Tina Wells: Harmonizing Your Work and Life

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Get ready to be inspired today as we have a special guest named Tina Wells. She is a business strategist, advisor and founder of Relevant Media. She founded Buzz Marketing group at just 16 years old and worked with big names such as Dell, Apple and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Tina is also a best selling author of seven books including MacKenzie Blue and the Z Files. She is a board member of several prestigious organizations including THINX and the United Nations Foundation's Global Entrepreneurs Council. Tina has recently released a book titled the Elevation Harness the Power of Work Life Harmony to unlock your creativity, cultivate joy, and reach your biggest goals. With so much experience and wisdom to share, I can't wait for you to hear Tina's story and learn from her insights. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Tina Wells. So first, just a little bit of background, can you just bring us up to speed what you've been doing since 16.

Just those few years since Guy I'm going to be 43 in a few weeks and you know, I can't believe that I have been so fortunate to have a career for 27 years and to really have a career where I started out loving product and pop culture. And it's almost come full circle where now I get to create product and bring it to market. And I still love product and pop culture and so there's definitely been a through line, I would say in my career over the last 27 years.

And buzz Marketing Group is in your past now.

Yeah.

Okay. And you are. You're Tina Wells or what's relevant? And I don't mean relevant in the sense of, I'm asking you, what's R E L E V a N T? I'm asking you what's R L V N T?

So that that's relevant media. And for years I was in marketing. I was one of the first in millennial marketing, you know, at a time when it was really emerging. And I fell into this of really understanding millennials. I became dubbed the Millennial Whisperer. And I participated in a program through the Aspen Global Leadership Network called the Henry Crown Fellowship and realized I was indeed at an inflection point. I don't think I went into the fellowship feeling that I was, but I was. And about three years ago realized, you know what? I don't want to be in marketing anymore. What do I want to do? Something I had done for fun back in 2009 is I launched a middle grade fiction series called Mackenzie Blue. And three years ago, when I had that aha moment, I thought, I really love middle grade. I love the space and I love content. And so I really thought that the evolution would just be relevant media. And it really was this idea that it would be about representation, it would be culturally relevant in every way, shape and form. And I started working with Target and a partnership to create and distribute middle grade books. And that partnership expanded into product. And so now I have both relevant media and relevant products. And the goal of relevant products is to to create innovative brands that launch in partnership with retailers. And Target's my first partner. I have Elevation by Tina Wells that just launched and it's a home office line. I have another really excited launch that I hopefully can talk about soon. And so right now I feel like I get to bring my research background, my marketing and understanding emerging demographics background, my love for products, and create these brands and tell these holistic stories.

Listening to this, and I'm sure other people are listening to this, and the immediate question that comes to mind is exactly how does one get into Target? What do you do? You just call, you know, 1-800-target. Can I come in and show you my book and my daily planner? And would you put it in stock in 3,000 stores? Like, how does that work?

So I've always had this feeling my entire career that relationships matter. And if you know me personally, I just had a celebration with my dearest friends to celebrate my book launch and my launch at Target. These are people who I've just known forever. And I'm just a person who really cherishes relationships. You know, I have five younger siblings very close to my family, my mom is one of 14. My father's an only child, but I grew up in a really big family. And it just was a value, I think, from my parents that you treat people well and relationships really matter. And so it's the long answer to how Target, you know, it was through the Henry Crom Fellowship, which came through a relationship and there was a women's weekend and there were fellows over 20 years time and there was someone there from Target and I didn't actually approach her that weekend. A dear friend of mine did on my behalf and said, you should be talking to Tina, you should get to know her. And so I very indebted obviously to that friend. But I think for many of us, we have that moment when opportunity really meets our experience and what we've been working towards. And I think it's is showing up as a person that my friend would feel so confident to recommend that she even needed to talk to. So being diligent about my work. And it was 25 years in the making, right, to get that, that introduction and then also to be able to perform and to deliver what was needed. And so I think so often we want to go into a place like Target and sell, sell, sell. And I came in very different because of my marketing background and said, let me listen and let me hear what the opportunities are. And you have to sometimes quiet yourself, stop trying to sell, let a buyer talk to you, talk about what's not showing up in the store, and then say, what is my opportunity to bring something that's gonna add value? And then how do I, you know, before we come in and say, I'm selling you this, I'm selling you that, and that, that's always been how I've operated in my career. Where can I add value? You know, so whether it was a CMO at Dell Technologies or the CMO of Oprah Winfrey Networks, I approached every client the same way and said, what are you really asking me for? Right? Because a lot of times, especially coming for me, coming from the service industry, people may say one thing and they're actually asking you for something else. And if you're not allowing them the opportunity to just speak, allowing them the space, right? A lot of time when we're in conversation, someone talks and we talk, then someone talks and you got to pause sometimes and just see, like, is there something else they're trying to say? And that was really my philosophy, approaching the target relationship. Where can I add value? What are their goals and objectives? There's a huge corporate objective right now around Reaching more black guests and bringing more black customers into the store. Where do I see an opportunity? So it's a lot of listening, to be honest.

So when you went to Minneapolis, they didn't stick you in room number 73. Like, I've been to Walmart. I've seen what it's like at Walmart. It's not like that for you at Target?

Oh, my gosh, no. And I actually got to shop the most incredible Target store with an escalator. And I was really upset that my Target back here in New Jersey doesn't have that. And, you know, I'm also a Target shopper. I know the different layouts and footprints of the store. And it reminded me so much of my marketing career, where I would get to work with brands that I really was such a big fan of or was able to learn so much. And I think this process really did take me back to that when I was the creative and marketing person who had to really get to know a brand and understand a brand. And I felt like every opportunity to engage or go into a store, I was learning more about what it meant to move from being a marketer to a merchant.

Well, I can tell you that any store that has figured out how to put a shopping cart on an escalator deserves some respect. I have simple tests for determining quality. So can we jump into the deep end of a pool right now?

Of course.

On my podcast so far, we've had a chimpanzee whisperer. Perhaps you've heard of her. Jane Goodall. We've had a cattle whisperer. Perhaps you heard of her. Temple Grandin. And now we have the Millennial Whisperer. We're up in our game every week here. So this is my first question in the deep end of the pool. Let's suppose Joe Biden calls you up and he says, tina, you're the Millennial Whisperer. My administration is thinking of banning TikTok. And we're afraid that all these millennials who love TikTok, they're going to not vote for me in re election. What's your advice, Tina? Should I ban it or not?

Oh, goodness, you really threw me into the deep end with that one. So the first thing I would say is, whatever decision you're going to make, my first piece of advice to you is to be incredibly clear and to be incredibly authentic about why you are making that decision, what the repercussions are going to be, and don't sugarcoat anything. Be clear. I think what I have learned most as a marketer Especially dealing with emerging demographics and younger consumers is they want the truth. We live in a different time where if you grew up as a classic marketer, you could build a brand and you could tell people whatever you wanted because there wasn't the Internet, Right. I always jokingly say, if I wanted to know what Jane Cosmetics used back in 1994, I couldn't Google, does this product have this right? I didn't have that opportunity. Customers and younger consumers now do. They can find out whatever they want to know within seconds. And so not being authentic, not telling the truth, it serves no one. But I still think we have this idea in our head as marketers that we can kick the can, right? Like it's very old school, like we can just push it to the next news cycle. I would say be very direct, be very honest, and be very clear on what's next. And also, you know, we're talking about a demographic who are incredible creators. And not only are they incredible creators, they actually have figured out how to monetize their creativity. So we're talking about a loss of a technology, potentially, that could mean the loss of income for so many young Americans who have just figured out how to make money in this creative economy. Right? So you have to speak to, how are you protecting that? And then I also think the other side, and I've definitely, I would say, gotten a crash course in this in my last two years as a manufacturer. There's so many things that sound great and are great marketing taglines until you get into the nitty gritty of what it means to manufacture a product and land something on shelves at a price that serves customers and allows access. And what you really start to realize is so much of this conversation is gray. You know, there are things that are in black or white. If this happens or that happens, it's a bad situation. But I would also start to have a really honest conversation with younger Americans about the relationship with the US And China and our relationships around products and making products and accessibility and affordability and what that really means for our two economies. But all the things I'm saying goes back to the idea that we're going to have an honest, authentic conversation. And I think the biggest issue we see in politics today is people are not really engaging in honest, authentic conversations. They're engaging in SOUNDBITE conversations.

Now, I'm going to throw you in the deep end of the pool holding a 25 pound weight.

Oh, no.

What if Ron DeSantis calls you up and says, tina, you're the millennial Whisperer, how do I get young black people to vote for me?

I would say you have made the wrong call. You clearly are not looking for young black people to vote for you with these policies. And then I would say, and I would love to have a follow up call with you about the current policies and how they're serving no one. It's funny. What's more concerning to me, what I see a lot of what's happening with DeSantis, and I consider myself a very independent voter. But I'm a business owner. I'm a small business owner in America. And I always think through that lens of what policy is going to serve me as a small business owner, what policy is going to hurt me? And the last thing I want to see with any politician, period, is fighting with companies, right? Like I start to look at, where is it coming from? Why are we doing this? And we obviously have seen things where we're like, no, we need regulations, we need things in place. But when you look and you see any politician in any party that seems to pick a fight with a business owner, for me, that's what I'm like, okay, that's my interest now. And I want to understand why that's happening. But I think DeSantis has already made the decision that that's not who he was voting for him anyway.

So after this episode, are you going to call up your PR person saying, what the hell did you do? Why did you make me interview with that guy? He wasn't talking about what I wanted to talk about. He's talking about politics half the time.

I'm like, guy, I love this conversation because I'm, I always say, even though I'm in the product business now, I am such a marketer through and through. And when you're in consumer behavior, I wouldn't say my job is politics, but my job for so many years was listening to people, really listening to people. And when you listen to people and you listen to their concerns, whether it's what they want in a new product or how they want to live their life, that is the same thing that you listen to or you should tap into as a politician, how am I going to make this person's life better? And so I love having this conversation because it's what I see and it really reflects the work and how I like, view different things. But I am that person that watches any news network and I'm angry and saying, but you only told 30% of the real problem, or you only presented this and you skewed it. And that used to be the thing that would irritate me the most as a researcher, when people would take data and the data would show one thing, and they would just decide that they were going to skew it in this way to say what they wanted. And I felt like that was, to me, the moment of Santa doesn't exist as a marketer was when I started realizing, But I read the same data, and that's not what it said, you know? So I like this kind of conversation.

Okay, okay, we're going to get out of the deep end of the pool now. Now, you just alluded to it in this last answer. But exactly how does one go about understanding youth culture? If I'm a CMO listening to this and I'm saying, okay, what do I do? Do I do focus groups? Do I hire social media influencer? I have no idea how to sell electric cars to millennials. What do I do? Well, how do you gain that knowledge?

So the first thing you don't do? This is the biggest mistake I would see clients making. We'd start to have our first conversation, and they say, my kid. And I'm like, this is going downhill from there, right? I'm sorry to say this to all of you. Your kid may actually not be the coolest, most popular person. So if your entire marketing strategy of what you think a whole entire demographic are going to do is based off of what your kid is doing, not a good place to start, right? And what I would always say is, I am an expert in this field, and every time I put out a survey, I am caught off guard by what the demographic is saying they are teaching me. So if I'm the one who in this room knows the most and I don't always understand what they want and can't predict, how are you just deciding that because your kid does X, Y, and Z, that's the cool thing, you know? And a lot of times in marketing, the opportunity for that CMO or that marketing team was to understand where things were going, right? And so think about. For the people who got onto TikTok before it became TikTok, they skyrocket, right? That is what the marketer is always looking for, is understanding where culture is heading, getting there a beat before so that your brand can then capitalize and skyrocket. Marketing is not a game where you want to get what you pay for. You want to get, like a 10x return. And the way to do that is, is to really understand culture and understand where it's going. Now, there was a Period, where marketers controlled culture. Very many of us remember that old school, amazing PBS documentary, the Merchants of Cool, that really explained how a lot of those big brands in the 90s could control it. We could control media a lot more than we can now, if we can control it at all. And so that is our job, is to understand where things are headed. But you cannot do that if you're trying to steer. You have to really observe. And I think that is the hardest role for people who are used to executing, used to making decisions, used to having the answer to all of a sudden not have the answer. It is not a muscle that they have really worked before. And so I've gone into situations where it's been a little tough, intense at first, or you get the person who's like, we really failed and so we need you to come in and fix it. And now this is a triage situation where we didn't really have to be here.

Okay, so you told us what you're not going to do.

What do you do?

Is it surveys? What is it tactically?

I'll tell you. Okay, so here's one thing I do often and I talk a lot about this. I love airports. I actually happen to be in them all the time. And I love them because it's a really unique place to observe people. It's a place where people cannot, for whatever reason, present the best representative of themselves there are. People are anxious when they're traveling, they're unhappy, they're delayed. So there is not a facade of who they are. In some ways, when they're traveling, right, they're not dressed up like they're going to work, they're wearing whatever. Like there's a version that is the real life person that appears for some reason at the airport. And I love to grab a cup of coffee and sit and watch people in the airport. I like to watch what they're doing. What's with them? I remember realizing Toms was going to be a major trend because I was on a flight and mom, daughter and grandmom all had Toms on, right? We saw the same thing with Uggs. And so I think it's one getting out of our safe zone. You know, there was a time I was working with a very well known massive record label company who was trying to understand illegal downloading. And where would I take my meetings? On the 50th floor at the private dining room for the heads of labels. And I remember thinking, that is your problem. You are here in rarefied air. And the problem is on the street as soon as you walk out of the front door, you know, and so what I surveys, all of that, that's important, once you put yourself in an environment, to just observe without an outcome. So that's the hardest thing, because in marketing, we don't want to observe without. Right. Marketing is an art and a science. The artsy part is, let's see how it comes together. But so many of us are committed to the science part, and we forget about the pure discovery. And so we go in asking a survey in a way that's already loaded questions because we haven't given ourselves the opportunity to discover and to see what's emerging, to see how are people interacting with each other, what trends are emerging. We don't always do that. We go in with, like, I need to know if I can sell this cell phone to you. At this price point, you're asking really specific questions. Instead of saying what technology best serves the consumer today, we are. We're like assuming it's a cell phone because we manufacture cell phones. Imagine Blockbuster doing this survey. They never thought that Netflix was coming, so they would have asked, what's the best way to get you a video? Instead of saying, what's the best way to deliver entertainment to customers.

Now, let's suppose I'm the CMO of Ford, and I say, we think that the future is electrification. How do we get young people to buy electric cars? You're not going to do this in the airport. Maybe you could do it in the airport parking lot. But now what? What do you do?

So then we do a little more ethnographic research, which is just observing casually for a few weeks a group of people and their behaviors, because now we want to understand the behavior. So you've given me a very easy layup guy. For the first time today. I just want to tell you, you've given me a layup question that makes me a great host because we're now talking about a demographic that is so committed to everything about sustainability. This is the earth that they are inheriting. The hard question to answer for you would, how do you convince someone in an older demographic, like a Gen Xer or a Boomer, that they need to buy a car that's very different from what they're used to, because the hardest part is changing behavior from people who have existed with something for a long time? So then the bigger question becomes, how does that CMO begin to allocate their funds? Do they allocate funding to the customers who might be in an older demographic who are Currently driving sales, but not the future. And I find that for any organization, especially when they are serving customers across generations, that is the question. When do I shift in my spending from who I have today to betting on who I believe my customer is going to be in the future?

Well, I mean, you opened the door. So what's the answer?

So the answer is that you have to look at where you think things will be five years from now. Too much of what we do is respond to what's happening today. If we are in a long term business, not everybody is, let's be clear. But Ford is right. They are in it for the long haul. They really need to understand who their customer is, the core customer that they're going to be speaking to. And they need to understand from a business perspective when they're going to make that pivot. And that pivot, really, there's a lot of data that has to come into it. What is the age of that customer we're talking about who really wants a more sustainable future? Too often what we do is we make them younger than they actually are. We did this with millennials as well, where we kept saying very classic Hillary Clinton, like kids on college campuses. And I remember hearing that one time and saying, wait, this person you're talking about is 35, with two kids and living in the suburbs. But in our minds, we sometimes think young people, college campuses, right? Just that's just the way things work the same way for us as marketers. And so again, the problem someone might have at Ford is if they think young person, college campus, not 28, 29, 30 year old, making first big purchase, right? So we've got to get rid of our own blinders that help us mislabel generations. And so I would say it's really a re education going into it, like I don't know anything. And then I answer that question, because if you go into it thinking, am I going to allocate budget to that kid on college campus? You're not asking the right question. You've got to go into it saying, oh, am I going to allocate my budget to a person who is going to be my customer for the next 35 years? Yes, you would have a different answer to that question.

Okay, I'm satisfied you are tough guy. All right? And listen, I promise you we're going to get to your book, okay?

This is so much better than tough.

I promise.

Do.

What are you telling your clients now or even telling yourself about ChatGPT?

It's so funny, guy. This keeps coming up for me at dinner parties. My new book, the Elevation approach, is my 20th book, and I get it. All that, like, what do you, as a writer, think about this? I said, here's what I know. I don't answer the question about what I think about. For me, as a writer, I answered this question saying, what I know is when at any point in history when we have tried to resist an emerging technology, it's not ended well. Right? How many blockbuster stories do we have today? Classic example. And I keep going back to that because it's like, they didn't have to end up where they did. It is when you think you're going to stop something from happening that is happening. That's the problem. And you can't be so committed. You know, I'm a writer. I have great ideas. And what I hope is that technology is going to help make those ideas better. I was chatting with a friend who's a doctor at Hopkins, and he was telling me that he's, like, training AI to read scans, and eventually it's going to read it better than him, but it's going to help his patients. Right. And so I think we have to not find a way to ignore it. I think too often we tell ourselves stories about things, and when you're in these companies and corporations, they're actually massive groups of people who can tell themselves the same story and start to believe it. What I would say is, you got to get to know it, and you have to get to know everything about it and figure it out. And I don't think it's going to replace. I think it can enhance, but I think it would be detrimental to any writer to ignore what's happening and just think that it's not going to have a huge impact on the entire industry.

Just for the record, I am a writer also, and I think that Chat GPT has made me two or three times more efficient as a writer. Like, no question in my mind. And everybody's afraid of this situation where it writes the book for you. And that's total is. It is the ultimate research assistant. It is second only to Madison Nismer as a research assistant. I have Madison GPT and Chat GPT. So.

And I have amazing editors. And that's what I said. I'm like, they're not going to replace these amazing, incredible editors who push the content, and maybe it'll help you get your first draft done, but when those editors get there and rip it to shreds and make it a book, you know, it can only do. But so much. But I agree. I think it really, for me, I feel like it'll help me do more. You know, I look at my process now and how I would love to write more and have so many more books and series out there serving different groups of readers, and it's hard to replicate myself, my writing partner. And so, again, I think it's understanding how it can really enhance what we're doing. But I have to have the idea. I have to have the thought of what I want to talk about, and I have to have a voice and a way I write and a way I communicate at a tool like that can only really be helpful.

Last night, I have access to Bard already, and I also have access to ChatGPT4. So I asked both of them the same question, which is, what should I ask Tina Wells in a podcast interview? And I'm not using one question. Every question was along the lines of, what kind of challenges did you face in your career? What was the most exciting development in your career? It's like NPR on steroids kind of questions. So, Believe me, if ChatGPT4 had said, ask her what Joe Biden should do about TikTok, I would be in the hospital with cardiac arrest this morning when we would be postponing this one more time. But anyway, so now you're 42 or 43 years old, black female, and you started at 16. And did you ever encounter imposter syndrome? And if you did, how did you get over it?

So, guy, I'm gonna be very honest with you.

No, I want you to lie.

Oh, goodness. I'm trying to be serious now. You're making me laugh. But, yeah, I told you, I'm the oldest of six. And every February, my father would make us black history coloring books. He would print out this black and white sheet that had a bio of really incredible African Americans. And we would, like, make fun of, like, oh, my gosh, here's dad again with these coloring books. And I realized, you know, a much older age, the impact of seeing the best of who we were and how that was a big part of my family culture and the storytelling, what we were allowed to consume and allowed to watch and not allowed to watch. And my parents very seriously saying, this is how we want to raise our children. You know, I have five siblings who are all college educated, all in different career trajectories. I have a sister who became a dean before she was 40. I have a brother who had a number one song in Billboard shorts, I think by the time he was 30. So I come from a really accomplished family. So I didn't have imposter syndrome, I would say, until the last two years when I took a turn and got into manufacturing. And I absolutely had imposter syndrome, because what I had to learn to manufacture and get a product in stores. There is no faking it till you make it in that field. You know, and I'm a marketer. We can spin things, twist it, add a little sparkle. We could polish some things up. You can't, like, polish something up through customs, right? It either is what it is. Like, the formula. Either is what it is. There's no being cute to get a product into the US that was the first time I remember literally having a moment of, are these people crazy at Target? Why are they letting me do this? I don't even think anyone should trust me to do that. Like, this is absolutely insane. And I think my mind was blown that every day I have friends who, whether they're scientists, they work in these highly regulated industries that have very specific do this or don't do that, where you actually can't be 95% correct. You have to be 100% correct. So I've absolutely, over the last two years, had imposter syndrome. And one, because I had to learn something. I just didn't know. And when you are an expert at something for the majority of your career, I really thought, who, after 40, decides to completely change what they do and. And to know nothing and have to learn all of this? And now that I'm on Brand two, I don't feel like so much of an imposter. I feel like I've learned and I know so much, but I definitely had two years, and that was that those were the toughest two years of my life. To wake up every day and say, I don't know what I'm going to deal with today. And I don't know the answer, and I'm not used to that well.

And so how did you get through it?

A lot of funny text messages with friends, a lot of venting to friends, a lot of asking questions. It was, for me, a level of vulnerability, Vulnerability I didn't like. Again, my whole career, I would come in and show up with the answer for people. That millennial whisperer is here. She's gonna fix this. And I had more questions than I had answers to questions for a few years, and that was really difficult. And the honest truth is I dealt with it with advice Oprah has given very publicly. I think it's brilliant advice, which is to do the next right thing, Right? For the first time in my life, I knew where I wanted things to go. But I didn't have the willpower every day to will it to the end. I only had the willpower to just get to the next step. And I didn't know it was gonna happen. At that next step, every day in my mind, I was like, and this could be the end, because I might run out of steam and I can't do this anymore. And it would just one thing would propel me forward, or I would get a sample of my product in the mail and say, okay, I'm excited now. Like, the creative part of the job that I love would come back in a way that would say, okay, I can do the next step. But it was a couple years of not fully seeing the entire process for sure.

So your advice to people is what do the next. Take the little victories, make little steps.

Understand where you want to end up. Don't have the expectation that you have to run the marathon in the day. And that was me, was, I have to get this marathon done in this day, and I have to do a marathon every day. And I realize, actually I'm training for one, and I'm learning how to run, and I'm learning how to do this new thing, and then I'm going to get to the finish line. But my expectation was I could just do it and like, that, get there. And that. That was not reality at all.

A few months ago, we interviewed a woman who was diagnosed with ALS nine years ago. Typically, you get diagnosed and you die. In two years, she's lived nine. And when she was diagnosed, she made it a life goal to run a marathon or finish a marathon in all 50 states. And last year, she did it. So if you ever want to be connected to someone who has knowledge about marathons, I have the world's best person for you.

Apparently the world's most inspiring person, too. Wow.

I'm deaf, right? And when I tell people that, like, sympathetic and empathetic with me, and then I think, what would I rather be, deaf or with als? You think Steve Jobs wouldn't rather be deaf and alive than here, but have pancreatic cancer? So it's all relative. I don't know how we got on that topic. Anyway, now, believe it or not, we're going to get closer to your book. So first question. First question from your book is I want you to explain the difference between joy and happiness.

Going back to the last few years of my life, really from the time, I think, when I talk in the book about my dad getting sick. I really started to understand joy versus happiness. And the real idea is happiness is temporal. Right. And there are a lot of things outside of our control with happiness. Something happens, it makes us happy or not happy, where joy is a state we choose to exist in. Right. And I learned so much about joy from my dad when he had gone into heart failure, then realized he was going to have to live his life with this device called an lvad. And for me, obviously, I was deeply unhappy about it. And then I watched my dad show up as the same person. And my dad is a very joyful person, no matter what's happening. How are you doing? I'm great. And I would take him to the doctor. He's not great. A, B and C is going on, but my dad is like, my daughter's here. It's a sunny day. I had tea this morning. I'm great, you know? And I really started to think watching him and in that particular year, spending so much time in the hospital and every time saying an encouraging, inspiring word to someone else. And I thought, wow, this is what it means to live in a state of joy when you don't let your outside circumstance determine how you're going to show up, how you're going to treat other people. For me, if I were in that situation, I, knowing myself at that time in my life, wouldn't have been able to show up at all in the way my dad did. And I really started to think about what I want to do is create joy. And in my line, that's why I have this, like, everything bag that has the phrase create joy on it. It's a constant reminder because we cannot control the things that make us happy, but we can start to build some controls around how we can create joy for ourselves.

The myth of work life balance. So you have a long diatribe about work life balance, and I completely, utterly agree. Don't get me wrong. So what's wrong with this concept of work life balance?

I think what we're all realizing, and we definitely have realized it after a pandemic, is the idea of just adding more stuff on the scale. Yeah. It keeps it balanced. But do you really want to have a ton of work and a ton of play and a ton of work and a ton of play. And you're doing this all the time, just adding more, adding more, adding more. When in reality, what we're seeking is a life that works for us, however we put language to it. Right. I want time with my Partner time with my family. And I want to do the work that I love. Right. I don't want to have to sacrifice between the two. So what does that look like during the pandemic when we're all home together, we're on zoom, and then what do we do? Have a break and go have a meal together as a family? That's something that hadn't really existed for quite some time and we couldn't really put the language around. Well, I like this feeling, you know, and people tell us we should work at a time and then carve out other time to do personal things. But what if I need to take a call on the way to picking my son up from practice? Why shouldn't I be able to do that? And so I think we all started feeling this way. And then you hear about people not wanting return to the office. I don't think that people didn't want to return to their work. I think they didn't want to return to the way they had to work. And I think they just weren't the same people going back into offices. We need a new way of talking about this. I'm certainly not the first person to bring up the idea of work, life, harmony. But what I hope I can do is provide people with a framework to actually achieve it.

And what's that framework?

I think the framework is really one. A lot of what I talk about in the book is taking a minute to quiet yourself and ask, what do I really want? Because we start creating a bunch of things and we don't really know why we want them. So a big part of the book, it might take you through a four phase approach that I call the elevation approach that starts with preparation and inspiration and recreation and transformation. And I tell the story about how I got into burnout and I was constantly doing two out of the four things and never could really get myself to a place of realizing or transforming because I was always burning out. So while it's important to bring in recreation and play and all of those things, if you don't know what you want and why you want it, you are just really kind of like the hamster on the treadmill. You're just running the race and you don't know where you're going, why you're going there, you have to give yourself some direction. But part, again, it goes back to even our earlier conversation around authenticity, really being honest with yourself about what you want. And I think society tells us we should want so many things, you know, and I'm a marketer who real. Who definitely recognizes all of the messages that we have crafted. We've crafted very specific messages for women, We've crafted very specific, specific messages for men. We have them set up in very specific ways for specific reasons. And what we're all saying collectively is those labels no longer fit us. We no longer want to be defined in certain ways. And we're in this very interesting time when the labels we've been given don't match the lives we want to live. And we don't know how to quite reconcile that. And so then you have people that just call everything woke. And I remember at one point saying, what is woke these days? Is it a catch all for whatever we don't feel comfortable with? We just call it woke wokeness. But in reality it's like, no, we've just mislabeled a lot of things. And people are finally standing up and saying, I reject the label. I reject the idea that I have to be 9 to 5 or I reject the idea that I can't take a paternity leave. And so we're in this very interesting place, which I love. Obviously, I'm the kind of marketer that loves to see people mix it up. And I love to see consumers and people take back their power. And people are saying, well, I don't want to work like that. Well, then I won't come to your company. I know my value and my skill set and I don't want to do that. And that's the area of discomfort we're having where people are just saying, I reject the idea that I have to do things this way, that it's been prescripted to me and I want to do something completely different.

At the foundation of what you just said is good goal setting. So you now have a moral obligation to explain how to set goals.

Yes. Well, Guy, I absolutely have to tell you, I have a planner at Target that takes you through how to set smart goals. Although it's in the book as well, because I believe in giving people tools, okay. To realize these things. And I'll be honest and say when I started creating these tools in my mind, and I do think as marketers, we have to create things with a person in mind, I would always give my clients that advice. Name that person who has the attributes and who are you trying to serve? And I thought about a lot of my friends who had chosen to either step away from their careers for some time to raise their children, or they felt over scheduled or overworked and they said, I don't have time to realize goals and what happens. We sit down with these frameworks that are like, spend two hours a day and it's like, you've lost me there, right? On average, women are doing an additional 30 hours of caregiving per week with a full time job. So the way you set goals, you don't need hours and hours, you need to be smart about it. There's a framework about being really specific, making sure things can be measurable and actionable and having a timestamp to them. They're realistic. And then you have a timeline. And when you get into that framework, what I'm actually doing, you might even start to dub me like the dream killer because I do write fiction and I am very creative in that way. But I do not think we should have any fiction involved in the goals we want for our life because we don't have time for that. If you, in your mind, if you spend so much time thinking about this imaginary bakery, you're going to open up. But in reality, when you start to go through the elevation approach, you get to the first step, preparation, and you realize that isn't feasible. You know the awesome thing that happens, you let go of something that is not serving you and you open up space for the thing that can fill that time. So I do really believe in being very disciplined around your goal setting and your goal planning because we spend a lot of time, you know, and it's very culturally driven. Like you can have the life that you want, dream, have a vision board a dream. And you know what we're doing, we're putting these things there that can't become a reality for our life because of choices we make are making. And it is okay to want what you want, but it's not okay to be unrealistic about it and then unrealistically goal plan around it because you're just wasting a lot of time that you don't have.

Up next on Remarkable People.

I believe people are more than the job that they have, you know, and I really think about how am I benefiting you and your life? How are you benefiting me? What's the reciprocity? And we have to stop being on a mission to collect people, then serve us and not think about how we're in service to other people and what we have to offer.

Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world. They provide practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable if you live in the US or Canada. Text 831-609-0628 to get notified of each new episode. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. One of the things I didn't quite understand is I understand the steps of preparation, inspiration, recreation, and transformation. There. Are you proud that I, I can just rip those four things off from your book and I just want more information of going from preparation to inspiration. So in preparation, now I form this goal. But why do I need inspiration? I mean, if I have this goal, shouldn't I just go out there and do it? Why do I need external inspiration? Shouldn't I be self driven to do this?

So, Guy, think about some of the greatest entrepreneurs we know who were self driven. And then what did they do? They made an mvp. And then what did they do? They let people beta test it. And then what did they do from that beta test? They corrected and kept innovating until they got to the product that was revolutionary and changed so many of our lives. Right? And so it's almost like I'm inviting you to create your mvp because it's again, when you socialize it with people who have knowledge, that is the key point. Too often we do our research and then where do we go to our friend to say, I want to open a bakery. And what does the friend say? Get it, girl. Yeah. Instead of going to a bakery owner who's like, I'm going to tell you these five things you need to know. I remember in my early 30s, I was thinking about selling my agency and I'd done all the prep work. I knew a lot of the answers and I went to a friend who had done the very thing I wanted to do, and she very clearly said, I'm going to define for you what this looks like. Year one through five. Year one, it's great. Year two, you're cruising. Year three, not feeling so good. Year four, you want out. And you got to stay till the end of that year. When she really broke it down, someone who knew what I was trying to do. I said, oh, that is not for me. And here's all the other things you need to know. If I had just gone to friends who were here to cheer me on, I wouldn't need inspiration. I would have gone and done the thing and it would have been the wrong decision. And so I will tell you, inspiration is hard if you do it the right way, because it's about checking your math. You've gotten curious, you know your numbers. It is now checking it with people who are doing the thing you want to do. And that's the key in that phase, don't socialize and go have drinks with your friends. That's a ritual you're doing. That's in recreation. This is going to the people who know what you are trying to do and getting really clear on what I think I learned in preparation. Is it really true? An inspiration.

Whoa. Tell me how you really feel.

Now do you see why you need recreation? After that, you need a break. You're putting yourself.

After this podcast, Madison and I will go surfing. So I loved your concept of rituals. And we had, I would say, maybe the world's greatest ritual whisperer, which is Julia Cameron. And so, like you, she really believes in rituals. So I want you to explain why rituals are necessary.

I think rituals are necessary because they ground us. And a lot of what I'm talking about in my book is a very practical approach. I want you to do the thing you need to accomplish in your life, and I am going to be that real talk friend. I am not your hype woman. I'm not here to make you spend one ounce of any of your time on a path that's not meant for you, because you are wasting time being the person you need to be. And what I love about rituals is it's a way of grounding yourself wherever you are. And as you bring more into your life and things and you start to create the work life harmony you're looking for, there might be a moment where you can imagine, like, getting swept away by a wave. What I'm trying to do is ground you and say, for me, no matter where I am in the world, I love a hot drink in the morning. It could be coffee, it could be chai. It could be a lot of things. I love the idea of taking that time to create that thing for bae. I love drawing a bath or doing different things. And I have a life where sometimes I can be all over the world, different time zones. I love finding a way to connect with my siblings. I have a brother who lives in Italy who's been there for over 12 years. And I have another brother who's wherever he is in the world. And we have to find a ritual to ground us. My friends, I talk about my supper club, I was with them last night, where we had one day that we would commit per month. We're all busy in our careers. One meal per month. We commit to each other, right? And so those are the things that really bring us back to who we are when we're on this path. Of all the things we're trying to introduce into our lives. And so I think they're really important to remind us of who we are. There are even rituals I have that I feel really connect me to my ancestors in a way, like my grandmother, my grade on if I'm preparing a tea or something to keep me healthy. And I remember my aunt did that when I was younger and made it for me what I was feeling under the weather. Right. And so somehow we've got to find the right rituals that really do bring you back to who you really are at the core. That has nothing to do with your work.

Another thing I love from your book is this belief that you should deposit before you withdraw. And why is that?

Yeah, so almost. It's like we're having a full circle moment. When you asked me how I got into Target, that goes back to what I talk about with how I view relationships. And I really, deeply believe this. You know, I'm in a process right now where I'm on tour and doing things. And when you are launching a book, people tell you, you go out and you ask a million people for everything in the world. And I say, I'm not doing that. Everyone's very. But this is how it's done. I said, no. I have written a book about how I have to make a deposit before I make a withdrawal. And it's incredibly important to me to be in integrity with what I'm writing and how I'm teaching people. And I think the response is different. You know, I think that just the idea that I want to serve and I want to give before I receive, it just sets you up in a different way. I talk also about hating the idea of networking, because to me, networking means I look at who you are and your role and title. I assign value to that, and then I go after you for that value. Do you want to be dealt with that way? Why are we teaching people this instead of just saying, I'm interested in you as a person? Again, I am a researcher who is generally interested in people for who they are. And then I decide we're friends. And I can't tell you, guy, how many times in my life someone has said, can you connect me to this person? I'm like, I don't think I know them. And it's like, oh, they're your LinkedIn connection. Right. Because they tell me the role that company. Can you connect me to the cmo? So I don't think I know that person. And then I look at them like, oh, you mean my friend Diane, the girl that I met at a girls camp in the summer, and we went to an 80s prom, and we made. Oh, that's my friend. Oh, right. She's at Goldman, but she's just my friend. And that's literally how I look at things, because I believe people are more than the job that they have. You know, And I really think about, how am I benefiting you and your life? How are you benefiting me? What's the reciprocity? And we have to stop being on a mission to collect people, then serve us, and not think about how we're in service to other people and what we have to offer.

Well, I guess I shouldn't ask you to introduce me to Oprah to get her on this podcast, huh? But. But you know what? I am perfectly willing to connect you to any of our previous guests, just FYI.

Okay, so you have a really great deposit, so you're not asking for that big of withdrawal. People just text like, can you give my book to Oprah? No. Like, when I was able to work and produce the Super Soul 100, I got to do that in service of this bigger idea that Oprah had to really elevate humanity. Through all these amazing people, I learned a lot about reciprocity, and I learned a lot in that season of working with her and the team, about how people just unbelievable the withdrawals people would make, not even thinking that she needed the deposit. That was what was really remarkable to watch in that process. Sometimes we take people's humanity away because they have such a big role in how we see them in the world and don't realize they're also a person and don't want to be looked at as a transaction, you know, And I think we've gotta. We see that in a lot of people, right? They become larger than life, and we don't allow them to be human beings. And I am often troubled when I see that.

So just so people truly understand this, you're not suggesting that you make a deposit with the expectation that this is an investment for a withdrawal someday?

No. So imagine if I had said, I'm gonna get to know my friend Kim because one day she's gonna introduce me to someone at Target who's gonna change my life. No. I just became friends with Kim because I just like her. You know what I mean? And we had common interests, and we did things together, and we traveled together, and because we had long conversations of making investments into each other, she understood my heart. I'll tell you this, too, guy. She knew before I knew where I needed to transition in my career. Because she knew me, so I wouldn't have even known what to ask her for. And that's what's so great about really cultivating real relationships. I was almost too scared to go for what I wanted because I'd become good at a thing. I was. This was my gig. I would have never thought to connect to that person at Target, to even expand what was possible, because I wasn't in a place to do that. And so I think it's really about being authentic. Not collecting people, just getting to know people who you genuinely like and then seeing. That's why I talk a lot about the idea of friend tours and not trying to have a mentor, but getting a group of people where you have different skill sets and you're going to challenge and be accountable to each other. And it was in that accountability and in that peer group that I was able to get to my next step. But it's all about authentic relationships.

This is my last kind of two question collection.

Okay.

The second question is gonna throw you back in the deep end, but the first question is in the shallow end. So the first question is, what is your advice to a teenage Black girl listening to this podcast?

Oh, goodness. My advice is to do your own research about who you are and where you come from, to not let any outside societal force impact how you view yourself. Really understand. This most critical thing for you to understand at this place in your life is how to filter out other people's projections of who you are. You are not responsible to those projections. You are not responsible to anyone else's interpretation of who you are. You know, you have to make your own path and understand one. You have to understand the game, whatever game you're participating in and playing. You want to understand the rules of engagement and how you need to show up. But I have a phrase I would say often, which is, I can't take that on. Right. And understanding and being really conscious of. If I am taking on an idea you have, let's say, of angry Black woman, well, I'm not angry. I am black and I am a woman, and I have an opinion. But if you translate that as angry Black woman, I actually don't have to take that on and I don't have to internalize that. So I think the most critical thing to know as that teenage girl is you have power. And don't let anyone teach you your history. Know it for yourself. I was very fortunate to have two parents who took on that responsibility of teaching us black history. And I. You can see in how we show up in our careers and in our life. That that was incredibly important. Create your own filtering system. Don't let anyone instill your joy. Show up happy and joyful and really do what you need to do to protect your emotions and protect how the outside world might view you.

You couldn't ask for a better segue to my last question, which is, what if this black teenage girl now says, I'm finding it so hard to learn about black history and culture because I live in Florida or I live in Texas or my school board has taken all the books out of my library. What am I supposed to do, Tina?

So I would tell her, I went to a very lovely Presbyterian private school where I got an incredible education. But one of the things they decided to teach us was that black people should be happy that they were slaves because at least they got to hear the gospel.

Jesus, are you kidding me?

I am not kidding. But you know where I was very fortunate? I came home and we had conversations at the dinner table about what we were learning at school. And my parents filtered that right out and very clearly explained. And so I think that what my parents taught us, like, outside of this house, people might have a lot of ideas about who we are. We are going to teach you who you are. And I'll never forget that, because culture is so strong. But whoever isn't part of that tribe, we have to do a better job as tribe members. I write middle grade fiction focused on representation for that specific reason, because I want children to be able to understand who they are, and I want to give that tool to parents. So I think parents, all of us, aunts, uncles, we've got to get very involved in helping our children understand who they are and stop giving so much credence and noise to people who very specifically want to be seen as taking that away for very specific political agendas. Right? And again, I'm a marketer. I'm viewing this in a cynical, very different way, where I'm looking at time and saying, it is so critical, especially at those younger years, for children to be taught their history. But if we can go back to the beginning of time, right, as storytellers, how was our history translated? It was oral, right? Our families would sit down and say, here's who you are. Here's where you come from. Here's how you got here. And that's a tradition that needs to continue for all of us. Here's who you are. And within that family, have that completely reinforced as well.

Wait, can we just back up for 60 seconds here? So you come home from school, you tell your parents this story, and your parents don't say, you're transferring, or I'm gonna call up the president of the school and just jump up and down on the table.

They absolutely dealt with it. Private label. Here's what I really appreciate about my parents. They understood that that school was the tip of the iceberg for what my real life would be like. And so what my parents were very clear about is this is not going away. So you kids need to understand how to show up fully as who you are. And you need to understand this. It is unfair. What happens to people who look like us in this world is not fair. And now we are going to teach you how to be the best version of yourself. But you cannot fall apart at someone else's interpretation of who you are. We need to reinforce who you are. So taking me away from that school wouldn't cease racism in my life. You know what I mean? Now, I just understood from a young age I can trust my parents to tell me who I am. I can go back to that school and say, actually, that's not correct. And it's so funny. I see it in my niece. She is so clear about who she is, how she shows up, when something's fair, when it's not fair. And I see it rise up in her and this strength and confidence that I realize now, I had that from my parents as well, you know, and it's my sister, and it's us reinforcing and her being able to ask questions and not avoiding the tough questions. But removing me from that environment wouldn't have helped. And now I'm just this tough woman who. It's like, you say what you want, it's going to roll off me. But I needed to have those experiences to train those muscles so that those words and things could roll off of me and not destroy my day or my afternoon. And now it's just like having Teflon and saying, here we go again. Moving on, not allowing it to be so destructive. I love that they minimized it. And I learned later that they definitely had words with those teachers and principals and made it clear. But it also wasn't brought to me like. And we went to the school, it was. And I like the way they handled it. Because if you think that every time someone's going to show up and fight your battles, they just taught me how to really comport myself so that I could deal in these situations. And there are a lot of those pressure situations, you know, And I've Been. I'm an entrepreneur guy, if I'm honest. I've been outside of that system for the last two years. When I've seen how people are treated, I'm like, are you kidding me? Somebody asked you questions about your hair. Like, there are things that happen that I can't even believe happened to black people in the workplace. And as an entrepreneur, I built my own company, I built my own infrastructure, and not really existed there. And so I credit my parents a lot with what they did. But, yes, I can see how one might think they should just taking me out of the school.

Wow. Did you see that story about school principal got fired because they showed a picture of David the sculpture naked? So that's porn. And so the principal got fired. You can't make this shit up. You really.

I hope that parents who are that involved in getting teachers fired are just as involved in teaching their children at home and teaching them the values and history and things that they need to know. And there's a lot, again, a lot of noise going on, but it's incredibly important. The values that are modeled in the home are what the kids are picking up. And I can see that from going into classrooms and interacting with young readers. And there's a lot of deflection. And again, I wrote a book asking you to really look at yourself honestly, have an honest conversation.

I think you build the case that what. What some of these politicians are doing now is going to have the exact opposite effect of what they want and what they think is going to happen. It's going to be the mother of unintended consequences.

Oh, absolutely. It gives me. I will say this is the one petty thing. I will say. It gives me immense pleasure to watch them go out and think that they are crusading and doing something amazing. And I'm like, you have no clue what's coming back for you. That is gonna backfire in a way. And guess what? You're not even gonna be in the workforce when all of the things that are gonna happen start happening. It has no ramifications or implications for you. And that's the scariest thing for me, I think, with any politician of different ages, is you're creating policies and you're. And you're coming up with ideas and theories that ultimately are not going to impact your future. And that is a really difficult. If you're a CEO of a company and you do something, it could impact your bonus, you want it to go well. We are allowing people to just create things that they can walk away from and then not have to deal with the consequences. So I think in general there's some issues there. But Guy, I I do take a little pleasure in thinking it's not going to end up how you think it is, but keep going with that talk of yours.

Well, until this podcast I had two Republican listeners and I just lost them them. But that's okay. So this has been just remarkable. And because you're a marketer and I'm a marketer, which is the highest calling, I give you this opportunity. Just pitch your book.

I love it. At the end when I'm exhausted of all the big questions, it's now talk about the book. It's very smart. The elevation approach is for anyone who really thinks work life balance doesn't work, who is searching for something new, but also for the person who is trying to figure out how to make their dreams reality and really how to bring to life the life that they want. And it's also an invitation to take a minute pause, get to know yourself in this season, get to understand what you want and have really a foolproof plan to help you get there.

Thanks for listening to today's podcast with the remarkable Tina Wells. We hope you enjoyed listening to her insights about marketing, entrepreneurship and work life harmony. Tina's journey is a testament to the power of hard work, dedication and vision. Until next time, keep learning, growing and chasing your dreams. My thanks to Jeff C, Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and the drop in Queen of Santa Cruz who dominates Jack's Madison Nessmer. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.