of increasing, 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 five or 10 minutes, even five minutes, this research is very clear. Five minutes breaks between your meetings will cool your brain down. It's amazing when they, 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 five to ten 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 after another, our brains are orange and red. We're literally hot headed and we cannot think as well. Cognitively, we're in decline, we're depleted and ultimately 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, of mental exhaustion that so many of us feel at the end of a typical day. Again, if this conversation was meaningful, we so want to hear about it. So you can leave a comment, feedback of any kind@adammarkel.com forward slash podcast. If this is an episode that you think some other folks in your world, other, 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, you know, 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 five star review and you leave a, you know, one of those, those kind of things, what ends up happening is that this, 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, you know, just so many, so many, too many blessings to sort of wish you. But I will wish you that you feel grateful in this moment for, 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 your, keep ethics at the front of mind. Be, be grateful for, for all the things that are happening, whether they're positive or maybe they're not positive. Everything is net positive. If we're preparing for sort of any eventuality and making ourselves resilient to whatever change, 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, and the fact that we were able to even supplement it. I thought that he was very flexible in his approach and we talked a lot about those particular skills we dove into. Specifically one of the skills and tools that is, is often underrated under, 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 what that looks like in the tech world, in the startup world, in the world of, of innovation where Mark spends so much of his time. We talked about comedy and improv, which was 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's a, that's a prediction because I think these are, 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 actually loved really where, where we're able to, to take our, our discussion today. I hope you enjoy the episode. If you love it, share it with a friend. Share it with somebody that you feel just could use this kind of insight. And of course, as always, we appreciate your comments. You can go to AdamMarkel.com forward/podcast. Leave a comment if you've not established your own resilience level. Found out what your your current baseline is for mental, emotional, physical and spiritual resilience. It's as simple as going to rank my resilience.com and get your own score in less than 3 minutes. That's the best part. Rank my resilience.com get your score and get the resources and and tools after that, many of which are are simply going to 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. Even better on the road ahead.

Thanks for listening everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcast for more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChangeproof.