105: Tools for Transitions—Just Ahead Mentors, Jealousy Antidotes, and Powerful Small Steps to Find Jobs (or Clients) with Dev Aujla

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Hello everybody. Welcome back. I am so excited to be here with fast friend and kindred spirit, Dev Ajula. Dev is the CEO of Catalog, a recruiting and advisory firm that has provided talent and high level strategy to some of the world's most innovative companies, including BMW, Change.org, good Magazine, and Planned Parenthood. For 10 years, he ran Dream Now, a nonprofit design studio and he reached over 500,000 people raising millions of dollars for projects that do good. In his spare time, he runs an incredible passion project that we're going to get into at the start of today's show. And he's co author of two books. Well, co author of his first book, Making Finding Meaning, Money and Community in a Changing World. And he's the solo author of his latest book, Fantasy 50 Ways to Get a Job, an unconventional guide to finding work on your terms. And I've got to tell you, when I first got the book, I thought, well, this doesn't apply to me. It's 50 ways to get a job. But in preparing for this podcast and meeting Dev in person, he is the most Dev, I think you're one of the most interesting men in the world.

Oh man.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

This book is so good. I really Dev and I talked about how we would sneak in sort of spiritual or mindfulness messages into both of our books and Deb really did it and I found myself dog earing almost every single page. There's way more that I tagged than we can possibly even get to in this conversation and I was so inspired. So I'm going to say right now, for those of you who don't think that you're searching for a traditional job, there's still so much here. And, Dev, before we get into some of your fun practices, like.

Finding your center of gravity, creating a gravity log, everyday Prozac, I mean, these are creating a course pack. These are just some of his amazing ideas. Going on a solo trip, going on a research trip. I want to start with this passion project of yours because you and I share a love of books. So can you just kick us off by sharing what you're up to in Dumbo, New York, which listeners stands for down under the Manhattan bridge overpass.

Sure. So I. It started about a year and a half ago. I walked by a bookstore that was closing down, and I've always had the dream of running a bookstore, thinking, you know, I've been a book person, and I was like, oh, my God, the bookstore is closing down. What if I could buy all the books? So I just started going in there and showing up every night and just sort of getting a vibe of what's going on. And I ended up just slowly putting books in boxes and talking to the guy. And I ended up choosing, over the course of a month, that was like, about 100 hours of work every night, choosing about 3,000 books and that I liked. And I kind of came up with this deal with them, and I moved them all into my apartment. And.

One thing I realized was I didn't want to run a bookstore because everyone came in every night and just sort of asked for Harry Potter. And I was like, ah, you know what? I actually just want the books. I don't want to sell them. I don't want to give them away once I finally got them. And so I moved them into my apartment, and then they were there for two months. And my brother came over and was like, dev, what's your problem? I'm phoning, Mom. This is an issue. You're a hoarder. This place smells like a used bookstore, and your floor is sinking. Literally, my floor there was an inch between the baseboard and the floor, and there's just so much weight. There was like 100 boxes stacked up. And so I was like, oh, my God, I gotta do something. This is not good. And two days later, I met this woman who was running a space in Dumbo called the Made in New York Media Center. And I was telling her about all the book stuff, and she's like, I have a library that's been fully built out. And we ran out of budget to buy books. And I was like, well, I've got books and no library. Let's do this. And so I ended Up I have the space that over the last year I've created this project called the Sorted Library. S O R T E D. And it is my eventual vision is to have multiple reading rooms. And in each reading room is the collection, a copy of the collection of a famous creative. So it's like imagine going to search for your answers within Audre Lorde's personal library or Kurt Vonnegut or Francisco Pessoa, or, you know, it's just the idea that you can go look for your answer within somebody else's context, I think is so beautiful. And yeah, so far it's just been an Instagram account and then I've been building a nonprofit around it.

I love how in the book you talk about if you focus on helping other people, you can see the universe as this amazing matching puzzle. And in this case, how incredible that you happen to get all these books and then right when you decided they needed a new home, you happened to run into a woman who said, hey, I have a library, but no books. Like, you can't even write this.

Even the. I actually got the books for free as well because I was doing volunteering at the time for a nonprofit I really believe in. And I had to help them hire a few people and they came to me being like, hey, you know, and they do like anti inequality, global stealth led work. And they're like, you know, we have a little bit of extra money we would love to support, so pay you for your. For what you've done for us. And I was like, don't pay me, pay this book guy. And it'll be this weird sort of trade. And then therefore I'll get the books. And so I. The whole library project so far has really happened outside of, outside of just that way, you know, just. Just because, I don't know, tell listeners.

About your Instagram account, which my partner Michael said was one of the coolest Instagrams he's ever seen.

So it's at Sorted Library. And the idea behind it is that when people come into these reading rooms and the reading room we currently have set up in Dumbo, you create a small collection. So the collections can be really about anything, can be a question that you are holding or asking yourself. It can be an idea. And you make a collection of three to four books and you write, you create a little card. You can kind of see them, see them online. You know, the collections go from, you know, different takes on the way things change to ideas around feminism, to, you know, isolation, to like, joy. It's just it's like a huge. It's a catalog of human, human questions and emotions and curiosities. And it's a different way of organizing, organizing the books and interacting with the collection and, and you know, it forces people out of.

Out of what they think they need. And you end up looking to drama, poetry, art, theology, mythology, fiction in order to find your answer to your question around what's the future of the suburbs? You know, and that's the thing I love the most, is that kind of nonlinear inquiry and that chance to look. Look to the arts, look to look to something unexpected to find an answer.

I love how the theme of inquiry is woven throughout. And in this case, it really is so fun to look at his Instagram account because you're seeing the stack of books that the person has curated for their particular inquiry and in the cards at the library are handwritten and then there's a photo of the person attached. So it's just this very personal, meaningful and thoughtful. I mean, these are very thoughtful books that you've curated and inquiries that people are creating. And as you said, I love that you just decided you just don't want to sell the same old books and people can't even take the books out at all. It's a library where you go and immerse yourself. And I love how you say you thought you wanted this light drenched library in Chinatown and you ended up with this dark place in Dumbo, but that it's perfect somehow.

Yeah. You know, when I originally got the books and started dreaming about the place that I would have, you know, it was that feeling of like coming up in plants and beautiful bookshelves and, you know, from the chaos of Chinatown into this very calm, serene place. And.

What showed up was that place, the place that Sabrina offered. And it was, it's in the back of a other workspace and there's no windows, but honestly, you walk in and it feels so good and so right and it's just that ability or that, you know, holding the wheel loosely or just, yeah, this is what's happening right now. And it's good, it's enough. And it is, it's a perfect next step for the library. And yeah, it's been pretty exciting.

One practice that has been helpful for you is finding just ahead mentors. And you share how your friend Andrew became that for you as it related to the bookstore. And you write in your book, you say, all of my hesitations and insecurities vanished and I knew what I was doing was both real and valuable. So tell us about some of the insecurities you had other than being a hoarder when you were first starting the library and how seeing what Andrew was doing shifted that for you, of course.

So, you know, when I had the books and I didn't, it was hard for me to even call it a library or a reading room or think of it as something real. In my head, a library is this like, fast space, like the New York Public Library or any great cities library. And, you know, there's tons and thousands of books. And, you know, it was weird. I was like, well, they need a cataloging system. You need this. All these things that I built up that a real library had that my reading room wasn't that. And so I was kind of like hesitant to invite people over or talk about it. And, you know, and I was like, I don't have enough books, I don't have enough space. I don't have the right thing. I didn't, you know, it's not formal enough. And I didn't choose them a proper way. And then I met Andrew and as soon as. One of the best things about the library is I've started meeting library people, which are just great people. The best. You don't have to talk that much.

Yeah, totally.

And Andrew runs something called the Reanimation Library. And a friend had introduced us and I went and visited him. And he had his collection at the time in the Queen's Museum. And they had a studio space below. And I went down the stairs and sort of around this, like into the back of the museum and then down into like the dark area. Then there's like this studio. And he had a. He had, you know, a thousand books or 1500 books on these blue metal shelves. And there was no plants and there was no light and there wasn't thousands of books. There wasn't a cataloging system the way that I envisioned it. And I was like, oh. But the experience of talking to him and having him walk me through his project was like, this is so real. I was so excited. It was real. It was as real of a library and a project and a beautiful experience as I could have ever hoped for myself. And just seeing that, you know, and I don't. I've never even told him that. He's like been a. Just a head mentor, but now he's.

Immortalized in your book. But the thing is his work, his library was also got to do museum shows, like big museums, I think. Think you mentioned moma and a few others. So clearly cultural elite, the powers that be were also recognizing this is something.

This is something, you know, and all of a sudden when I came back, I just felt this, like, surge of energy that, like, of course this. What I'm doing is something. And, you know, I have enough. And I have like the. Just the 3,000 books I have and the space I have and what I'm doing is. Is good enough to continue building. And it was. It changed how I started inviting people through and which led to all the collections that you see online right now.

Meaning you weren't inviting people previously?

No, I was kind of like hesitant. You know, it was like just close friends. And then all of a sudden I'm like, no, this is good enough. I'm going to start inviting all kinds of folks through that I think are great. And here we are.

What I love about this side hustle, which is now, what do you even call it? I mean, I know you still do a different job as a recruiter, and this isn't necessarily making money, but it doesn't feel right to call it a side hustle.

You know, it's. It's. I'm building a nonprofit. I'm building a cultural institution that might take me 20 years to do, and I hope it does because the. The process of building it is just the best. You know, where I'm. I'm going to Portugal in June to Fernando Pessoa's estate, and we are gonna go look. And like, I've been visiting all these famous creatives that I love that I love their writing and looking at their personal libraries. And, you know, it's just like that act of doing that and taking a small group of people with me to these places is just so much fun. Like, I wouldn't want to do anything else. So I hope it lasts a long time.

I love that because now so many people say, oh, it's taking me so long to write the book or do whatever project they're working on. And here you are saying, I hope it takes me 20 years, that this is a passion project for life. And Dev also has some great ideas around recreating famous people's personal libraries, which is so interesting. And I love that in creating this, you're attracting your people. And it's just such a good example of that. And I forwarded devices. There's this thing, not just in New York, actually all over, called the Silent Book Club. So again, it's kind of a dream. Like people who love books but don't want to go network and chit chat. So these groups get together Actually all over the country and sit and read quietly together. Like, how beautiful.

It's amazing.

One thing we were talking about the Just Ahead mentor and your friend Andrew. And there's this flip side of that, which is you say that oftentimes during transition or even job searching, jealousy comes up. And you have a really interesting approach for solving that. I would love if you could share with listeners.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I think it's like navigating, navigating the career and navigating our. Our lives. Especially nowadays when we're just like flipping through.

Instagram and social media and we're seeing all these other people's lives. It just be. It's so easy to get thrown off track and, you know, end up in that spiral being like, I wish I need a career where it enables me to work on the beach, or I need a career to work remotely, or, you know, everyone's life kind of just looks like the best. And. And my, my way of dealing with that.

Comes from the choices that we make about our life. And the whole book is about figuring out all the small places in our lives that we can make choices. And the example I use in that chapter is about my apartment. So when I actually went to a studio of an artist, a minimalist artist, Donald Judd, and it's like a museum studio, and it shows. Is kind of like frozen his apartment as it was, you know, as he left it. And. And it's just like it's built for him, you know, it's not built for anybody else. There's just enough room for the coats that he has, and the like, view corridors are just perfect for him, and everything just works. In fact, I would. It'd be cold to live there. Like, I wouldn't want to live there. It wouldn't work for anybody else. You know, it was almost inhospitable, but it was like, chosen. So when I came back from that, I went to my own apartment. I was like, I'm gonna make all these small changes to my own apartment. Like, I'm paint the radiators white and I'm going to clear up the visual field in different ways. I got to move this chair into exactly where the sun hits at 3 o', clock, which is when I always come home. And, you know, it's like, just made all these changes so that my apartment really just works for me. And what the result of that was was unexpected. And it happened when I went to a beautiful apartment of someone that I had just met, and they had this, you know, apartment that obviously Makes you feel jealous normally, you know, like, you're like, oh, my God, I need to get this. You know, that whole rush of feelings came in, and as I was sitting there, I was like, no, you know, their radiators aren't white. And it's not. It's not what I chose. It's not what I would have chosen. It's not made for me. And all of a sudden, that, like, takes the heat away from all those jealous feelings, you know, because what happens is you're like, okay, I didn't choose a life where I'm, like, sitting on the beach and not working and doing that. You know, like, what I chose was a life where I'm, like, working and doing this and. And, you know, all these small things that I have an apartment with white radiators and that. The way that I go into the subway, I think about this and I. You know, all these small moments that we get to choose about our life, and those all add up so that we know we can always make different choices. But the life we have is ours, and it is something we have chosen, and we have agency and control over that. And it really changes that reaction, that jealous feeling, because, you know, you know, you're doing. You're doing what you want, you know? And I mean, I just love, like, the reason why I wrote a career book is because in that moment of, like, I don't know what I'm gonna do next, you actually have the chance to rethink everything about your life. And people do, like, the relationship they have to time to money, to space, to how we live, how we work every day, our daily routines. All that stuff is at play in that moment of what's next. And that seems so. So fertile. It seems so exciting to spend time thinking there.

That was one of my favorite things about the book, is that you kept reinforcing over and over, hey. As if you're shaking the reader, like, hey, you have a chance to do things differently. You have a chance to change the way you're being. In one chapter, you talk about mimicking how a deer would walk.

And that's. Don't just follow your same routines just as they were. And second of all, don't just make a job search. This most miserable thing that you say, the typical way that we job search turns it into an absolute depressing. You say emotional nosedive. It's demoralizing. And that from that emotional bottom, you are in your worst position to be searching, negotiating, or building the skills and confidence you need. And this is. I Think so Beautiful. You say the act of finding a job should feel the same as the job itself. An engaging experience that has purpose and direction. It should be filled with wonder, possibility, and the conviction that there is a path forward.

Yes. You know, I really, I really believe our careers can be ways we answer questions. You know, our careers can be an avenue for inquiry in the same way that the sorted library gets to show that like four different books from different genres can all come together to speak to one idea. Our lives can do the same thing. And a job that you would think is unrelated might be the perfect place for you to learn the next thing with that question. And those questions that stick around, those are the ones that our careers end up being made for, you know, and we, we don't know that. We don't know that before, but the ones that stick around, the ones that we just keep on more interested in and still want to answer more and more when we look backwards. That's what our career is made of. And it should feel exciting, it should feel good, it should feel like a question you want to answer.

And just like you said with Sordid Library, the whole point of our career is that it's expansive and it's long and this inquiry that we're studying is what gives us purpose no matter which of the job. Or for solopreneurs or entrepreneurs, whichever client you're working with. Also, one thing I wanted to add on the Donald Judd story, I thought it was so interesting how you shared that in this soho industrial building, he had four separate floors for eating, entertaining, working and sleeping, and that each pocket was custom designed for that activity. And I just. It's such a great concept of personalization as an antidote to jealousy, that the more you personalize and get to know what you need and what makes your. What sparks joy. Another thing we share in common. I'm always saying that to coaching clients and to my momentum crew. It's like what sparks joy. And another thing that you advocate is not just career as inquiry, but the spaces in between moves as very fertile. Like you said, very fertile times. So you advise people to do two different things that should not be confused with each other. Schedule a vacation buffer and go on a research trip. What's the difference?

Yeah, I mean, so one of the reasons why I like the scheduling a vacation buffer as an exercise is actually because.

We are pattern based creatures. You know, we do what we were doing before, and if we don't have enough time to reset, find a sort of new equilibrium, what will happen is Our job search will recreate the same stresses of our last job. We'll be busy, stressed out, and things we don't want will just show up in our job search and they will then show up in our next job and we don't actually get a chance to escape or change what we want. And a vacation buffer is, it can be, it doesn't need to be going on to far away. You know, it can be even in your own city or not even leaving anywhere at all. But it's about a chance to reset those, those daily rhythms, you know, so we don't just copy and paste, because if we don't choose, we will copy and paste. That's just what happens. And that's, that's, that's what a vacation buffer is. And then a research trip is taking that idea of our careers as avenues of inquiry, of ways answering questions. A research trip is a chance for you to actually go somewhere. It can be local, it can be far away, it can be wherever. And it, and it can even be unrelated and you can find a way to tie it together, you know, and the idea is by actually moving to a different spot and looking for nonlinear ways of connecting that trip to. The question you have is it starts giving you a sense of directionality right, right away, which is often missing in our career search. You know, our career searches, we go to job boards, we feel a little depressed, and all of a sudden we're trusting an algorithm that picks our YouTube video to pick our next job. And it's like, what the hell is going on? You know, it just feel, it feels, feels horrible. And what happens is it feels horrible because there's no directionality. You're not, you're not actually actively choosing where you're going to go ask. And what's cool about the research trip is it's not even about what comes out at the other end. It's all the people that you end up meeting and the conversations you end up having and the other questions that will fill your notebook pages along the way that may end up being the question that makes your career or that you keep on pursuing. And it's that flexibility that just gives you enough to get going that is, is worth doing.

You also talk about a solo trip.

Yeah, a solo trip is, you know, I think a lot of people think, you know, go on a solo trip and try to find yourself, you know, or like, hopefully like a strike of lightning comes down and you're just like, this is it. This is my big idea. I gotta make all the change. And I really, I mean a solo trip, chances are not, it's not going to happen. You know, you're going to go away, you're going to be alone for a couple days and stay a couple days longer than you think and.

Something may not happen at all, you know, you may come back. But that space and that act of choosing to do it can be instrumental for reasons that you won't understand and you can't predict because you go into something like some people go into these solo trips. For the first time I ever did a solo trip, I went into it, you know, I have all this thinking, I want to do these, all these big questions, I want to think, finally I'm alone, I have no phone, I can, I can dive in. And it's surprising, you can actually get through all the thinking within like a day or two. You know, you're just like, you're thinking, you're thinking, you're talking, you're writing, and then what? And then stay an extra day because that's when the good stuff happens and it's just nothing.

You know, it's just like, well now I've thought about all that stuff and I guess I'll just go for a walk.

And you know, it's like that space, that mental space you can't really put.

You can't really quantify what it does for you, but it is, it's a good part of living and it should be experienced. And especially when we spend so much time in a place that's usually inundated with messages that that mental space is good to feel, it's good to know, it's good to know in your body how that feels to be past all your thinking and just, just be there.

And it seems like, I think, you know, especially for those who are in between gigs or jobs, that there's a lot of pressure, like every moment counts. I don't have time to go on a solo trip. And what I love what you just said is you, you can't even plan or predict the ways that you're going to benefit. But you say in the book, I guarantee you'll be two or three days closer to getting a job because you'll be clear headed, grounded and ready to make important decisions about your career. That even if you don't spend one minute of focus on the search or even on proper networking or research, just getting out of your home environment. And this is really a theme throughout. You even have the preface or the foreword is by Londo.

Rinzo Renzo. Man, this is what I get for always only reading things. But I know his name. He's a Buddhist teacher here in the New York area, and he's written a couple books himself. What's the role of Buddhism in your life and work?

You know, I don't have an active practice. I don't have an active spiritual or religious practice. I think I consider myself spiritual. But I think a lot of the Buddhist practices have resonated and I've read a lot of.

Of the texts and there's, I think the idea that we've actually always, like with spirituality, with religion has always been answering the question for us of how should a person be, you know, how should we be in the world? And I think, like, that there's so many great lessons to draw on from different religions, all kinds of different religions, about how to do that, you know, and it goes down to the practical.

Practical things like how to spend time alone or how to spend time with your thoughts, or not just noticing your thoughts, letting them go, or even like, how do we relate to our neighbors and what kinds of rules do we. Do we. Do we take on? And I just, I find looking at religion and spirituality such, Such terrific ground for understanding how a person should be and whether whatever that practice is for you, you know, I think we're stepping away from religion a lot of times, and it's like the rise of the religious nuns, you know, the people that check off the I have no religion box on the forms of N U N. Yeah, exactly. N O N E S. And. And that rises like, is leaving us in a place where, where we are still. We're still seeking those answers because they're human questions, you know, and. And so I think the book, the book really has a thread of answering that question of like, how should a person be? And there isn't a way, but there is so much. So many people that have walked before us and so many, so many lessons that have been in literature, in spirituality and religion that have been passed on. And I think listening to that and understanding that context can be very grounding.

When we had coffee, you had a really interesting take on what spirituality means to you. And I could see it then, because we had coffee before I read Deb's book, that there's this curiosity you have, you have this really interesting skill of noticing, like Dev once played a game with himself to make his commute easier, putting himself in front of these tiny areas within the subway while waiting for the train and like, writing down all observations that he could, like, I don't know, who thinks to do this? The way that you knew you were ready to quit your job was you started noticing dirt on the stairs, and you were, like, unhappy with yourself that you hadn't noticed the dirt on the periphery of the stairs.

In months. And that was your signal that it was time to pay attention. So how do you define spirituality as it relates to this daily noticing?

You know, I mean, spirituality is a practice, you know, it is what. It is, something we practice. It's what we do every day. You know, it's how we think and show up and relate to us, ourselves, to our friends, our family. It. It pervades that all. And I really.

Really believe that there is so much to draw on around how should we show up and how do we care about ourselves and how do we approach ourselves? And. And the subway platform, I was. It came out of the fact that I was commuting every day and I was feeling, like, frustrated, annoyed. I was feeling whatever emotions I would see on the subway would resonate throughout the day. And I just. I was always standing in the same place, and it would always be for between two and five minutes as I waited for the train. And so I just started writing down all the details, like, just trying to, like, get them down on my phone. And it all of a sudden, that act of noticing, that practice of doing that every day, like, transformed that space and transformed the commute, you know, for like a period of like, eight, nine months. Like, I did it for so long until I felt like I didn't need to do it anymore. And. But it was just like, all of a sudden I knew that space. I felt like the world expert of this 100 square foot space of the Dekala subway stop in Fort Greene, you know, And I was like, I just. It shifted something. And I think that's the power, that spiritual practice or any type of practice that's sustained, that happens every day that we do can give us, you know, it can give us different insights, it can give us different knowledge and different ways of approaching that knowledge.

Are you going to write a book called DeKalb Subway from the Field?

Exactly. It's pretty boring, actually. I actually put a little bit of it. I put a little bit of it in the book. And originally I put like, two pages, and the editor was like, no, nobody is going to read this.

There are 12 tiles. The tiles are aligned nine by six by four. That's great.

I have 80 pages or something, or like, I'm in.

But it really did work because you got a postcard from your friend In Bali at some point during that, and you didn't have the jealousies, you felt like you were so happy with your DeKalb subway stop.

Yeah. You know, it's funny. It's, it's, it's. It's these all. It's all these small acts. You know, I think we think that when we're trying to change our whole career, we need to make some big decisions or move cities or change our total jobs or quit everything or follow our passion. And there's all this, like, aggressive action that we're told we're supposed to take, especially in America, you know, it's a very American thing. Go for it, do it. Be, be, be, be. And I really believe it's the small choices and the smallest moments. Even in the most boring of places that you can imagine, the subway station or the PowerPoint presentation you have to watch 45 times. There is some way to do a quarter turn and look at it differently that can actually give us meaning. And it's that it's the accumulation of all those small choices that ends up making a great career or a good life.

So I teased at the beginning, center of gravity and finding your center of gravity. And you say that yours revolves around being liked or loved, and it affects everything in your life that actually your career had been built to benefit the center of gravity. I can relate to that so much. And anyone who's done the enneagram, I'm always like a 2, 3 or a 3, 2, like the achiever and wanting to be loved. And it's gets tiring. But. So tell us what has your center of gravity? Just what did that awareness teach you? And do you do anything to change it? Or do you just. And tell us what the gravity log exercises?

Yeah, sure. So the idea of the center of gravity is that we all have is this one characteristic characteristic that's tied to how we interpret the world. So it's a way to think about. It is like something that you get overly upset about but that's not actually really happening or which is a good.

One for the gravity log.

Yeah, right.

To notice. What do you get disproportionately upset about?

You know, you're like. All of a sudden you're upset. And like examples of center of gravities could be, you know, like always being in control or being seen or being in front of people or, you know, it can be all kinds of things, but it's. It skews. I call it the center of gravity because it skews what you're Seeing it's not real what you're seeing. So for me, you know, being something, it's like, I want to be liked or loved. It ends up, you know, it works for me with my job. Because doing recruiting, you have to constantly think, hey, how's this employer feeling? How does this candidate person, do they like me? Does this person, like, do they. Will they like each other? You know, it like naturally works to how my brain goes. And actually we generally find our ways to. Or we build complex systems to help us with this. But just noticing or knowing, and usually our friends can help us tell. Like if you, like, read the chapter in the center of gravity or think about what your center of gravity is, the thing that skews your reality the most. Our friends are usually pretty good at being like, oh, yeah, that's your thing. This is the thing that. That will make you upset. Or that, like another example is like being authentic or being real, you know, and some people, it's like, that's the thing. That's the thing they need everyone around them to be. And so if you start noticing, you don't have to change it, you know, I don't. It's not gonna. I don't need to get rid of the fact that I want to be liked or loved. What I need to do or what I started doing was I just started noticing every time that that was influencing or showing up in my life. And I'd ask myself, and I'd be like, oh, yeah, is this decision that I'm making about being liked or loved? Or like my overthinking whether this person has emailed me back and what does it mean? And I'm like, oh, wait, that has something to do with my center of gravity. Is it serving me right now? No. Okay. It's not real, then it's okay. It's fine. And just by noticing and just by making a little gravity log, so I just use my notes in my phone and I make a little check mark or a little X every single time I notice it every day. And what happened over the course of even two weeks of just noticing it, you realize that you get to choose whether you. It's serving you. Like in my recruiting job that that innate feeling I have serves me, it works really well. And then there's other moments where it doesn't serve me, where it's not working. And so I get to choose to walk around it. I don't need to get rid of it. I don't need to change it. I just get to choose to be like, yeah, that's okay. That's what that is. I'm just going to walk around and that gives you the power back. It gives you. It makes you feel. It gives you agency and control, and it helps us find even new jobs. You know, I like thinking about it in terms of, like, make a list. Once you understand what your center of gravity is, make a list of careers that would really benefit from your center of gravity. You know, the example I used in the book was a nurse. And over the course of her career, she. Her center of gravity is being in control. And normally nursing is much more of a caring role. But she had found her way through the hospital to the point where she was at in the ccu and she was in the most controlling position, the place where the nurse has the most control over the whole situation, because they are there and it's like acute situations and. And she was. She had found that way that her center of gravity could work with any job. So it's not, it's not about like just dropping and finding a totally different job, but it's understanding how do we find ourselves in a way that works with the natural way that we are.

I love it, and I love including the center of gravity, as I like to think about circles in a Venn diagram that maybe your career or ideal client Venn diagram has qualities of industry or type of work or who they are. And you might as well include your center of gravity, this thing that is even deeper just about what drives you and what upsets you and how that can play a role. So like the nurse example is a great one.

Yeah. And another way to tell your center of gravity is like, if you were given two choices and one of those choices was related to your center of gravity, would you always choose that one? You know, that's another little mental way to figure it out. But I mean, if you think about it for a second there, it's. And start asking family and friends and talking to people, it's surprising what you. What you find. And it's. It's been another way to do it. Another quick exercise is look back at major milestones or decisions that you have made in the past five years or even a year and ask yourself if there was one reason why that you made those decisions or one trigger or one emotional moment, and if there was a center of gravity involved in that, because oftentimes those moments are when our center of gravity is really at play.

So good. There's so much more I want to ask you, Deb, but I feel like Listeners will just have to get your book. 50 Ways to Get a Job. There's one thing that I do think is important that comes up all the time with my clients, people in momentum when in between jobs or even working as a freelancer trying to get clients. And that is deciding when to work for free. I would love to hear your thoughts on that because there's varying advice out there. And then on a similar but related note, the benefits of volunteering and how that comes into play with job searching and career.

Totally. I mean so I, you know, working for free is, can be a part of it and, but is also, I think you really need to get clear. I don't think it's necessary all the time, you know, and I think it's something that actually gets.

You know, it's a real class privilege thing. It's a real privilege to be able to just not get paid and to get experience. And there are tons of ways to get that mission fit or to learn a skill where you can actually get paid to do it. And I really want. The book is filled with ways to actually navigate those real practicals practicalities of that, you know, to figure out, make your to learn list and to move towards a career that a job, a job title that you may never have thought yourself in, but it might be the right one for you to learn that skill. And it's seeing our careers in that longer arc so that we don't just necessarily need to work for free, you know. And I, I really wanted to be aware of that when I was writing, writing the book because I feel like there's so many books that are written from a place of.

Well, it's great but you have to be upper middle class and you can just go take an internship and then just move back home. And like that's not the reality for most people people. And you know, I want to give people the real, real steps on how to, how to navigate that. And yeah, and I get the questions to ask when you're, when you're thinking about when, when to, to take a risk or if you have the privilege to work for free is like ask yourself who are you going to be around, you know, and what kinds of people are you going to be meeting and what ways are you going to be meeting those people and what, what go back here to learn list and ask yourself what in this position, how many of the things on my to learn list will this job teach me? You know, and, and again, what kind of learning experience is it and do you have control over that learning experience. So are you able to, to shape and to do the things that you actually need to learn, or are you going to be learning something you don't necessarily want? You know, because it might be the perfect internship or a job. But if you aren't learning the things you need to learn, it might not be the right one for, for you. And it's really hard to make that decision without having some sort of framework to judge it against. And I really believe that idea of having a learn list is a great framework to help you make that decision.

I'm so glad you brought up the idea of class privilege too, because this is something I was talking to you about when we had coffee and Dev has a long career in nonprofit work and fundraising and organizations and he just knows everything, I think, and everyone in this certain pocket of the world. And he recommended this great book to me called Classified and I'm not remembering the subtitle right now, but it's about class privilege and ways invisible privilege that probably anyone with the leisure time to even listen to this podcast has some amount of privilege. And that was just a really eye opening book. This is a woman, the woman who wrote it inherited $3 million and through a family trust and gave it away by when she was 25 years old and then has gone on to create this book and a foundation and some work around this, but just gaining awareness. And like you said, this even this notion of working for free is really, is a privilege. And it's one to be aware of.

And the best thing about it is once you're aware of it, you can leverage that for good, for doing good. But if you aren't aware of it, if you haven't thought about it or become aware of this, the small, the small privileges like having orthodontics at some point in your life or regular visits to the dentist, or learning how to feel comfortable in a lot of different social situations, you know, these are the things that make up class privilege. And the idea that once you are aware of it, it doesn't take away from what you've done or what you're able to do, but it actually enables you to step into the world in a way that's a little gentler and is using what you have and what you've been given in order to do good and in order to create the world that you want to see. And yeah, it's worth, it's worth, it's worth asking those questions.

I love what you said because in J.D. vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy he talks about class, privilege. And we don't realize that even going to a job interview, things like orthodontics comes into play. Did your parents have the thousands of dollars to straighten out and whiten your teeth, what you wear, how he didn't know which forks, which silverware to use at his interview for Yale Law School. And he had never had sparkling water before. Like there were all these micro, micro moments that had less to do with his race but more to do with his class. And it was just so interesting. And I love how you put it. It just that the awareness doesn't have to take anything away, but that it can allow you to step into the world in a way that's a little gentler.

Definitely.

So well said.

And there's, there's just, there's. You don't need it to do well. But it's important to understand the dynamics at play so that even if you grew up in a way that doesn't have that, you know you are no, that you are still enough and that you can do it and you can navigate it and you. And there are steps and the way through. And I really believe that like that was, that's what the frame was when I was writing this book was like, how can these steps actually help anybody from where they are take that next tangible step to get the career that they want?

So awesome. Dev. I'm thrilled that we met and we truly have like a brother and a sister. Although I think Pivot's a boy, so I think they're brothers books. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Sure. I mean 50 Ways to Get a Job.com is the website for the book and there's a lot of the exercises on there. The books available on Amazon and everywhere else and sorted Library I love to have people buy. It's S O R-T-E-D library.com amazing.

Awesome, Deb. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for pivotless, a curated top twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow.

Hasn't it always, Sam?