How You Actually Figure Out Who You Are with Suzy Welch

Hello, everyone, it's Guy Kawasaki. I believe we are in troubling and dangerous times. One of the things that's happening is that privacy is eroding. And when privacy erodes, so does democracy. So Madison Knysberg and I, we just finished a book. It's called Everybody has Something to Hide. This is a jargon free book. It is for everybody to learn why and how they should use signal. They should use signal to ensure their privacy, safety and well being. It comes out on January 28th. For five days, it'll be free, and then it'll go to $4.04. I hope you see what we did there. The forward is from Congressman Ro Khanna because he believes, like we do, that democracy is extremely important. And signal is one of the tools that can help us preserve democracy. So remember the name Everybody has Something to Hide. It's by Guy Kawasaki and Madison Nismer.

When you need resilience is when you're absolutely your weakest and you're terrified. And, yeah, sure, grit will help you overcome that and stand up. But I've actually thought that there's something else going on from everybody that I've ever observed that got up and kept fighting and kept living was that they also were able to forgive. And you have to really forgive to access your grit. I think it's grit, sure. But first, forgiveness. And so you either have to forgive yourself because you effed up. I screwed up. That's why I'm on my back. That's why I've been fired. That's why I got divorced. Whatever. You have to forgive yourself or you have to forgive the person who put you on your back, or both. And I just think to say to people, just get up is so simplistic.

Hello, everybody. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People podcast. We're on this quest to help you become remarkable. And today we have a remarkable and inspiring guests. Her name is Susie Welch. And Susie. Oh, like, I read her books and she was a real hero to me. She was the editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, and I once got in the Harvard Business Review, so that kind of made my life right there. So she is an author, she's a professor, she's a journalist. She's like, you name it, she's in it. And now she's a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. Right, Susie? I got that right.

That's what I do. That's my day job.

Yeah. And this is her new book. I gotta hit that pose. I'm gonna be like yeah. So. So this is her.

How many hours it took to hit that pose. I was exhausted of posing and that finally we got one that worked for them.

Not natural looks like a Annie Lebovitz kind of portrait. But anyway, so anyway, so you know her new book, we're going to be talking about becoming you. All right, so, Suzia, I want to go back into your past, to your book called Winning that you co authored with Jack Welch. And, oh, my God, some people are probably so young, they don't know who Jack Welch is, but Jack Welch.

My students don't know. My students don't know.

Yeah. So Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric, and he took that company from like 12 billion to 400 billion, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you had this book called Winning, and one of the key concepts was this 20, 70, 10, that the employees are company. 20% are these, like, highly motivated, highly effective people. They're in the top 20%. And those people you reward, there's 70% where you actually are developing them because they're promising. And the last 10%, you're supposed to let go. So my question here is, from the outside looking in, you hear a lot of references about, oh, Jack Welch was ruthless. Susie Welch was ruthless. Every year they cull out 10% of the herd. So what is the theory with what you do with the 10%?

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about Jack. It's been almost six years since he died, and so I love to still talk about him. I think that one of the hard parts of Jack's life was the misunderstanding of this idea of differentiation. If you've managed anybody, you know that you have your top performers and reward and you love them and you encourage them and you congratulate them and you thank them. And then you've got the very valuable 70% who are solid performers, and you try to make them find ways to get better and better. And then you've got people who should be working somewhere else. Of course, the first step is that you try to help them get better at their job, either to buy in more to the values or to amp up their performance for the good of the whole organization. But sometimes people are not in the right place for them. They don't buy into the values of the organization, and they don't have the actual skills or aptitudes and the ideas is to love them out the door. This is not like somebody gets a phone call in the middle of the night saying, you're dead to us. Of course, this was the wonderful, popularized way of putting it, it's like, this is not how it happened. Nobody ever was surprised when they were let go. Jack used to say, if somebody's surprised when you let them go, it's on you. It's your bad. You made a terrible mistake. You were a horrible manager. You have a year of trying to help people be better at their work, and if not, then I have a friend who works at Sony who says at that point, you invite them to become a customer. You know, and I think that this was the idea, is that if somebody should be very, very successful someplace else, with which is a better match for their skills and aptitudes, then help them find that place. There were no sort of, you know, the kind of cartoonish interpretation of differentiation was always agonizing to Jack. He was like, you know, I guess maybe it's just a subtle point, and people don't want subtle points. And it's easy to kind of make it look like this horrible draconian thing. It wasn't that. And he wouldn't have been able to grow that company and have so many people love him if that's the way he had been operating.

The Silicon Valley interpretation or misinterpretation of that is every year you take the bottom 10% out and you shoot them in the head.

That's gross. That's just gross. And I think that, again, the ideal situation is when you've had enough conversations with an employee that they know what's coming and they think, yep, that's right. They've been told and talked through it a couple of times. And then together you say, okay, what's the package? What's the package? How many weeks is it? How many months is it? And then you work out a way for them to go with dignity. That's the ideal way. Silicon Valley, it has its own way of interpreting everything, doesn't it? But GE was a big industrial company, and they didn't do it. They didn't do it that way because they lived in communities and they didn't do it that way.

So I'm going to ask you a difficult question that might reduce your federal funding and stuff, but I gotta know, if Jack Welch were alive today and running General Electric, would he be donating money to the inauguration? Would he be on the inauguration stage? Would GE be giving Donald Trump a gold and glass trophy? Would you be paying for the destruction of the East Wing? Like, where would Jack Welch be today?

Well, there's no GE for Jack to run anymore. But when Donald Trump started running, Jack had never really liked him personally. Like, we were invited to his wedding to Melania and he refused to go because he thought that Donald Trump was not his favorite person. And so we didn't go. And I was like, come on, it's going to be a fun party. And, you know, I was no fan either, but I thought it would be a fun party to go to. And everyone was going. We didn't go. When he got nominated, he was kind of amazed. He didn't support him in that process, much to Donald Trump's frustration. But then when he was elected the first time, Jack, like many leaders, said, okay, maybe he'll surprise us, maybe he'll be okay. This is the first time. And he joined that commission in D.C. business leaders. And then the administration unfolded and Jack, sort of six months in, went on CBC and he said, I'd give Donald Trump. I think he gave him like a D minus in managing people. And Trump called Jack and totally renounced him. He just said to him, like, how dare you? You know, I respected. And they had a falling out that was very unpleasant. I was in the room when it happened. And then when Jack died, Donald Trump called me and he reminded me of that incident. He said, you know, your husband was grateful he gave me a D minus in managing people. And I mean, he actually said it like it was during. I had sort of two days where people came to the house after Jack died. It wasn't an Irish wake, but it was kind of an Irish wake. And it was during the wake, somebody came and got me and said, the president's on the phone for you. And I went in and he said, you know, husband was great, but I'll never forget that. He went on cnbc and I was like, look, my husband just died, and this is not actually, you know, what I'm gonna talking about. So actually, I don't know what Jack would be doing. He did what was best for the company. And if that meant that he would have kept one foot in to keep the company in the good graces of the president, maybe he would have, I don't know. But I do know that he had a lot of courage in going CBC and saying, like, the way he's managing people in the White House is not the way you manage people. You can't have a revolving door like this. And it kind of lost to history that that happened, but it certainly had fallout for us personally.

Well, you are the only person I know that got invited to that wedding.

Oh, no, but everybody got invited to that wedding. You do, because he just look, this is before he had his eye on politics, and he was just like a Palm beach bon vivant. And there were a lot of people there who just went because they were curious to know what Mar A Lago looked like. I mean, he was apolitical then. I just wanted to go because I thought it'd be fun to see what everyone was wearing. Nobody in those days could have ever guessed where he was going to go.

Deep in your book. I'm going to jump around a little bit. Deep in your book, you came up with this thought that you have to combine grit with forgiveness. And I would never have put those two things together. So why are you combining grit with forgiveness? In order to optimize.

Okay, the book. I'm just going to step back for a second and just say this. The book is about a methodology that I teach that helps you determine your purpose, which I. There's a point to where I'm going with this, which I posit lies at the intersection of your values, your deeply held beliefs, which no one knows, your aptitudes, which no one actually knows either, and your economically viable interest with most people have a fraction of understanding. And so the book is about excavating those three data sets, if you will, as part of knowing who you are. I have a tool called the Career Traits Compass, which helps you determine where you fall in the continuum from each individual contributor to leader and one of the traits that I think you should have if you want to go into a leadership position, which not everybody wants to do, some people are perfectly happy being individual contributors and power to them. Okay? But if you have your eyes on leadership, then you need to have resilience because you're going to get the, you know, beat out of you every single day. And so then this begs the question of what is resilience? And I happen to hate the common definition of resilience. I hate it because I think it's dumb. I think it's dumb because when you need resilience, everyone just says resilience is perseverance, it's grit, it's get up and do it again of ness and all these other things. But the facts are that's fine when you're healthy and strong, but the time you really need your resilience is when you're on your back and somebody's on top of you and you've been pushed over and you're getting pummeled. When you need resilience is when you're absolutely your weakest and. And you're terrified. And yeah, sure, Grit will help you overcome that and stand up. But I've actually thought that there's something else going on from everybody that I've ever observed that got up and kept fighting and kept living was that they also were able to forgive. And you have to really forgive to access your grit. I think it's grit, sure. But first forgiveness. And so you either have to forgive yourself because you effed up, okay, a lot of times you have to forgive yourself. I screwed up. That's why I'm on my back. That's why I had been fired, that's why I got divorced. Whatever. You have to forgive yourself or you have to forgive the person who put you on your back, or both. And I just think to say to people, just get up is so simplistic. It's like there's some mental and emotional work that has to happen first. And I had to. The number of times I've had to draw on my resilience is many because I've screwed up so many times in my life. And I have, I have. And I've had to say, okay, stop relitigating how you screwed up and just forgive yourself. You screwed up. Say sorry to everybody. To say sorry to. And then you can start to access what you need to access. But to assume you can do any of that without letting go first is, to me, nonsensical. That's how I coupled them. Guy.

Starting a business comes with its share of ups and downs, which is why staying true to your vision is essential, a non negotiable for Romeo and Milka Bregali, Capital One business customers and co owners of ra's plant based restaurant in New York. Romeo and Milka took a leap of faith when starting their own restaurant. Gutting an empty space and building it from the ground up. Every pipe, every wall, every detail. But building from scratch came with a heavy financial burden, which is when they turned to their Capital One business card. With the flexibility of the card's no preset spending limit, they were able to spend more and earn more rewards while bringing their vision to life. Today, Roz's success is proof that with passion and the right support, it's possible to make your dreams a reality. Learn more@capitalone.com businesscards.

You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Have you ever had this discussion with Angela Duckworth, who is kind of the mother of grit?

I love her and revere her and teach her to my students. I've not actually had this direct conversation with her. She is so smart and her research is so good. I don't know how you do. If somebody once asked me if I wanted to do some research on this, now that I have the whole research of becoming ulabs and NYU at my fingertips, which is such a treat in life, I don't know how you do research on forgiveness because it's something that people are very poor at. Self reporting. Everyone says they forgive, but very few people actually do. It's a little like self awareness. We are very blind to how self aware we are by definition.

I think if we could start a whole series with Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck and Susie Welch walk into a.

Bar and I think we should throw Kim Scott in there also, if you don't mind if we want to have a real night. Okay.

All right. All right. I had a drop the mic moment when reading your book because I came on that part about non sibi and I said, that is me. That's how I want to define my life. I should get license plates to say non sibi.

So I don't know if you're non sibi or radius. To tell you the truth. I think there's two values that are very similar. Have you taken the values bridge so we could find out exactly what you are? So this is my test that I developed in my lab to rank order people's values and we would find out if you were non civic or not. Can I do an analytic on you?

It's a little scary, but yeah, why not?

Okay, okay, okay. So these are two values that I want to unpick here. So the value, my work, my academic work, my PhD thesis, all that is about values, expression, which values we have and how much we live them, which is not always the same thing. So there is a value for helping people. And that's like this impulse to help people one on one in a very personal way, to. To tutor somebody, to mentor somebody, to reach up to the top shelf and get somebody on what they can't reach. To build your life around the act of helping people in a personal way. And that's called non symbiote. That's a Latin for not for oneself. But there's a second value that's aligned but can be very different, which is we call radius, which is the desire to change the world. And sometimes those track together. Sometimes somebody can be very non sibi and very high radius. But sometimes people who want to change the world are kind of snarky and dreadful to people on an individual level because they've got bigger battles to fight. So If a student presents to me as a says I'm a social justice warrior, I always think to myself, I can't wait to see her test results because I know that radius is going to come up at the top. So which one of those resonates with you more, Guy?

Oh, Nancy, for sure. Not even a question. Okay.

All right. You nailed it.

As I was reading your book, I said, guy, what really gives you great pleasure is helping people. Now don't get me wrong, if Joe the ragman or Jane the rag woman calls me up and says, will you be my mentor? The answer is usually no. Because in addition to non civi, my family is the most important to me. I will not sacrifice my family to help others, necessarily. But, you know, maybe it's not mentoring, but on a day to day kind of living, I hope to kind of absolutely stand for non civi. That would be my life goal there.

Well, I think that from what you're saying, that probably family centrism is your top goal, which is the desire to make your decisions and behaviors with family as a life organizing principle. And then maybe non civvie would be next. And sometimes those two values are in conflict with each other because both are people asking you to be available.

Yes, they do. And I have a natural tension in my life where my predisposition is always to default to yes, but that gets in the way of my family. So I often have to pick, you know. So anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into, you know.

But every conversation with me turns into what's your value? So I'm. So you are falling prey to my values work. So I will. I will stop asking the questions.

So you have this concept about the Venn diagram where you take the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and what's economically viable. So my question is, it sounds a lot like the Western interpretation of the Japanese concept of ikigai.

Of course, I have a slide in my deck. And when I present to my students, I say, there's people who want to raise their hand right now and ask, is this the Western interpretation of ikigai? Happens every single semester, I think. But of course, I bow deeply to it. I think that ikigai is conceptual, whereas becoming you is tactical. And we are kind of ruthlessly tactical. What are your values? Let's rank order them. What are your intellectual and emotional aptitudes? Let's get them sorted out and ranked, and then let's find your economically viable interest based on what the what. Like literally, we play a game called industry Bingo. Where I call out the keggers for industries as I teach them. And then we look at that data data and we find out what's at the center. Whereas Eigigai asks you a lot of very meaningful philosophical questions and it's a very good way to ponder things. I'm there to get people to their purpose as rapidly as possible. I'm less woo woo. I'm like relentlessly un woo woo. And is a beautiful thing. It just has, it has too many questions that people don't know how to answer. Like most people can't answer what their personal mission is. But ego guy asks you to do that. And I am one of the things. Yes you can. But I'm just going to say you're in a 5% group of people. So I'm dealing with people who are kind of either students or who are mid career pivoters or people who are 50 years old and saying to themselves, this cannot possibly be all there is. And all the pondering in the world is only going to make them ponder more and they need a roadmap.

Yeah, well, between this western interpretation of Ikigai and your discussion of Kintsugi, man, you had me because Madison and I are surfers, so we always, we always damage our boards. And I went through this wabi sabi Kintsugi stage where I would repair my boards and as I repaired the boards, I would mix in gold dust so I could have surfboards with Kintsugi looking look like Japanese pottery with the pot.

Like your life does not depend on you, like staying afloat with it. So I'm not sure. Did this actually fix the board in a way that made it safe to ride on?

It's okay.

It's okay. The point of it was so beautiful, you decided to go with it. Okay, so.

So now I understand the intersection of these three. Three things. But surely there are cases where it's the empty set. When you try to draw those three parts of the Venn diagram. It cannot always be that people have an intersection so rare.

So rare. I've probably taught becoming you to now tens of thousands of people because I teach it in a class at NYU that's open enrollment. So people come from around the world. I teach, I teach it around the world. I teach it at nyu, but I can't think of an empty set situation. When it's an empty set situation, something's going on. It's like either we're talking serious burnout or serious anxiety or serious trauma. I've not ever found an empty Set. Now, I will say this. Sometimes what people come up with requires them to blow up their fricking lives, okay? And so sometimes they don't go do it because, okay, if I'm going to go do that, I've got to say goodbye to my identity. I've got to say, tell people who I love that we're not going on three vacations this year. So it's very rarely empty. Set. But sometimes the results are hard for people to then walk into that. That does happen. But we have a becoming you reunion each year, and people come back and they tell their stories of taking that leap into what they've discovered. And there's never a dry eye in the house because it takes a lot of courage to go live your purpose. It really does.

Well, how about if I give you a perverted view of your Venn diagram, which would. If your values and your aptitudes align and you're doing something that fits in with both and you love it, but it's not economically valuable or viable, I could make the case that if you're doing something that you're good at and you love it, but you cannot make money, that is a true test, that you love it because anybody can love something that's very lucrative. But if you love something that doesn't make you money, like podcasting. I love podcasting. I make no money. It costs me money to do podcasting, but I still do it because I love. Isn't that proof that it aligns with my values and aptitudes because I cannot make money doing it?

I think what it proves is that you don't have a very high value of affluence. I think that's what it proves. If you're just doing what you love and what you're good at and you can't make money at it. All I know is if you're still doing it, that affluence is not your number one or two, three, four value. Probably affluence is probably number 15 for you. You're proven my case, not yours. You're proven that you've already made the decision on how much affluence matters because it's economically viable interest. The way we describe that, the way we define that, is the work that calls you emotionally and or intellectually that is aligned with your value of affluence. So the higher your value of affluence, the smaller that circle gets. But if you don't value affluence very much, and affluence, believe it or not, is Only a top five value for 25% of the population. Okay. And it's mainly older people, by the way. But for the younger generations, affluence is down in the moderate or peripheral areas and therefore they can do a lot more things. They can then just focus on what they're good at and what they love.

Ah, Susie, I feel much better now. Okay, so values aptitude and economically viable influence. So question number one is, how do you truly determine your values?

It's brutal. So I had to develop a test for it. When I started teaching Becoming youg, I developed seven different assessment tools to determine your values. And try as I might, even though we did all seven exercises and they're all pretty good ones, excellent ones, at the end of the semester, students would default and say, my values are family and financial security in equal measure. And I would say, well, that's just simply not true. That's not how it works. There's many more than two values. And I relied for a while on the two very highly accepted, kind of gold standard academic surveys that assess values. But I couldn't get comfortable with them for two reasons. One was they made it so that if you had values that were in conflict in each other, they canceled each other out. Whereas in fact, the reality of life is we all walk around with values that are in conflict with each other. And that's how life goes, okay? They don't magically cancel each other out. And the second is they didn't test how much you had of a value and how much you were actually living it. For many people that's the source of their happiness or unhappiness. We call that the authenticity gap. And so I ended up up, really, after kind of a year of deep frustration, developing this tool called the I didn't. I developed it with a fantastic team in my lab of psychometricians and data scientists called the Values Bridge. And we finally validated it seven times. And we let the made it available to the public May 6. And since then, 100,000 people have taken it, which is very exciting. And I think it does a marvelous job in separating people from their identity, which is what gets in the way, or gets in the way of us talking about what our real values are. And it rank orders your values from 1 to 16. It has 94% efficacy. So I'm super proud about that because I'm not woo woo. As I said earlier. And I wanted a really good test. I've seen so many different reactions to the test where people will say, this can't possibly Be my values. And I would say, good, okay, why don't you go join the support group for people who say, this can't be your valves because they really are your values. And then they come around and they say, okay, these are my values. I'm not living them or I don't like them. So that's a long answer. Just how do you find out your values? You have to find be expertly tested on them because self reporting does not work. Because I literally, one of my biggest problems was I would ask my students. I have 16 values in my inventory. Alport Strang has 19 and Schwartz has 17, but I have 16. So I say, here are your values. And I literally would have my students kind of rank order them based on the exercises. And then I would see them manually move the values around because, oh God, I couldn't possibly have family centrism at 11. What about as I am? But the facts are it was at 11. And so you kind of have to trick yourself into understanding what your true values are. That's the answer.

And what if you do a frank and honest analysis and you find out that your values suck? I mean, there are people who have values that suck. So then what?

Well, they suck. In what way? The thing is, I'm a values agnostic. If your values are not hurting anybody, your values are your values. We're not talking about virtues here. Everyone should have virtues. Everyone should have more. Fairness, kindness, goodness, decency, courage. Those are virtues. I'm not in that business, okay? I have an esteemed colleague, John. He's in the business of virtues. I don't do research into virtues and I don't talk about them. Everyone should have more of the virtues. I'm talking about values, which are choices about how you organize your life. And if you're not hurting anybody, you should have exactly the values you want and we should all be able to talk with. So let's take the value of work centrism, which is how much you will use work to organize your life. Life. Okay. And so I happen to have very high work centrism. I like work for work sake. I have very low eudaimonia, which is self care. I don't give a damn how I feel or look, whatever. And so I don't want to pick on people who have lower work centrism. If I did that, I wouldn't talk to any of my own children. And I don't want to be picked on for having high work centrism. This is a value. I want work to organize my Life, it's not better or worse. This is not the 1800s where, like, how industrious you were was a virtue. You. And so your values only suck if you're hurting somebody with them. Okay, so you could have very low belovedness. That's the value for how much a partnered relationship matters to you. By the way, since you're a man, I can tell you right now you have much higher value of belovedness than most women do, because that's what the data is showing us. But let's take the value of belovedness. That's the value you place. That's how much you want to organize your life around an intimate partnered relationship. If you're in a partnered relationship with somebody, if you have low belovedness and your partner has high belovedness, they're probably feeling a lot of pain, okay? But if you're not in a partnered relationship, by all means, have low belovedness. It doesn't affect anybody. You can live your life the way you want it to be. James Bond, travel around the world, whatever. I think you've got to think about your values in the ecosystem. If you're not hurting anyone with your values, who are we to judge?

Well, yeah, but. Well, first of all, just for clarity, you said that men have a higher degree of belovedness.

Can't believe it.

Well, yeah, I can't believe it either.

Yeah, no, I know. I mean, and some of the data is shocking around belovedness. We're just replicating it right now to make sure we're right, because. And I think we are, because. And we cut it by profession and by. And by gender, and we're finding out some very interesting things.

And what if your values are hurting people? Then what? I mean, you know, if you're a fascist dictator, your values are hurting people. People. Right.

Well, those aren't values. I don't think those would be around a fascist dictator. Those are politics. I mean, values are things like, how big a life do you want? That would be scope. What value do you place on a personal relationship? That's belovedness. How much do you want work to organize your life? The one thing about the values bridge is it's for normal, healthy people. It doesn't take into account people who have psychoses or psychological issues. So if a fascist dictator took it. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people who are trying to figure out how to balance a lot of things that they want all at the same time. Yeah.

They need Susie Wells, Volume two, which is unbecoming.

You but yeah, right, that's. Oh, don't suggest that to my publisher, please. I think that people definitely look at their values and sometimes say, oh, my God, look at my values. I don't want to be this person. And then the conversation is, well, why not? That's the person you are. How did it happen? And so that's a separate conversation. Most people look at their values and they say, oh, my God, this is so me. And then the next thing I ask them to look at is the data that shows how close or far they are from living their values. And a lot of times it finds they're very far away, and that hurts.

Okay, enough about values. I'm exhausted.

So now I know. I tell you, I have that effect on people.

Let's talk about aptitude now. Okay, first of all, define an aptitude.

For me, there's two different kinds of aptitudes. The first aptitude is pretty easy to understand. It's cognitive. It's like it's your wiring. It's pretty set. By the time you're 15, are you a generalist or a specialist? Are you a diagnostic problem solver or a fact checker? This is our intellectual proclivities about how we do work, organize information, think. And there's 50 aptitudes that could be tested. I focus on six big ones. Like, are we 3D visualizers or abstract thinkers? Because. Because it's very painful to be a person who is a future focuser, which is one of the aptitudes in a job that rewards people who are present focusers, people who like to do lists and tasks. And if you're in a job that needs you to be focused on the big, hairy, audacious goal, and you're a to do list person, that's painful. So aptitudes are your inborn cognitive proclivities. And you can lean into them or you can lean away from them, but just like, you know, it's much more comfortable to write with your dominant hand your whole life life, isn't it? If you want to sign your name with your dominant hand, your cognitive aptitudes are like the dominant hand of your brain. You're either specialist or a generalist. You're either a brainstormer or an idea contributor. And so there's just a bunch of different pillars of your brain. You should be aware of what comes most naturally to you. It doesn't mean you're perfect at it. It just means you get better at them more easily.

But can't aptitudes develop to take a surfing Analogy. Ten years ago, I sucked as a surfer. Today, I suck a lot less. This, I would not say I have a natural aptitude for surfing, but by sheer determination, I have made progress.

I'm not saying that there's any reason not to lean into the stuff you're not as good at and work relentlessly to get better at it. But you're not a professional surfer, are you? No. I wouldn't think you'll make your career in the stuff that you have to relentlessly work on, okay? So look, I have worked for 30 years to be a better golfer, okay? I started off mediocre, and now I'm slightly better than mediocre. I love the game I played as much as I can, I love it. But I. For me, it's hard work to be good at golf, okay? Like, when I make a putt, this is a reason to, like, cry softly into my hands, okay? Because it's such an achievement of hard work, okay? One of my four children was born a professional golfer. He picked up a club, and we just looked at him, and he was doing things, like, at 6 years old that the pro at the club said to I us, we can't teach what your kid has. Okay, which one of us guys should become a professional golfer, him or me? So I'm not saying don't do anything that you don't have an aptitude in. I'm just saying it's a hobby, all right? If you're not good at it, and I'd say, like, you want to build a thriving, successful career, play to your strengths. But of course, when you start to lead, you got to use all of your aptitudes, and you've got to work on the ones you're not as good at, but you're better off, and it's a lot less painful. I mean, the number of times I've had students or people come to me and say, I just found out, for the past 15 years, I've been a specialist in a generalist job. No wonder I can't get ahead. This is data we need to know about ourselves. And yet a lot of times we back into it or we find out the hard way when we get fired. You know what I mean? It's good to know what you're good at.

Up next on Remarkable People.

But I would just say a lot of people go into consulting because it's the path of least resistance. It's got the most money, and they there's a convey ball right into it. I do have a little bit of a Problem with people being consultants before they've actually lived life. Like I always had like a little. Oh, that. Like we had 24 year old consultants telling 55 year old plant managers what to do. I was like, yeah, you've never, you've never had a bead of sweat on your forehead. And so this is making me uncomfortable. So you're right, you're right. I'm not consulting's biggest friend. I see the place for it and so forth. But I think there's other things if we just opened our eyes to them. We were awarded this incredible contract to.

Put on an event for 2,000 people.

The budget was around one and a half million dollars. It was a black tie event. There was a jazz band playing and.

A cigar bar and a bourbon bar. That's Natasha Miller, Capital One business customer and CEO of Entire Productions, a corporate event management company. And she's telling us how she had to float a large contract for nine months.

It was really hard since we were carrying that 1.5 million, most of which passed through to pay for the venue and all the vendors and all the food and beverage.

It's this waterfall effect.

Thankfully, we were able to handle that.

With the Capital One credit cards, which have a 2% cash back on everything. For Natasha, it wasn't just the financial support from Capital One business, but the personal investment as well.

I had incredible support from my personal banker, Callie. I knew that at any point I was in trouble that I can call.

Her, which I've never had before in a bank, ever. With the help of Callie and her Capital One business card, Natasha was able to stretch every dollar in order to bring this monumental event to life. To learn more, go to capitalone.com businesscards.

Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. All right, so now backing up a little bit, let's talk about the roadblocks to finding this intersection of values, aptitude and economic economic viability. What stands in our way from getting to it?

Well, I think there's four big. I call them the four horsemen of purpose, destruction. I think there's four big dynamics that get in the way, get between us and our purpose. And the first one is expectations. We build a life around what's expected of us and that can be expected of us by our parents, our society, our culture, our time, our generation, our partner, or ourselves. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Saying like, I had a student one time who just every single time she did the method methodology, it came out, she should be a Roomba teacher. And she did it three times. And it kept on saying Roomba teacher. And finally she came to my office hours. She was in complete tears. And she said, why does it keep telling me this? And I said, I don't know. You keep putting the data in and that's where it comes out. She said, I can't be a Roomba teacher. I have an mba. And I was like, well, I'm not sure there's legislation that actually prevents that, but okay. But these were her own expectations about what she was going to do with her mba. She went off to be a consultant. Okay, so I'll hear from her in a few years. So there's expectations and they're real. And people live their whole lives for other people. And then it's like the great talking head song. You wake up and you say, what is this beautiful house? What is this beautiful life? My God, what have I done? And I play that song for my students, and they have no idea who the talking heads are. And I feel old. So there's expectations, then there's expedience. And a lot of times we don't live our purpose because it's so hard. It's just easier. It's easier not to live your values sometimes because they create friction or they create change or they piss off people who love you. They don't want you living your non sibi so much because it gets in the way of how much time you spend with the family or whatever. So there's expedience and reduction of friction. Then there's life events where you get fired or you have a baby or somebody gets sick or you get sick, and it just floats you away from the life you were supposed to live because you were just trying to get by and you had your head down just getting through one day at a time. And I had that for decades because I had four young children. I was working full time. I wasn't thinking about my purpose. I was thinking about survival. And I'm a lucky person. I'm a privileged person. And I was still thinking about just getting through the days. And then there's finally economic security and you know, behavioral economics as well as I do, which basically boils down to the fact that we make decisions based on a number, even if we don't care about wealth. So we'll say, I'm going to take this job because it pays more, even though the job that pays less is absolutely immediately upon our Purpose. And we'll do it, even if affluence just doesn't matter to us, because we're wired to prefer hard data and numbers are hard data. So virtually everything gets in the way of us living our purpose. You know what I mean? It's like life is set up for the world's coming. For our purpose. You have to fight. To paraphrase the Beastie Boys, you have to fight for your right to live your purpose. It's hard. Hard.

One of the things that I noticed reading your book is you sure seem to have a negative attitude towards becoming a consultant. Like, over and over, over and over, he said, yeah, he became a consultant. I knew that wouldn't last.

That's right. Okay, so let me explain myself. You're not wrong. Look, here's my problem.

McKinsey's never gonna sponsor my podcast.

No, they're not. No, but look there. I have so many friends with McKinsey, but there's a conveyor belt into consulting from business school, and you've got some of the brightest, shiniest minds. And then the consulting firms come and they paint this picture of like nirvana, of like the Holy land. And, oh, they offer more money than they kids can have ever seen and they've got a lot of debt and they get on the conveyor belt. And consulting is great for some people, but it shouldn't be taking 80% of a class of MBAs, because there's other wonderful things they could and should be doing if they just got off that conveyor belt. So. So look, I worked at Bain for seven years. I loved it there. I still have good friends there, and it is a great firm, which I would recommend if you needed consulting. But I would just say a lot of people go into consulting because it's the path of least resistance. It's got the most money, and there's a convey bolt right into it. I do have a little bit of a problem with people being consultants before they've actually lived life. I always had a little. Oh, that. We had 24 year old consultants telling, telling 55 year old plant managers what to do. I was like, yeah, you've never, you've never had a bead of sweat on your forehead. And so this is making me uncomfortable. So you're right, you're right. I'm not consulting's biggest friend. I see the place for it and so forth. But I think there's other things if we just opened our eyes to them.

Well, I would say that the way you feel about consultants is how I feel. About venture capitalists, that people want to go in to become venture capitalists. And they've never started a company. They've never, ever run a company. They've just been cranking Excel spreadsheets their whole life.

That's right. They like the identity stuff around. They like saying they're a vc, just like a lot of people love saying they want to be an entrepreneur. I get a lot of students who say to me, professor Welch, I just want to be an entrepreneur. And I say, that's fantastic. What's your idea? And then they'll say this. They'll say, something in tech. And I say, anything beyond that? And I. And they say, no, no, no. And I say, okay, people, I can't wait till you have your idea. But they love the identity of being an entrepreneur, and they don't understand that part of that identity is not sleeping at all for years on end.

You should tell those people to be consultants.

But anyways, they don't sleep either.

But yeah, yeah, so we talked about this. Conveyor belt consulting. So if I'm a college graduate, recent college graduate, or about to graduate, graduate from college, what is your advice about your first few jobs out of college?

Well, number one, you got to go into them with a grain of salt, knowing that there'll be a fantastic story down the road. I do think that I wouldn't take a first job without knowing what my values and aptitudes were, because you can just waste so much time. That's where the most boneheaded detours occur, at the beginning of your career, because you use your first few jobs to figure out your values and aptitudes when you don't have to. There's 10 tests that exist, and you can do it and find out. So, like, I had a student one time who, after the semester is over, got office hours. That's unusual after, because the grading's done. So she got office hours, and she said, look, I'm going into investment banking. I don't know if you remember this, but my top value was family centrism. My second value was belonging. And my. And I. And then she listed off her aptitudes. And I said, what are you doing? And she said, yeah, it doesn't really make sense, does it? And I said, no, not really. And she said, well, I'm just gonna make some money, and then in a few years, I'm gonna start having my family. And I was like, why? Why, why, why? Why? Because those are really good years that you didn't have to blow at a place that you were never gonna like or even love or even like. And so I think if you're about to graduate from college, you can't know anything about the world coming for you. But you can know about yourself. You've got to paint a portrait, a self portrait of yourself standing still before you start running. So you know what to run towards boards. Instead of being all willy nilly like your father's co workers, uncle has a job at St. Louis in a small consulting firm and you're like, there's a job, I'm going and I get it. But I would not advise that.

Yeah, it's better to reconcile with her father and go into the appliance business, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. As a story from my book proves, it absolutely does sometimes you have to do that hard work. But he couldn't have done it unless he had actually done the work of understanding who he truly was.

All right, so now more advice. What do you say when people say that achieving work life balance is very important? To me.

It is to them. But you can't make the assumption it is to the person you're talking to.

20 to 30 year old person.

I say okay, I just hope affluence isn't a very high value of your course. I think that work life balance has consequences and if you are willing to accept those consequences, then that's great. I think you've got to understand that two things. Number one is everybody does not have the same definition of balance. There's a great video going around of Jensen Huang being asked about his work life balance. And he said I think I love my balance. I work all the time. And the audience laughed. But that's his work life balance. And I would say my work life balance is probably pretty close to that sort of 99 1. 99% work, 1% and I feel perfectly balanced. I don't have any negativity about my balance, but you might look at it and say yuck. I want it to be exactly the opposite. 99% surfing, 1% working. And I would say power to you. That's your balance. I think the one thing we have to understand about whatever balance we equation we settle into, we just have to be understanding that there's no perfect solution. Every single one of them has consequences. My students often take the values bridge the test and they'll come out with their number one value being what we call eudaimonia, which is self care. Okay, Self care, pleasure, leisure, personal flourishing. And their second value will be affluence. Money, being rich that happens all the time. And then they'll come down to the front of the room after class and they'll say to me very sheepishly, professor Welch, my number one value is eudaimonia self care and to affluence is that problem. And I'll say, do you promise not to shoot the messenger? And they say, well, what? What? And I'll say, look, I didn't make the rules, okay? But I'm going to tell you what the rules are because I'm old. And the rules are unless you're spectacularly good at what you do, having a huge amount of fun and taking care of yourself and putting yourself and your pleasure and leisure first and making a huge boatload of money is actually quite difficult for me. For mere mortals, you may be the one person who does it, but I don't go into it thinking you were going to be that person who is.

In the Susie Welch hall of Fame for becoming themselves.

Who'S fully living in their area of transcendence. I would say I can list a couple of people. I think Jamie Dimon is. And one time I was giving a speech, J.P. morgan, and he was giving the speech after me, and he was standing in the back of the room. And after I was done sort of explaining the whole thing and took questions from the audience, he went up next, and the person who was interviewing him said, jamie, you just heard Susie Welch describe area of transcendence. Are you in yours? And he said, damn straight, or hell yes, I am. And so I would say that he is, and I'm lucky enough to know him personally as well. And I think he's a person who's fully living his purpose. He's living his values, his aptitudes, and his interests. Full on 100%, I would say. Another example would be a woman named Kitty Block. She's the. The CEO of Humane World for Animals, that's formerly Humane Society. And she's a person who is living every value and every aptitude and every interest completely, fully. So I. I bump into them. We call these people transcendence. I think I am right now, too.

If somebody asked me that question, I would have said Jane Goodall and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Yeah, I would say they both two people.

Yeah.

You could feel it. You could feel it off of people. They're doing the work they should be doing and the work they want to be doing. And they're saying so darn good at it. I'd put them there, too. Yeah.

And my last question is, it's actually stolen from you. But, you know, part of what I learned from Steve Jobs is you gotta. It's a talent to know what to steal from people. So I'm giving you that caveat. I'm stealing this question from you. Who, Suzy Welch, would you trade lives with?

Well, the good thing about that exercise and the. The book is that it allows you to name four or five people, so you don't have to come down to just one. And I would say the reason why we do that is because. And we also allow you to throw out something. But I really admire. I admire Hoda Kotb. I love what she does with her life. I think she does so much good for people, and I love her joyous energy. I think Mary Erdos, who's the vice chairman of JP Morgan, is a huge idol of mine. She is a great leader. I think I admire tremendously Martha Stewart and her resilience and the company that she's built, the growth and jobs she's created for people by remaining completely true to herself. I've always been a huge admirer of Orianna Fallacci, who is no longer with us, who was an Italian journalist who lived completely according to her own values and aptitudes and interests long before it was okay for a woman to do that. So I have that collection of people, but honestly, I kind of love my life, and so I'm sticking with it.

I didn't exactly hear you mention any of the tech bros from Silicon Valley there.

Yeah, no, I actually did not throw their names in there. That's true. You know, I'm not of Silicon Valley the way you are. And so they are not the first people that come to my mind kind of out here in New York. And so maybe I'm going to use that as my excuse.

Susie, believe me, they are not the first people who come to my mind when that question is asked. Don't worry about. About it. All right, Susie Wells, thank you so much. Let me get your book again.

Hold it up here.

This is Susie Welch's book becoming you. And the next book is going to be unbecoming you, but I look forward to that book that might have a bigger market.

Oh, man, it might. That's scary to think of.

Well, Susie Wells, thank you very much for being on my podcast.

Well, you're great, and thank you for having me on. It's so fun to talk to you.

So I would need to thank the remarkable people team, which is Madison Knysmer. There's Tessa Knysberg, who does the research for us. There's Jeff C, who's co producer, and Shannon Hernandez, who's our sound design engineer. So that's it. And that's the Remarkable People team. And we all to reach out and thank you, Susie, for being on our podcast.

Thank you for having me.

This is Remarkable People.