How Reflection and Purpose Drive Tech Innovation and Success with Elizabeth Bieniek

Most startup founders think success starts with a big idea or a killer product. The plan usually goes: build something cool, get funding, scale fast, and win. That plan, if you're successful, will take you about 5 years. And that big idea, that killer product, if it doesn't have a clear why, a sharp purpose, it's very likely as a founder you'll burn out, your team will drift, and as a business you'll waste time on things that don't matter. Today's guest doesn't just build startups, she helps founders and teams stay clear on their why so they can make better choices and grow with purpose. Hey, what's up everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you no-fluff tips on how to grow. If you enjoy the show, please do me a favor, hit that subscribe button and do send me your biggest growth questions at masteringtechgrowth.com. I'd love to know what you're working on and what's getting in your way. I'm joined today by Elizabeth Bieniak. She's a leadership consultant, a tech visionary who co-founded Webex Hologram at Cisco, named one of the top most influential female founders by TechCrunch. On top of that, Elizabeth wrote the bestselling book, "Cake on Tuesday," and hosts "Cake on Tuesday: The Leadership Blueprint" podcast. Today she's sharing how to keep your why alive, lead better, focus sharper, and grow faster. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth.

Thank you, Mike. It's fantastic to be here. This is such a great topic.

It's an excellent, such a timely topic for me as well. I feel like I'm losing my why with the podcast. My wife actually raised that question. It's like, what are we doing this? You know, what's the vision? So I feel like this is going to help me a lot. Before we go into it, Elizabeth, we love to start with this question. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

For me, tech is always about the why. It's always about people first. I spend a lot of time talking about human-centric tech or human-centric AI. And if you are not putting the people and the purpose first, your tech is not going to work. So that's what comes first to me is make sure your tech is serving your why, or else it's just going to be tech for tech's sake.

How do you put your people first? Like what's in practical mode that looks like?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing, especially in innovative tech, a lot of times it's really easy to get distracted by what amazing potential we could do rather than thinking, should we do it? So starting with people first can take a lot of forms. I mean, ultimately, we're always looking at our customers and what problem are we solving? What are we doing for them? But a lot of times you have to get creative with that because I feel like when the tech is shiny, when it's interesting, exciting, it's sexy. It's even harder to get to that real why because you end up sort of compromising on that, saying, yeah, but we could do this, or, oh, maybe we just don't realize we actually have this potential. We didn't, we didn't know we could do this, so we need that, we need that now. I think you see that a lot with companies exploding into, oh, we need, we need to inject AI into our company and our process now. And my first question there is, well, why? And everybody's like, well, AI, it's top of mind. Everybody's doing it. We gotta do it. We gotta—

yep.

Okay, but why? How are you going to use it? How does it make your process better? How does it serve your customers? How is it helping you solve real-world problems and keep the relationship at the forefront of what you're doing? There could be a very clear answer of how the tech is helping that. Great. Then we have our why, we understand what we're doing, and we can move forward. But if you can't answer that question, how is the tech making my process better? How is it building the relationships with my employees and my customers better? You gotta pause before you start implementing technology.

I love that. Well, you did a lot, right? So can you give us a little bit of that moment in life when you did the Cisco Webex hologram? You had 3 kids at that time, right?

I had 2 during the process.

During the process, right?

Started with 1, ended with 3.

And then you're doing all of this innovative work at Cisco and like, I'm just putting myself in that situation. I got two kids as well and, you know, big dreams and side hustles and stuff like that. I just get sucked into this, what I call business as usual operations. And if you're not proactively taking a step back, it's so easy to just get lost in everything. So can you just give us like how your mind worked and how did you sort of remind yourself about your why during that? Time in your life?

Yeah. So for better or worse, I've always been a compartmentalizer. I always put things in buckets. So when I'm somewhere, I'm 100% there. And that's just the way I'm wired. And it's hard for me not to be that way. This can get me in trouble. Just ask my husband. There's times where he's like, "I put it literally on the floor that you'd have to step over it so you'd see it." I'm like, "Well, I was thinking about something else. So I didn't, it's not there. That world is not there because I'm focused on something else." And so I think it took me a long time in my career to really harness that and realize, how do I use that for good and not get distracted by that? But for me, taking those moments and those pauses throughout my career and throughout projects, it's really, really hard when you're going 100 miles an hour. Everything, everybody wants everything yesterday, especially when you have funding on the line. There's a huge push to go fast. But I like to say it's the whole don't start running until you realize what direction you're going and who's carrying the water, because you need these important details sorted first or you're going to go fast in the wrong direction. So what that looks like for me on my calendar is I have always had time on my calendar that is blocked for no purpose other than getting my head above the trees and thinking. Now, I will, I will admit that when the seasons are really, really busy and going really fast, that might be a shorter window than I would like.

Mm-hmm.

But it's at least a pause. Maybe it's a 30 minutes on my calendar Monday morning of thou shalt not schedule over this 30 minutes. That's gonna be my chance to, I'm gonna walk away from my computer. I'm gonna go for a walk, get outside, get some fresh air, and I'm just gonna think very high level of forget about everything I need to do today, this week, this quarter. Are we going in the right direction?

Mm-hmm.

Is this trajectory going to put me where we need to be 5 years from now, 10 years from now. And when I have the ability to make that longer, sometimes that might be a 4-hour block, sometimes that might be an entire day. Sometimes in a season that could be, I'm gonna take a, a personal retreat and this is gonna be my focus for this week. I think having those moments, however big or small, and making them sacred on your calendar is huge because otherwise we get really efficient at optimizing the wrong thing.

I love that. I love the saying. How did it go, Elizabeth? Like, don't start running before you know where you're going and someone carrying the water.

And who's carrying the water? Yeah, I think who's, who's doing what, what are those little details that when you're, when you're halfway through a major hike, it's not a little detail. Yeah, I thought you had the water. Oh wait, no, I thought you did. You want to make sure that you have all your planning sorted and those things are taken care of, or It's going to bite you in the behind later.

Oh yeah, 100%. And it happens way too often. And you raise this question, it's like, didn't we learn something like last time? And now we're doing the same this time. It's just such a catch-22 situation. So that calendar moment, right? So do you have a way of how you think through that time? Half an hour walk? I do the same. I love going for a run during lunch and this is my thinking time.

Sure.

But 4 hours, I feel like you would need to have like a framework, almost like some type of ideation process. Or is it just purely being in silence and allowing your brains to get bored? So you actually—

yeah, I think it's that. It's really the— it's kind of like the concept of an unconference or the unstructured time. I mean, you talk about— people talk about the unconference of going to a conference. Most of the magic happens in the in-between. It's not necessarily— the sessions could be great, the demos could be great, but it's those random hallway conversations you had in the corner of the expo floor with somebody and like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. You have to allow for time for that. So for me, if I have a big time block, it is important that it's not scheduled because otherwise I'm going to schedule it with the framework of my existing priorities. And so it's going to defeat the purpose of what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is get away from my existing priorities and think very high level and very strategic is what I'm doing. Is this right? Is this important now? And you need to make sure that you don't unintentionally put that wrong framework that's gonna limit you. So a lot of times just, I usually shut off technology for that period of time. I will leave the phone at home. I'll turn everything off. I will have pen and paper, good old-fashioned notebook, uh, because it's good to capture ideas and, and jot things down. But it's very important to have that pause to really think strategically because you're not gonna figure it out in the first 5 minutes. You do need to sit in that little— I go through this with my kids, the whole like, yeah, I'm bored. Okay, be bored. Be bored for a while because that's when your brain kicks in. You come up with a really cool idea and then they get into this imaginative play and these amazing things. But if you don't allow yourself to get to that uncomfortable piece first where I'm bored, I want my distraction, I got so many things to do, sit in that, get past that, and that's when you can really think strategically.

So we're basically saying like you should not even be in the office for this. Like you should go somewhere where there's no, um, where there's nothing. It literally like you have to be bored. You have to put your brain in a situation where there's no distractions. You can't engage with anyone or anything and you just in the thinking mode. Maybe you do have a pen and paper if something good hits your brain just to put it in. And that's a must. And we're saying this is like a weekly Exercise is weekly.

I can't go a week without this. And again, like, it will get smaller in, in crunch seasons. It might be pretty small, but if I'm not spending a bare minimum 30 minutes a week on just that, I'm probably missing something big.

Yeah. And it's just like, why, why, why in your brains? Like, why are we doing this? The 5 whys. Okay, so if I would ask this, how do you hold on to clarity around what you're doing during very, very busy, chaotic times, the answer would be effectively this: have that time in your diary, hopefully weekly, to literally disengage with what you're doing right now in day-to-day activities and just ask why about the things.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of personal mindfulness exercises that we overlook when it comes to business but are really useful of just things of Is this problem issue that I'm facing right now with my, with my customer, with my technology, with my team, is this going to be relevant one day from now? Is this going to be relevant one week from now? One year?

Mm-hmm.

5 years. When you start putting those different lenses on it, it helps prioritize very quickly what is on your very busy and rapid to-do list right now. So I think taking that pause and ensuring that I am looking at the longer term, it keeps you from getting sucked into the immediate-term fires, which may or may not align to your long-term strategic vision. But unless you pause and map that out and say, are we going to care about this 5 years from now? If the answer is yes, okay, this is a priority. We should be working on it. We should be— okay, now what do I do now in the short term to ensure that we are on the right trajectory in 5 years from now? That is a good exercise and that might be the outcome. But if your answer is 5 years from now, we're not even gonna think about this. Okay, why is this dominating our time right now?

Yeah, I love that. What if, and this is real, at least with me and I've seen with—

Let's get real, Mike. Let's get real talk here.

I've seen with other founders as well. So we do start startups with some type of vision, with some type of why, with some type of purpose. But along the way, some pivots happens or something like that. You sort of like find yourself losing that why? So how do you take yourself back into the why?

That's why I think the frequency really does matter.

Okay.

Because if you are, if you have a clear vision, a clear purpose, and you start executing, and you get a year, 2 years down the road, and then realize, what is my why? Why are we doing this? We've gotten away from the original intent. And really, original purpose, 2 years later, it's really hard to go back and reevaluate of, is this still valid? Because a lot of things have probably changed and you had assumptions when you first made your plan 2 years ago. And some of those are very valid reasons why you've had to pivot your strategy some. But if you are doing this weekly, if you are having the, uh, um, a meeting with your team more broadly on this every month, if you're doing a strategic offsite with your leadership team every quarter, like you're not gonna get as far off of the path. And so doing it very frequently allows you to keep that why front and center. Because if you get a month down the road and like, you know what, this is— we're off. Why are we doing this? This is totally different from what I set up. You can course correct because it's only been a month. It's much easier to do that than when you're years down the road.

What if exactly that happened? What if I'm like a couple of years in and I'm like, what I'm doing over here? Like, I just want to close the shop. I'm burned out. What do you do then? Is it like take a retreat?

There's always time for redemption, Mike. There's always time for redemption. You're gonna need more than 30 minutes though. I think that's the time where you need to— the longer period of time it's been, the longer you need to sit down with that. So maybe it is taking a week, maybe it is taking a mini sabbatical. Whatever the case is, you are gonna have to allow for longer time. And you might get in there and say like, you know what, I think I need 3 days, I'm just gonna go and Close everything off and focus for 3 days and you get to the end of 3 days and like, wow, I'm really off track. I need more time. Then take more time. I think we look at that as a luxury of I'm going 100 miles an hour. I can't take 3 days to stop. You can't afford not to. Can you really afford to go another 1, 2, 3 years in the direction you're going? If it's the wrong direction, the faster you can course correct, the better. So you can't afford not to.

Yeah. I love that. You can get sucked— so easy to get sucked into that. And time just— just weeks, thing, thing, months pass fast. And then you're like, okay, well, we're already in the summer. I just feel like, you know, I came from New Year's celebration and it's like 6 months down. And I'm like, okay, well, great. What did I achieve? So retrospective, you need to look back and it's like just busy work, just busy work. And it's like, what is the big picture now? So I'm losing my why 100%. Um, can I ask this, Elizabeth, about purpose? So, uh, I see a lot of entrepreneurs and especially they get thrown off when you ask that question. It's like you go to some type of networking event and you go like, you know, what are you guys doing? Oh, we're doing this and this. And it's like, oh great, what's your purpose? And people are, yeah, what, what do you mean?

Like, what do you mean?

Like, what's your purpose as a, as a human being, as a business? And I, I do get that, that people are like, have a hard time to define this. So if I'm asking this like as entrepreneur, how do I find my purpose, or how do I define my purpose? What's Elizabeth's approach?

And I'll be honest, I have changed my approach on this drastically from earlier in my career, because the, the downside of my aforementioned compartmentalizing is I spent a lot of my early career thinking like, this is work Elizabeth, and this is outside work Elizabeth, and never the twain shall meet. And things didn't always align. I think as I'm— I've gotten older, you start entering that second half of life, you start having a different focus on what you're doing and really want to make sure purposes are aligned. But I feel I look at it as much more together now. It is not, this is my work purpose and this is my life purpose and this is my family purpose and this is my person. It's all me and the clock is running down. So I do think age allows you to be a little bit more focused on that. But for me, my, my work purpose needs to be subject to my life purpose. So overarching is, why am I on this planet? Now, I don't know if we want to get down the spirituality route here, but I think you do need to have an, a higher calling and a higher purpose and realize, why did God put me on this earth? Why am I here? Because everything else serves that. Everything else has to factor into that. I use that when I created my own company, the what I'm doing now. And my purpose with the Cake on Tuesday podcast and elizabethbianik.com, it's all around, I am focused on helping other people tap into their purpose. I realized as I was getting deeper and deeper, what do I actually enjoy doing? What do I like doing? What makes me feel the most alive? What sets my soul on fire? It's, I get excited by other people's excitement. And when I can help enable somebody else to live out their purpose, That is the best thing in the world.

Okay.

So everything I'm doing right now, the people I talk to, the clients I work with, I, I've been working more in the education space and I might be shifting a little bit more on the academic side in the future. That is all serving that purpose of helping enable people to access knowledge and information in a path forward sooner, easier, so that they can fill their purpose.

So, I mean, that's great to hear you found your purpose. And I'm like, I know exactly what I mean when it comes to like age and having just one purpose and hopefully your purpose or, you know, your work purpose. I feel like I'm entering that phase.

Yeah.

When I used to get asked—

It comes on us quick.

Yeah, it does. I feel like after kids and a couple of years, I started asking that question. Before that, I was like, I don't care. I go to work and you go to interviews and people go like, you know, what's your purpose in life? Where do you see in 3 years? I'm like, I just want to code right now. Like, it's like, I don't, I don't have that vision, but now I'm trying to find my purpose, but I'm, I'm like, I, you know, I do have difficulties with that. So it was like, how, how did you find yourself? When it clicked for you, then, you know, like, oh, this is what I want to do.

It helped. It helped writing a book.

Okay.

To be honest, uh, Cake on Tuesday was actually a postmortem after the Webex hologram project. It started as that, just a personal postmortem of what worked, what didn't, what would I do different, what I want to do next. I want Do I want to do this? And writing that all down, it started shaping, well, what did I really enjoy about that process? And realizing so much of it was not about building cutting-edge technology, even though that was really cool. It was about leading a team of people to get excited about a vision and finding creative ways to move them forward when the path forward looked impossible. That's what I loved about it. And so that's what came out in Cake on Tuesday. The subtitle is 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation. And it's focused on this unlocking. How do you have really quick lessons and tools that you can help somebody else unlock their potential in their organization? And for me, I love the quote. I think it was Elizabeth Elliott that said it, "You never fully understand something until you write it down." So I'm not saying everybody's got to write a book. Maybe that's not your jam, uh, but having a— some sort of way that you are writing things down, it could be messy and it could just, just be for you. But if you can't sit down and say, what am I trying to do now? And maybe life purpose is too overwhelming to start with. Start with this year. What is my goal and purpose for this year? What do I want to end this year? We're perfectly halfway through a year right now. What do I want to end this year with? That I don't know now? What, what knowledge do I want to gain? What thing do I want to give back? What way do I want to help somebody? And maybe start there, because it, it gives you a framework of, okay, this is something I'm working towards. Otherwise, if you don't have— I mean, it's just like a project. You don't have little milestones along the way. You're just humming along like, what are we doing? What are we building here? Like, okay, yeah, it's slightly better than it was last year, but Everything else is changing too. So we're now, we're behind and you don't have something to get excited about, to rally around, to feel like I've accomplished something. Teams get very demotivated when you don't have milestones. You don't have phases that you're like, we finished this phase, we're moving to the next one. If you need the same thing personally. So I think just starting with that and looking at your time, your, your life in seasons. I mean, we both mentioned we have kids. You are very much confronted with the seasons that you're in cuz these little people physically get larger every year and you realize time has passed. And so you have goals for them of like, what do I want to expose them to? What do I want to help them learn? It's the same for yourself of what do you want to accomplish this year? And it doesn't have to be, I did this, this is my to-do list. I have done check, check, check, check, check. It should be more, what have you, how have you mentally grown? How have you done something impactful in the world? How have you made it a better place? I mean, these should be bigger purpose things, not just, hey, I paid my mortgage.

I love that. I love you calling out as well writing by hand. You mentioned a quote which I can't remember exactly now, but there's something, something about writing things down with your hands.

Elizabeth Elliot, I probably butchered it, but it was something to the effect of you never fully understand something until you write it down.

Yeah, there's something I think science have proven that writing things down with your hand has, has a much better connection with your brain and you, you tend to remember better. You tend to think more about this than say typing with the keyboard or speaking to a microphone. But I do love, uh, you know, maybe writing a book is definitely not for everyone, but sitting down and journaling and, and, and just going like, here's what's up, you know, here's what I'm doing right now, you know, it would be great to achieve this. These things tend to stay in your mind and tend to give you that purpose. And I want to just call out this, um, this quick study I found online, which has been done by Journal of Business Venturing. So basically a couple of universities came together and we have like Niederland University, Chile University, Finland, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates. And they did a study of why some founders, why some entrepreneurs are capable to effectively grind and just outwork everybody else, right?

Yeah.

And they came to this conclusion that it's purely because they have a purpose. They strongly believe in, which leads to just having more energy and being able to do more. Just like, yeah, simple as that. It's just so— that's why it's so important to personally really understand why you're doing this and, you know, what's your purpose on that. Do you feel like you had that, like, when you were doing Cisco? And like, do you feel like there was something like with you which allows you just to kick ass effectively?

Yes. I loved the Webex Hologram Project in its early days because it was very clear on purpose. We originally started with a question, and this was pre-COVID, pre-global pandemic, but we were looking at the whole challenge of connection. We were a global team. You have people on opposite sides of the world. There is some magic about when you sit down with somebody face-to-face in person and you're discussing an idea. And you can, you can gesture and share things and pass things back and forth. And there is a connection that comes with that. And that helps build a relationship. It helps establish trust. And so our question was, can you use technology to help facilitate that feeling of connection? That was the original premise of the project. Can I use technology to facilitate connection? And that's, that's a cool question. Can I? And it, it was everything about the project was in answer, in service of that question. Mm-hmm. And I found it fascinating because like I said, I think technology is only great when we use it to build relationship.

Yeah.

And facilitate human to human interaction.

Mm-hmm.

So when we were, we were, we were doing the project, all of the milestones were solving a different facet of that question. So question one was, we have an idea that you might be able to use augmented reality for this. We don't know if it's true. Technologically feasible. Let's see. So phase 1 was, could this be done with the technology constraints? And we solved that and like, yes, yes you can. Okay, cool. Now another question, could you do this? And we, we did it the next step of the technology. And then having customers come along in that journey too of, we had an idea of how we thought this could be amazing. And so we're like, all right, here's a use case. We, we whittled it down to 2 use cases of, of one so that we're really solving that problem of connection for technology. One was around remote training and one was around co-creation remotely. And so we're like, this is really cool. You can use this to facilitate connection and talk to a customer. And every customer came back and said, oh, I think we could use this for executive interviewing because you are getting to that feeling of connection. You are getting to the whole, rather than doing just a flat screen interview and then having to coordinate all these schedules to fly somebody on site and spend an entire day. There's that step in between where we could use technology and we feel like we are just together in a space having a chat. And that you get to rapport quicker, you get to trust quicker. And that was fascinating because it was not at all anything we had looked at. It was something that was purely customer-driven for a use case. But that's when you realize, wow, there, there's something here. We're still solving that original purpose. This is all in service to that purpose. And someone's coming up with another cool creative way of, of how that can help them solve their own problems.

It's very sci-fi as well. It reminds me of like Stargates where people just dial in, see the full—

all my original pitch decks had the Jedi Council in them.

Yeah, there you go. So, um, you mentioned the remote teams, Elizabeth, and one thing which came to my mind, and, and this is, uh, I feel like I have that struggle even right now, is, is, uh, when you work with remote teams and you don't really you know, see the people, you can go for lunch and have like one-to-ones and build that connection. I feel like they might not share your purpose. I feel like, you know, they might just don't care. And it's just like, you know, it's just a job. I'm just coding, whatever. Like, do you have any ways of sort of taking it? Like if you get a sense that, okay, that person doesn't really, you know, share the purpose or the why, they're just there to work. Is that okay? Or is it something you would go and do about that? And if you would, Like, what's your go-to?

I don't think it's okay if someone doesn't share a why. That being said, their piece of the puzzle, their why might not be the same as your why. That's okay. Okay. If you're leading a team, you're gonna have a very big why. I think everyone needs to be very aligned to their contribution and how their contribution impacts the whole, because otherwise you're just plugging numbers. You're just flipping switches or plugging code. It's not— there is no connection to the purpose. So if your connection to the purpose is different from another person's connection to purpose, that's okay. But what you do every day needs to align to a purpose. Otherwise, I don't think anybody can get motivated. It is just very transactional. And if it's transactional, then it's just, uh, somebody else offered me more money, better benefits, different work hours. There's no commitment to it. So you do need a connection to the why. I love getting people together in person if at all possible. So even if it's a totally remote team, once a year, once a quarter, whatever you can muster, if it is possible to get everybody together in person, I have yet to see technology 100% replace that.

Yeah.

There's just magic that happens when people get to together in person. That being said, I don't think it needs to be done very often. I think when we were hitting our stride, we found about 3 times a year was kind of the magic number.

Okay.

You get people together 3 times a year, it's enough that you're seeing people quick, familiarly enough of just like, oh wow, you lost weight, or oh, you change your hair, or oh, that you, you saw them not that long ago. So it helps kind of feel consistent and build relationship. But there's an incredible amount that can be done today remotely. I mean, we have some— you and I are different parts of the world right now. We're just having a face-to-face chat. That's amazing. Technology is facilitating that. There's a lot of really cool tools that help that. But again, the technology needs to serve the purpose that you're trying to accomplish. So I think a lot of times you see companies fail because they try to use technology to solve the people problem.

OK.

So they say, hey, my team's not really connecting or jiving. You know, they're remote. We don't get to see each other that often. So we're going to take this new tool and it makes us Play this game and do this quiz. And you get the groans and the eye rolls and the team's like, oh my God, I don't know, this forced corporate fun. I don't wanna do this. And you get the opposite result. It's not building connection. It's just becoming one more thing to do. I think it works a lot better when you look at what are we trying to do? We're trying to get to know each other. I had an amazing ops manager for many years at Cisco, Ashley Hamak. Shout out to Ashley. She was awesome. Her magic was understanding people and teams, and she was very good at understanding the vibe and the culture and when things maybe need a little work and when things are going well. So we would plan regular virtual, we call them offsites, but they're not really offsites because everybody's still in their home office calling in. But they would be planned facilitated activities and we would have things, we get a pulse of what's working right now. Okay, we need people to kind of get to know each other. So You know what, we're going to talk about books. Everybody bring your favorite book that you've read and you get to talk about it. And yes, you are forcing things a bit, but you are forcing somebody to talk about something they're passionate about. So we did these, this series called What Jazzes You, and we would do them, I think, every once, once a month to every couple of weeks. And we would have a session and it would be like, Mike, it's you and 3 other people are going to present. We have 1 hour, you have 15 minutes. Talk about, and we might have a theme. It might be your favorite vacation spot or something.

Hmm.

And you'd get on, you could do it however you want. You can just chat, you could do a slideshow of pictures, you can talk about wishlists of where you wanna go, share some favorite memories when you were a kid, whatever the case is. And you are forcing it to an extent in that, hey Mike, you gotta do this. You can't get out of it.

Mm-hmm.

But it, you get to talk about something that actually jazzes you. If you are not excited about it, we don't wanna hear about it. And because of that, you get people sharing these amazing stories. And then you start getting commonality and people like, oh, wow, I've been there too. Oh, that's what I loved about it too. And you start building conversation. And it's genuine because people are talking about things that they care about, not what you've told them they should care about. Yeah.

So that's all— get people building connections, which leads to great things. How would, like, do you have to bring back to the why for the team? Like, you mentioned very good one that everybody might not have the same why as you, but they have to have that why, which sort of leads towards that purpose. So I'm just thinking like, how do you keep your team grounded on the common why?

Yeah, I think that again goes back to how does your why fit into the bigger why? And I'll use an example too of we had one software developer who was very good at He jokingly called himself the garbage collector. So, okay, he would take all the things that didn't seem to work smoothly or all the dirty jobs that people didn't want to do, and that's what he would work on, right? And I talked to him about this once, about that. I'm like, you're so gifted and so talented and so capable. You're the first one to volunteer for these jobs that nobody else wants. Why? And I wanted to understand his why. And his why was If I take on these tasks, he's like, I know that nobody else wants to do it.

Mm-hmm.

And so if I do it, I know it's enabling them to do other things that they're more passionate about and they're better at. And for me, it's not that hard. I can do it. I can get it done. He's like, for me, it's really exciting to then see it makes everything smoother, everything cleaner, everything work togeth— together better. And so I see purpose and value in doing all the jobs nobody else wants to do because I'm both enabling them and building a beautiful system. And I thought that was interesting. Like his why was focused on building a beautiful system. Now I plug that into my why might've been solving how to use technology for connection. He was looking at, well, I want to use that technology, that building for, for connection. I want to make it beautiful. I want to make an amazing system for it. So it aligned. It wasn't necessarily the same thing. He could have taken his purpose and applied that to an entirely different overarching why, as long as it fit that, because he wanted to build a beautiful system. So I think that's what I mean by it can be different. And for him, that aligned to his personal, what he likes to do, how he finds joy, how he finds value, and adding something good to the world. So it worked because it aligned to his vision. It worked because it aligned to our vision. And I think you just need to find those connections and intersections. Connection points. The challenge I find for a lot of people, though, is it takes time to do that. Like, you have to sit down and have a real conversation with somebody to understand. And it can't be the 5-minute afterthought at the end of your weekly one-on-one when you just run through a whole bunch of to-dos. I'm like, OK, by the way, like, you know, what do you like doing? Why are you doing this? If you don't care, if you don't mean it, people know that. People recognize authenticity. So if they look at it as like you're just trying to do a culture checkbox Okay, I'm just going to give you a BS answer and then we're going to move on to the next thing. That's where you get garbage in, garbage out. If you don't put your own skin in the game, you're not going to get that from your people. But if you as a leader are authentic and clear with them of like, this is what I'm trying to do, this is why I'm doing, this is why it matters to me. Here's where I don't know what I'm doing. Here's where it's not working. Here's where I need help. And you have that conversation and you are authentic and raw and vulnerable. Usually what you put in is what you will get out, and people realize, oh, okay, all right, I could be real too. I don't really care about that piece. I care about this piece. All right, great, let's align those. You care about that, I care about this, it works really well together.

Okay, so it's just everyone pulling the same direction. Effectively, your end goal to aligning your team is to understand their personal whys and make sure that you put that in a, in a way that everybody just pulls wherever Yeah, the whole vision should go. That's a proper leadership right there, right? It's not, it's not something you can just wing at it. That's, uh, as you put it, garbage in, garbage out. You really have to commit on that one. Um, can I ask this, um, and I had this a little bit, it's like, you know, like these cheesy visions sometimes you hear businesses put forward. I don't want to name businesses I've been part of, but couple of things when you get execs coming out and they put like, this is the purpose now, or this is the vision, and it just sounds like a movie title and you go like, I don't know, man. It's like, I'm not sure if you've ever been part of these situations, but like what's a good way? Let's say if I'm like maybe startup just raised money and I'm just sort of rebranding, I'm looking to attract great talent. I want to set that purpose. I want to set that vision for the business. So, so people can know and buy into this. It's like, uh, like, what's a good framework to think about creating that in the first place? So it's more about maybe the narrative than the vision itself. You probably already have that. It's just about how do you position that, uh, to the broader market.

Yeah, this is maybe a slightly different direction on that, but what comes to mind as you were talking is the fact that not every aspect of every job is going to be magical and fun. There's certain times where it's just, we're part of a big corporation, we've gotta check these boxes, we've gotta fill out this form. Or it's a, you know, we get funding from this VC firm and we need these deliverables to meet. It doesn't align with where I wanna go long term, but I have to do this in order to get the funding so I can eventually get where I wanna go. I think sometimes just recognizing that and calling it out. I, I'm originally from upstate New York where sarcasm is a love language. And just snarky comments are just, that's part of who I am and how I communicate. And there's been plenty of times, I won't mention which clients or which companies, but plenty of times where something just, it was a corporate issue and it needed to be done. The box needed to be checked.

Mm-hmm.

But it was kind of silly. It, it, there wasn't really a purpose, but we couldn't get out of it because we're part of this team or we're getting funding from this group or whatever the case is. Okay. So. Recognizing it for what it is. There were times we would talk about something of, you know what, this is, I don't get it, don't understand it, don't think it's useful. However, it is important because we need to pass this threshold so we can get this funding so we can get this approval, whatever the case is. So we need to do it. So let's do it in the best way possible. There's times where we have to sit through a training or sit through a meeting and we would play bingo. How many times did somebody say efficiencies of scale? How many times does somebody say, you know, whatever buzzword of the moment? How do you make it more fun? How do you gamify it? We have this thing like we all need to fill out this form for whatever compliance issue. Whoever gets it done faster, you know, gets to have bragging rights for the next week and, you know, decide what we're gonna talk about at our next office, whatever. You just gamify things. People love games. I love gamifying everything that's possible. So sometimes it's just embracing the slog and realizing this is not fun. This is not the greatest thing in the world, but it needs to be done. So how do we make it? Better.

How do you make it better? How do you gamify it? It's just like maybe skill you have, Elizabeth, because you were saying these things and I was like, this is great. And thinking about myself, I never did that. It's like, I don't think if I have me, maybe that's my creative juice not being juicy enough, but like, how do you look at something and go like, here's how I'm going to gamify it?

So my mind just went to this really silly movie that has— called Rat Race— that has John Cleese in it. John Cleese plays this character of the eccentric billionaire kind of thing, and he and all his rich friends, they do these silly challenges all the time. There's one point where they're like flying in a private jet and the captain is like moving all over the place because they had a bet on who's gonna throw up in the barf bag first. And then they're like, oh, okay, it was him, all right, passing money around. It's such a silly extreme example, but To me, there's a little nugget of truth in there of you can literally gamify anything. You can make anything fun. And there were plenty of times in different projects I've worked on where we would just do something silly. Again, it was a, everyone has to do this thing. Nobody wants to do it. Whoever gets to do it first, you know, you get X prize. There were times where we've made, uh, again, Ashley, my ops manager, she was a big, uh, co-conspirator in a lot of this. We did superhero awards for the team once, and it was this— it was just a silly thing. It was that we were having— celebrating a milestone wrap-up, and we had like no extra funding. We didn't have money to do anything cool or fun. It was a virtual wrap-up. And so we got together and just thought through, like, let's just give everybody a superhero award. And we made up superheroes. One of the guys on the team who was great at just kind of making all the bits and pieces work together, we call them Captain Elmer, for the Elmer glue, like, because you make everything stick together. And we made these, like, those little things you see in a kindergarten award of just— it's got like a little logo and a thing on there, like, great job, Mike, you are Captain Elmer, and here's your little thing. Thank you. And we meant it to be silly and just a way to add some levity to the situation. It didn't take a lot of time or effort, cost no money from a budget perspective. But some people on the team, they printed them out and hung them up at their desk. And it was just They loved it. It was just a way to be fun. Even Cake on Tuesday, my book, I wrote a business book called Cake on Tuesday because the title comes from a chapter in there, Half Cake on Tuesday, which again came from another, another thing that my ops manager and I came up with of, we were in a, a certain phase for the project where it was just, there wasn't an exciting milestone to rally around. And we said, how do we make this more fun? And so she got the idea of making a Wheel of Fortune style wheel of winning. Putting everybody's name on it. At the end of our staff meetings, which were on Tuesday, she'd spin it, and if it landed on your name, we'd be like, Mike, you won! Celebrate you! And then we would ship you a cake wherever you were in the world. It would just show up at your door a couple days later for no reason other than the fact that you won the Wheel of Winning that week. And there's all sorts of ways you can make things fun and enjoyable and add games. And, and you spend so much of your daily life at work doing work, and to do hard things, you gotta Play hard too.

I love how you put that. So, so this is just creative juices, I would say. You guys coming up with this idea, what if I put this in ChatGPT and I go like, hey, like, I got this situation, let's find out, tell me how can I gamify it. But I love that it takes, um, it makes it human-ish. I want to put it like this because when you think When you're very deep into things and you're just grinding and everything is important, there's so much pressure, especially if you have like tight deadlines and maybe there's, you know, big project and everyone's expecting stuff. It becomes very serious very quickly. And just allows to take that lid off, right? It's just the simple things like that, the words you mentioned, the cake, it just makes the situation, okay, well, we're all just humans trying to do great. Right. So I want to move us into a little bit of how do you think about all of this, the why and the purpose as a whole business. And for me, in my mind, when you start with the startups, at least you think about, okay, I think I discovered the problem market has and I think I just develop a service or a product to solve that problem. So, you know, a.k.a. I have a problem fit or a market fit. And then out of that is when the purpose appears or goals or the why appears. Is that the right direction though?

Meaning what? Starting with the—

Meaning you should maybe start with the purpose first and go like, what do I really want to achieve? And then sort of going like, I should find some problems.

I think it can work either way. You do need to get to the purpose. You need to get to the why. But I do think it can work either way. Like in the case that you just used, I think I just, Solve this issue. I think I, I think I just discovered this thing. Great. Validate that. It's awesome that you think you solve something and maybe you have a cool solution for it. Talk to people about that and talk to a lot of people about that in a lot of different areas. I think a lot of times we can be very narrow-minded in our feedback and our, our market sampling.

Mm-hmm.

And you talk to people that are just like us doing the same thing in the same world, in the same environment of like, hey, does this work? And like, oh yeah, that's amazing. And then you build an entire thing. A product and try to bring it to the world and realize, oh, that was like a 2% sampling of the market that I talked to, and this doesn't actually work for everybody else. So talking to everybody, I love doing pitches to the most random people. So if you have an idea for— this is my business, I want to boil it down into one tagline, this is my value prop. Great. Say that to the person at the grocery store that you run into. Say that to your Uber driver. Say that to whoever. And if they don't immediately get it and understand what you're trying to do, it's not good enough. Because we, we'd spend so much of our time talking to the same small fragment of people with the same perspective and then seem surprised later when it doesn't resonate more broadly. I, I do think I talk a lot about diversity of thought. We focus a lot in our current culture around diversity and diversity metrics, but a lot of times our diversity metrics fall short because we're just looking, do people look different than I look? Okay, you can have a bunch of people that look different but all think the same.

Yeah.

Do you have people that actually have diversity of thought? Now, a lot of times if people of diversity of thought, you're going to have diversity of everything else too, because you're from different walks of life and different backgrounds. But the most crucial thing there is getting that diversity of thought, because you want people who are coming at it from different angles. And that is what's going to make something robust and resonate and really be useful for the world, is when you're getting that input from all different sides.

Okay, so I'll try to rephrase this and see if the answer changes.

So, Yeah, I think I went on a huge tangent and didn't actually answer your original question.

So please stay. No, you did, but I just want to pick on this sampling situation. So, and diversity of thought is like, you said pitch to everybody. It feels very random in a sense of I will get that diversity happening like grocery store, in the gym, in a bus or, you know, whatever. But if I'm doing this, it's like, is it enough to ask like 8 people or 13 or 60? It's like, like how much— It depends what you're doing. It depends what I'm doing. Okay. I mean, that's a good shout. So where I'm coming from, this is effectively we had, we had like a product person and he effectively said, if you talk with 8 people on random, the answers you'll get, the samples of answers you get, statistically speaking, it gives you the the same if you scale this to 100 people. So meaning that if you, if you're thinking from starter perspective, you know, budgeting-wise, just talk with 8 random people. Like, that's it. Like, whatever you draw conclusion-wise from this, you'll draw the same from 100. This is going to be bigger numbers, but the conclusion will be the same. Do you have any sort of, um, intake on that? It's like, does that match up?

I'm sure there's a lot of metrics out there. I've done much more research than I could do off the top of my head. The one thing that does come to mind though is is I have spent some of my time mentoring younger women in their careers. And I like to use the metric of if you are trying to make a career move, if you're trying to move either internally at a large corporation or move to another company, I specifically use this for large corporations because people don't realize the wealth of information that they have access to by being part of a long— large organization, if you have the same email address that ends in the same thing as everybody else, you can reach out to them internally and ask. And so asking people for an informational interview, a networking virtual coffee, whatever the case, just asking for advice. My metric was always do that 35 times before you make a move internally.

35 times?

35 conversations before you move. And that's based on nothing other than my own career, I just found statistically that's what it always ended up being. Anytime I want to make a shift of like, hey, I've been doing this, I now want to go learn about this. If you just talk to a couple people, even if you talk to 8 people, I feel like you're going to have a limited view on it, but you want to see like, what are the other things out there? Let me talk to some other people. Okay, here's the thing I think I want to do. Let me talk to the people. Let me talk to the people who are leading that. Let me talk to the people who are working their way up in that. Let me talk to people who are doing it for a really long time. I'm trying to— people that just started and they've got a different approach on how to break into it. And for me, it was just like, a lot of people will balk at that number, but I'm like, if you want to make a good move, have 35 conversations.

I love that. I want to say now, and people listening who know statistics might go like, you're talking nonsense, Mike, but I want to say that statistically acceptable smallest sample is 32. I want to say that. I would Google right now, but I'll need to do that after the show. I want to say that, yeah, that's the number. The number is that before you draw any conclusion, to validate that as a statistical conclusion, you have to have a smaller sample of 32. That's what I say. That's a good, it's a good, good challenge back. I love that. And as well, very good tip. Now I'm thinking that I'm probably not— I work for a big enterprise, it's like thousands of people. I'm not utilizing that capability of just talking with random people.

I think that's a huge underutilized opportunity for people. I think when I was earlier in my career realizing how many people wouldn't reach out and ask for it. I would just reach— they're like, how do you get in a meeting with that person? Like, I asked. Yeah, it just said like, hey, I'm thinking about shifting into this group, you might have to pick your brain for 20 minutes. Yeah, I don't think I ever had anyone say no. You might have somebody like, hey, I'm traveling for the next 6 weeks, I'm super busy, but so-and-so on my team would be really good to talk. Okay, great. You might get to divert to somebody else, but I never had anybody say no. And then Later in my career, when I started having people reach out to me and ask, I don't think I ever said no to them. If somebody reaches out and said, hey, I'm really fascinated with your group, what you're doing, I'm trying to figure out my next move. I've been here for a couple of years. Can I pick your brain for 20 minutes?

Hmm.

Sure.

Yeah.

I'm not going to say no. No.

Figure it out on your own. Yeah. That's actually my test when I join companies. I just want to see. And my problem would be probably that I don't go wide enough. But when I come into my area of expertise, when I join, I go to the, like, the biggest fish I, I can, I can reach, and I go like, can we have a coffee? And this is my way of sort of testing if, if the business is sort of ready to give time to make sure you are successful in your role. Yeah, because I feel it's like people go like, no, I don't have time. You, you, like you mentioned, you'll need to work out. It's like, hmm, I'm not sure if that's a, like, a fruitful culture, you know, if it's like culture which cares about you actually doing well. All right, we drifting a little bit. Let me roll back into this startup-ish why on the business, right? So I have this question is that when we solving a problem for a business, let me rephrase, solving a problem for a market and we think we have a business because of that. Right now, at least with the buzz around AI, I feel like people just literally use these words and they put this as a purpose or their why. You know, we're utilizing AI to solve new generation problems. It just feels cheesy, feels a little bit fake. And the question is, how do you actually know if you're doing something innovative or it's just, you know, just noise effectively?

Yeah. Well, you probably want the answer to that question of not, I've done it for 5 years and I haven't gotten any customers, or I've gotten great customers, because that's the ultimate litmus test of is it useful or not. I think the innovative question though is an interesting one because a lot of times we kind of overglorify innovation. Like innovation is like this. If you went to the top 5 consulting or the big tech companies or whatever, it's something the world's never seen before. That's innovative. Innovation is really just doing something differently. You could be doing something new, but you could just do, be doing something old in a new way. And, and if you look at it with that lens, you can innovate on anything. You can innovate on your household chores. You can innovate on your schedule and how you manage your schedule. You can innovate in how you're raising your kids. You can innovate in anything. And I think if you demystify innovation a bit and, and look at it more of just Can I do something new? Some of the best businesses out there are not breakthrough products we've never seen before.

Yeah.

It's taking an existing one and fixing a pain point that's existed for a long period of time. That's innovation. And a lot of times we don't look at it as innovation because like, oh, it's just the same business. Yeah. But they're doing it incredibly new way and getting a killing in the market doing that. I think that's more useful to the world, uh, but a lot of times overlooked because we just want to look at those unicorns.

Yeah, what's up with these unicorns, honestly? Like, why everyone is dreaming about that? It's just the chance you're gonna be creating something like that is 1 in a billion or something like that. Like, people—

the same reason people buy lottery tickets. It's everyone's excited by that, the chance, the chance to be the one.

However many. Yeah. I feel like I'm in the same boat. I don't buy lottery tickets, but I do dream of, you know, big unicorn type ideas. And I feel like every idea I have is basically going to change the world, but I don't do much about it. So it's just dreams at this point. But I do see people chasing all this time. And I feel like that's how people sell as well. A lot of things online is just that almost like constant gratification. Or getting rich quick type of schemas. They all like very similar to that is that unicornish approach, which is just not real. I mean, realistically speaking, statistically speaking, it's just such a— it's like getting hit by lightning 7 times or something like that. It's just like very unlikely that you're going to be part of that. So you want to approach your business in the sense of, okay, here's a real problem market has. I know that I validated. Hopefully you spoke with 35 people, which we just mentioned, something around that. You have your network around you which you can chat, random people. You validate that, you solve that, you have a service or product. Hopefully that leads to a vision and a purpose which then drives your days. So you're moving somewhere, and, and then, you know, it's just a grind for at least 3 to 5 years, isn't it? Until hopefully you have a business. There's going to be a lot of chaos into that. And, uh, one question which I have is that when you make these, uh, pivots and you need to refocus and you think like you took the wrong direction, I feel like we answered that question, Elizabeth. I feel like I'm asking the same thing. I think you mentioned that you just have to take a retreat, basically just create that distance, right? And just refocus yourself.

I think there is another piece and the way they're phrasing it now, there is another piece that we can get into, which is, I love the phrase action trumps everything. And for me, that goes to, there's a great Teddy Roosevelt quote about the best thing you can do in any situation is the right decision. Next best is the wrong decision. Worst is no decision. And I talk about that some in Cake on Tuesday. I have a chapter called Don't Be a Flat Squirrel. And it's all about decision waffling of, we tend to think that not making a decision is just delay, but inaction is a choice. It's a conscious effort. So I think that element is something we didn't really dig into before of forward momentum is really, really important. And I look at my tra— career trajectory, anybody's career trajectory to a large extent, it's usually not perfectly linear. It's usually, I went this way and then I went that way and then this way. As long as you're making some progress going forward, it doesn't matter if it's a perfectly straight line because there is a lot that we learn in the detours, in the meandering. As long as we are moving ultimately in the right direction, action trumps everything. Action is so important. Nike had got something right in their slogan, just do it. I think, I think that's a lot that can be said for people starting out with a new business or a new venture. We all can easily fall into that analysis paralysis issue of just, do I have all the research? Do I have all the stuff? When in reality, just test it out there. Do the small test and see the reaction, and that will guide your direction. And it might not be exactly right, and so you course correct a little bit, and then you get a little bit more correct and a little bit more correct. And in these fits and spurts, you're going to move much more quickly forward than if you just wait till everything's perfectly aligned and then try something.

Yeah, I love that. I have a gym-level analogy to this when it comes to why action is a lot more important. So going, for example, and talking with the private trainer for the gym and talking about your goals feels like you're actually doing something towards the goal of being fit. But a much better way is just to actually do some squats at home. Like, that takes you much closer to actually being fit than actually having a chat with the trainer and planning your routines and things like that. That— I feel like that's what you were saying, is just that, just do stuff. Just do it.

Yes. And I will out myself on this because this is something I struggle with all the time too. I live a lot of my life in my head. It's very easy to think through the perfect wording of something or the perfect approach to something. And I I was just talking to somebody because I still ask 35 people every time I'm trying to do something. I was talking to somebody about something I want to do with my business now, and he's a very seasoned professional. He's got multiple startups, lots of success, now professor and some things as well. And I was asking him, like, I know you don't really look at things that are, you know, oh, I wish I'd done this, but like, if you were going to give yourself advice 15 years ago, 20 years ago, what would you say? And his— because he's a very similar personality to me, and he's I would tell myself to get out of my head and just do it. And oh, that's kind of hidden right there. That's so important. I think we, we can look at that on a grand scale. Like, I could have a very different perspective on how I view where I am in my current life and, and career. And I, I was recently reading, uh, Dan Sullivan's book, uh, The Gap and the Gain, which is great book. Uh, Dan Sullivan has a lot of great insight, but it's talking about, are you focusing on the gap between where you are and where you wanna go? Are you focusing on the gain of where you are and where you were and what you have accomplished? And that is such a mind game and such a, such a perspective shift, but it's huge because I can easily look at where I am right now and say, well, I wanna grow my business to this and I want to help this many clients and I wanna make this much in revenue and I'm just not there yet. Be incredibly frustrated, right? Or I could pause and say, I'm raising 3 amazing children and I have a book and I've had a business and I've successful corporate career. And like, then I feel so blessed and fortunate. That's— it's the same. My situation is not any different. This is a matter of how am I looking at it. So that's something I'm— like I said, I'm just outing myself. I'm trying to work on myself to focus more on being in the gain and appreciating that for what it is rather than focusing on the gap.

I need to read that book. My mind just went places. Sounds like an excellent— let's take some questions from, from the audience, Elizabeth. So I've got this one. I'll put it on the screen. So if you check your screen, you'll see that. But I'll read this as well to our listeners who are now watching this live. What's one leadership rule you love breaking?

Oh, I love getting into— well, I'm definitely an ask forgiveness rather than ask permission kind of person in general. So I apply that to just about everything. But my favorite thing is when I'm starting something, when I'm moving into an organization or a team or a role, anytime I get the explanation, I always ask why. Why do we do it this way? And then when I get that, if somebody can't answer that adequately, it's just, oh, that's how I was trained to do it, or we've always done it that way, or this is just what works. That's not good enough. So I like to always break it then and find out, take it apart. If you can't explain to me, nobody here can explain to me why we do it this way, well, I'm going to break it to figure it out. Because if I break it and then I have to put it back together, the exact same way, now I can answer that question. This is why we do it this way. But if I break it and put it back together a different way and it works better, well, okay, why don't we do that before? Like, why can't we answer that question? Understanding the why of individual things and processes and how much we take for granted because we just say like, oh, it's just history. That's the way our customers expect this, or our predecessors did this. Why? If you're not passing that knowledge forward to each new person coming in of this is why we do it this way, this is the most efficient way, we've tested this, we've done this, and this is why. Then I think it's time to break it.

I love that. Do you know the experiment they did with the monkeys and bananas around the wise? Well, it's not around the wise. No, so it's effectively, they put 7 monkeys in the zoo, right? And they, they would hang a banana, right? And the monkeys would go, or one of the monkeys would go to get the banana, and they would spray all the monkeys, not the one which went to banana, but all of them with very, very cold water. So they all would get penalized, let's say, for going after banana, right? And they would effectively take one of the monkeys which knows that away from the 7 and add a new one which doesn't. And eventually they replaced all the 7 monkeys who actually knew that if you go after banana, you're going to get sprayed with cold water. So in the cage there was all monkeys and they had no idea why, but no one went after the banana. And I forgot to ask that Eventually the monkeys started beating the monkey who would go after banana because they knew they will get, uh, sprayed with the cold water. So effectively the new monkey would go like, I don't know that we're gonna get sprayed, so I'm gonna go after banana. The ones which knew, they would beat that monkey. Eventually the cage had no idea, no monkeys which had the history, and no one went after the bananas. So no one actually knew why you cannot touch the banana. It just was that thing, right?

Swap out the monkeys with your employees and swap out the bananas with some corporate policy that we don't understand why. And yeah, that's exactly the scenario.

Yep. Right. So we got another one. What's your non-negotiable morning ritual that sets the tone for your day? Besides coffee, of course.

Besides coffee. Oh man.

It's just coffee.

Can I do it? Can I do a tweak on that? Because it does involve coffee, but It is coffee with my husband every morning. That is actually, for me, that's part of my getting my head above the trees moment. And we both have, we both have our own businesses. We have, we have 3 small kids. We have busy lives. But also, my husband makes the best cup of coffee I've ever had in the entire world, and he makes it for me every day of my life. And I'm so blessed and spoiled with that. But that is part of it. It's not even so much about the coffee, though the coffee is amazing. It's about taking that moment to pause with the person that my most favorite person in the entire world. And that's usually— we do have a quick— it's like a morning scrum, the what's going on today, what's going on this week. And sometimes those coffee conversations, if we don't have meetings or something immediately pressing, they can become really long. And it's our head above the trees moment to check, are we on the right trajectory with our family and with our, our lives?

I love that. What coffee does he make? You just said like the best, you know, in your life. No, now I'm intrigued. Is it like—

so The coffee beans are Black Rifle Coffee beans. Uh, Freedom Fuel is the, is the one that we use. When I love the coffee, but he also, he hand grinds it because he just feels the automatic grinders are not quite as good.

Okay.

And then he does the pour-over method and he grates nutmeg and cinnamon on it.

Okay, well, that's a proper, like, you can't just do it. Yeah, you have to learn. But I really love, you know, you call it exactly— we have a very similar, I mean, I have flat white, but I make it as well before we kick off the day. We have some chats. So it feels like very similar vibes, but I know exactly what you mean.

It's not just the coffee. I mean, it's the coffee's part of it, but it's the moment. It's taking an intentional pause every day.

Yeah. I love that.

All right.

So I got this one. I'm not sure if it's a question there. You are consultant, speaker, author, podcast host, tech leader, and a mom. Are you secretly operating in a different time zone the rest of us don't know about?

No, no, I'm not. And I went through seasons when my kids were younger and I having babies and infants and breastfeeding, all that stuff, where I definitely sacrifice sleep. But right now I make sleep a priority too because I'm realizing how more efficiently I function if I get a decent good night's sleep.

Oh my God, yes.

I think, oh, it's huge, right? I think any parent can relate to that statement. I think the biggest thing is, you know, I've always heard that comment about, you know, Gandhi had 24 hours in a day, Mother Teresa had 24 hours in a day. No one has had more than 24 hours a day. And you look at some of the amazing figures in history and what they've accomplished and realize they had just as much time as I have. I can't complain. I don't have enough time. To me, that's very sobering. And so it, it kind of gives me that perspective of how am I using the time that I have? And I think a lot of times I, I talk about, I like to ask why, and let's, let's break this if we don't understand why it works. I think that applies to schedules too. I, I think I've, I've been fortunate to have some good mentors and, and managers and bosses at earlier stages of my career, and there were There are times I remember having one conversation with one manager who blatantly said, he's like, "I'm not hiring you to punch a card and fill a certain number of hours. I'm hiring you because of the way you think." And so if that translates differently, that translates differently. And obviously that's something that's hard to do very early in your career before you establish your relationship and build it out. But I think challenging some of those assumptions of if you are working for somebody, having that conversation, be like, "What do you value about me as an employee?" And if It's the, the way you project. Okay, great. You know what? I'm more efficient when I do that of, I really like to have a pause midweek and take Wednesday mornings and I go and work out and have my relaxing time. And it just makes me so much more fresh. And then if I need to catch up on work, I do it on Saturday afternoons. And you know, that works for me. I think sometimes questioning those norms that we assume there are parameters in place that may not actually be there. I've had to get, uh, having 3 kids and, and doing businesses and all these crazy things, I've had to get really creative in things. There's times where certain things I can multitask. If I'm trying to make a great PowerPoint deck, I can do that sitting on a couch, watching a cartoon with my kids. Like, and I can be in two places and do two things at once. Other things I have to really, really concentrate. There are times where I just turn off all of my electronics, make sure all the kids are fed, and I'm just gonna sit down and focus. You have to find what works for you and what doesn't, because you're trying to make your hours more efficient and work within your own schedule and your own confines and find when I'm in the zone, I'm gonna go full bore and do as much as I can because I can get done more in 4 hours than I could 14 hours not in the zone. And just finding that way that works with you in the rhythm. Um, you need flexibility from the people around you to do that, but I think that is a huge overlooked, uh, resource is really working within your zones.

Hmm. Oh man, you're making me think a little bit, which is good. It's just my mind went places about my own, um, time management. I want to put it like this, but you, you have to make it work. I mean, we all got 24 hours. You can't make more time. I mean, you can buy more time in theory. You can delegate and buy virtual assistants and things like that to just generate more time. But if we're talking from employment perspective a wise use of time or playing into your strength around your time will just allow you to do, do more. And it doesn't, it doesn't mean you have to clock in at 9 and clock out at 6. Like, there's some, some flexibility around that might just make you much better. So asking questions around that, I love that.

You're hitting the nail on the head too with the playing into your strengths. And there's a couple great resources on there. I think Marcus Buckingham's Now Discover Your Strengths Buckingham's Strengths is a great book and it really challenges that preconceived notion of, well, we should all become really well-rounded people and work on the things you're not good at so you can be kind of okay at them. And that's why a lot of reviews are spent, here's what you did good, but we're just going to glance over that because you do that good. Let's talk about all the things you do poorly and how do we make those better? And Marcus Buckingham really challenges that, says, why? If you're bad at something, you're bad at something. You might be able to work really hard and get okay at it. It. But if you're great at something else, why don't you spend more time working on that? Because you're going to go from great to amazing.

Yeah.

And you get so much more return on that. So I think that's important. And the other part of that too is another Dan Sullivan, Ben Hardy book is The Who Not How. That I've read that recently. It was in the last year or two. And that kind of challenged me, I would say. It's really focused on, it's the same concept of focus on what you're good at, but the who, not how. Rather than figuring out how to do something that you're not that great at, who should you be hiring or outsourcing to do that? Because you, you really maximize your time when you do that.

Yeah, two excellent advices and two excellent books as well. Um, we actually had a guest who was a subscriber to The Camp of I don't do anything I'm not good at. I don't do anything I don't like. I just delegate that away and I just double down on the things I love doing because by default I'm excellent at them. And I want to see—

That's my life goal. I'm trying to get there. I'm not fully there yet, but I'm working on it.

But you do have other people who basically say enjoy the suck effectively, you know, find what you're really bad at. And go through the journey of getting better with this because that's going to build a character, that's going to teach you a discipline, that's going to teach you accountability and doing things you don't like. And that will be very important as well. If you, you know, entrepreneur and you're trying to build a business because you will be doing many, many things initially, at least you will, you will be wearing like 7 hats, different roles and things like that. So there's like, it's just two different philosophies.

Can't you have both though? Like, I don't necessarily see this totally in conflict. Like, on one hand, when it comes to, yeah, what I'm doing with my business, like, I might not be great at one piece of operations. Uh, why would I spend all my time doing that when I can hire somebody and they're much more efficient and they much more creative and strategic how they approach it? They do a much better job. I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna pay somebody else to do it. We're both happier for it. But there are certain things you can't get out of everything in life, and I don't think you should. And there's certain things of, again, going back to the kids thing, there's a season of life. My firstborn had colic. She was colicky for 6 weeks straight. My husband and I did not sleep. We just, everything was miserable. It was, it was a rough season, but we were in it and my husband and I were in it together. And we have both painful and wonderful memories out of that because we're like, look, this is our kid. We love our kid. We're in this. We're not getting out of the situation. There's nothing we can do to really get out of the situation other than wait it out. So we're going to do the best we can. So we watched an entire Netflix series staying up at absurd hours because the only thing we could do all night was bopping up and down with our kid on the yoga ball. It was the only thing we could pacify her. Like, yeah, there's some, some things you cannot get out of and you should just— those ones, I think you should embrace the suck. Back and what can I learn through this. And it taught me a lot of things. Taught me I can survive on way less sleep than I realized when I have to, but I don't want to do that unless absolutely essential. It taught me I picked good in my marriage choice. And it's good that when you're going through really rough times and you're both sleep deprived and communication is hard, like, okay, I've made a good choice. It also taught me communication is key when you get to the point of how do you convey something to somebody when you're both overly exhausted and you can't think of the right word and there's like you find communication shortcuts to make sure the point is getting across, or you make that intentional pause and like, I know I've been really short with you. Yeah, just tired. I still appreciate you. And you realize how to communicate. So you can learn stuff in both, I think.

Great shout. And, uh, I was driving around the block in the car. I was like, I remember the bouncy ball. I was like, I can't be bouncing. Let me do something else. So I tried the car. That worked very well as well. That works very well.

That's worked for a lot of people. Worked for none of my 3 kids.

No, no, just the bouncy ball. I can't imagine Elizabeth just balancing, watching Netflix. Right. So if people want to learn more about the Cake on Tuesday podcast or the book or just get in contact with you, Elizabeth, what's the details?

The easiest way to find me is cakeontuesday.com. My website is my name. It's elizabethbianik.com, but I understand it's easy, not the easiest easiest to say or spell. So, cakeontuesday.com redirects to my site. From my site, you can access the book, you can access the podcast, you can access my resources. Everything's there. So, cakeontuesday.com is the best way to find me.

There you go. Dear listeners, if you're tuning in live, check the notes. There will be a link to Elizabeth's LinkedIn if you want to connect. And if you go to the LinkedIn, you'll see other links. If you're watching this recorded, Again, check the show notes. All the links will be there. Excellent episode. The message we wanted to land today is that think hard if you can about your purpose. Try to find one. Try to find your own why as a per— as a person that will be your guide, a North Star, your compass, which will likely translate into your team and will potentially translate into your business. Do not forget to ask that at least once a week, 15 minutes or so if you can. Give yourself more time. Go somewhere where your mind gets bored so you can actually think about things. Is that a good conclusion and assessment, Elizabeth?

That's a great way to end. I'm pretty sure I said 30 minutes though, not 15. You gotta carve out some time.

Make a change. I was just like, there's no time. There's no time. Doing the mistake you should not be doing, right? You should find time. Alright guys, as always, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.