225: Pandemic Bubbles, Talent Trends, Self-Education, and Luck with Dr. MJC (Part 2)

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on, so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the.

Stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for.

Anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers.

Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more.

Toyota let's go places.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

This episode is brought to you by my Heart of Podcasting Live Masterclass coming up on June 25th in this live edition of the week long Heart of Podcasting, Quick Start or Sprint. To help you get your podcast started or optimize the one that you have, I am going to cover the priceless benefits of podcasting even if you don't monetize it right away. Tips for agile podcasting, how to launch a show and episodes quickly. I'll talk more about my shift from weekly to daily publishing. You can hear more about that in episode 223 of the podcast. I'll give you simple tips and templates for audio editing, post processing and publishing and then we'll open it up for Q and A and even some screen sharing walkthroughs of anything you would like to know or see in terms of the Pivot Podcast production process. I may even give you my favorite top five to seven GarageBand shortcuts that make audio editing so much easier even if you are self taught like me. If you want to join us for this, registration is now live@pivotmethod.com heart and I am throwing in an early bird bonus if you enroll by June 1. You will also get lifetime access to the week long version of this course that has a $297 value. So head on over to pivotmethod.com heart and join me for this live masterclass coming up on June 25th. Can't wait to see you there. Now on to Today's show, part two of my most recent conversation with Dr. MJC as part of our Pivoting Around a Pandemic series.

I don't know about you Michael. I wonder how you felt at the talk of opening up. Of course, I would want for people to have jobs and have work and the hospitals to be okay. And all of that goes without saying. There was a small part of me that I'm like, oh, no, I'm enjoying my pandemic bubble. I don't know if I'm ready to go. Not back. But.

I have not yet lived into exactly what I do want to create moving forward.

Yeah. So I had those same moments, and I'll admit some of those same moments, because I was almost. I think that in my mind, I haven't figured this out yet if there was. So everybody knows about the different stages of grief I'm having. I think I'm somewhere in different stages of pandemic where there is this unresolved mental state that I don't know how to describe it exactly to you and the folks listening to this, but I think some of that is, for me, is I haven't quite figured out what I'm doing this yet or how I'm going to look like at the end. And I think that's part of it. To me, it's unfinished business.

Yes. That is such a good way to put it. It's the unfinished business of a liminal state, I think, because the liminal state, we have all paused collectively, and we know that the way we were working wasn't working, to borrow a Marshall Goldsmith phrase. It just wasn't. The planet was being so negatively impacted. I do think that so many of us were overworked, over scheduled, overstressed. I just spoke with my friend Sarah, Shout Out Sara. She's. We were talking about, as she calls it, too many tiny boxes on the calendar, you know, and. And. And yet. So this time has. Has given a lot of us a lot of pause to.

To reflect and reshape. We have to reshape. That's the. It's. It's not an option. That's what's kind of crazy about this time. And I. I'm so glad you mentioned the grieving process, because in a lot of ways, I think we are grieving what was. For better and for worse. We are processing what's here now. We are trying to envision the highest possible future while also planning for the worst. It's a lot to process, a lot to take in.

Yeah. And I think. I think it was our last episode or the one before that, but we talked about adapting to nature, and I think that takes time. So the virus is changing our environment in a very significant way. And I think that many times we look at things and we need to have a quick fix at this point in time, there isn't a quick fix. And we probably know there's probably more than what we. There's more, how am I say this? There's more that we don't know about the virus and its impact than what we know at this point in time. The unknown universe is so much larger and it's going to take us time to go through that. And I think that there's at least some.

Mental discordance that we feel like we should have an easy fix, that, oh, the vaccine will do this or some treatment will do that, or social isolation will do this. And there isn't. It's not any one magic bullet that's going to take care of this. And we are going to have to adapt over a period of time. I've been thinking a lot about talent. I know that I shared with the group on momentum around Atul Gawande, who is a talented surgeon, professor at Harvard, writer for the Times, and I don't know the Atlantic, I don't know the guy. I don't know how many hours in a day he must work. And he got picked for the CEO role of Haven Health, which is basically the sort of venture, joint venture between JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon. And it's like they're supposed to set up this whole new healthcare system for their employees and da da da da as they grow. Well, that was back in January of 2018 and now nada has been done basically. And it was just announced a few couple about a week or two ago that he's leaving. He's keeping some sort of leadership and I call that sort of a talent role mismatch or a talent organization mismatch. And I kind of mentioned that to the group. It just, it's like a really talented person, but they were mismatched. And then how do you choose this new talent and what is the equation for that talent? And so, you know, I've been thinking about that and there is very little literature in this area. Again, I'm trying to think about this and how is code affecting that in the new normal, the next normal? And how is that based? And most of the times I know, like for example, let me get sports wonky on you this, but in drafts for like football or baseball projections, people try to project talent all the time. People sort of make a lot of money around the talent projections and what people should be doing in these highly statisticized, whatever it is Statistical sports. There you go. I didn't cry during stats, but I almost did.

They try to see what that's like and it's based on past observations. So past performance somehow projects to the future. And that's fine for some things, but there's a lot of randomness and a lot of luck and bias that occurs in that. So I've been thinking about that and how Atal Gawande, a talented surgeon, writer, thinker, book writer, past observations of his talent didn't really fit and it wasn't going to work out with Haven. And then going back to what you're describing in this pivoting of this new generation that time, maybe those give folks the time to look inward and reflect at what really what their talents are.

It kind of reminds me of a perfect on paper role that I'm sure he heard the names of those three companies and just thought, wow, how sexy. You know, I would too. I would probably take that job too, even if I wasn't sure if those were the three organizations behind it. And yet if we look at a tool, his zone of genius does seem to be ideas, writing, thought leadership. Maybe he doesn't want to be immersed in the intricacies of an organization and hard to say. I think that's a great example of sometimes you, you take an interim pivot or you don't know until you make a decision. You also talked about baseball. To continue on the baseball metaphor, I think we're going to see that utility players do really well. As in you can do a lot of things well. Sort of the jack of all trades.

Yeah.

And we're going to see specialists. So the pinch hitter or the designated hitter or the incredible shortstop who is an okay at bat but right. Doesn't let anything past him or her. The skill of self education, for example, is going to be increasingly important. It's vital right now because there is no set path, there is no set curriculum. You have to be able to look, adapt, adjust, learn, learn again, learn more. So that meta skill of learning and I love Tim Ferriss four Hour Chef, there is a whole section on meta learning and how to get better at learning. That's going to be a hugely important skill. And this skill of adaptability, you know, at Google, part of their hiring process is asking is the person googly? Sometimes people make fun of. But what does that mean? It means that they're bright, they're friendly, they're adaptable, among other things. But I'm just giving you the highlights. This skill of adaptability means companies are going to want to hire. And whether you're young or old, I don't even like the word old. But no matter your age, your career stage or bank account balance, the skill of agility and self learning, self teaching is everything, is everything. Because if in a world that we can't plan, the future can't even say one month out, that's what's crazy about opening things back up. It's almost like this hidden like shark lurking back in the ocean to go full circle back to the ocean. Yeah, yeah, because okay, we're going to go outside, but it's just everywhere this virus is looming. Oh my gosh. Speaking of sharks and Jaws.

Michael told me about a meme that if you watch Jaws in reverse, it's a shark by himself in the ocean and then he makes a lot of friends on the beach. Something like that. There's some meme, I wonder what would happen if we tried to apply that to the pandemic. But anyway, we just can't know. And so I think really understanding and getting clear that those meta skills are in fact skills, not just the technical or surface level skills.

So do you think the specialty. I have an interesting question. So do you think the specialty, like we keep on using the baseball analogy. So do you think the specialty players or the high, high end, high amplitude talent players are at risk because they're sort of stuck in that being a specialty or being, you know, high priced, maybe high priced talent people are going to be mitigating risk. Like I'm not sure I'm going to pay for that level of talent. I have somebody who is more adaptable, have more of the utility player. Do you think that's, that is something that could be happening or could happen?

Well, I guess it depends because you know, you have the Alex Rodriguez, Joe Rogan, you know, or pick your favorite player and there is going to be a premium for top talent. There just is. Or large platforms. If you're in the self employed arena, entrepreneur arena. It's as if Major League Baseball shut down half the minor league teams. I do think that we're in a situation like that and what I really don't want to see is the only restaurants that exist are chains. These winner take all effects that really kill our culture. That will be devastating. And I'm hoping and praying that there's some solution that we have not all uncovered yet that will allow things like restaurants to thrive even in this new and changing world. By the way, to just make sure I give you the jaws meme correctly, it's if you watch Jaws backwards, it's a movie about a shark that keeps throwing people up until they have to open a beach.

So one of your great talents, if I had, I guess a camera in your office right now. You were listening to me, you were talking to me and. And as you're talking, you were looking this up and then you're able to actually pull up on computer and read it back to me. That is a super. I don't want to use the word, the curse word. Skill. I mean, that's amazing.

Thank you. You know, it kind of reminds me, it is a skill I've honed for 15 years, if not more, because I used to get paid to take lecture notes in college. And then I parlayed that skill into when I work with one on one coaching clients, I take notes while talking and listening. So it's like my fingers work without conscious attention. It's really bizarre. It's like being able talk while driving a car. That's how it is for me. Well, thanks, mjc. Yeah, no, but I was listening to you. Don't worry.

No, no, no, no. I know you were. That's what's so awe inspiring, is like I. You've done this many, many times before and I sort of either momentum or in other groups. Like, how is she able to talk and then look something up and then remember it, look remember where it was. And I can only imagine that there's like probably five interns running around in your office.

In my head.

Yeah. In your head. Yeah. I'm sorry, it's all in your head. Yeah. Because you can't have that many people in your, in your apartment.

They used to joke, they used to joke at the startup. They said my boss, the founder would say, are you hiding five Jenny's in your office. There must be five of you in there. Like, how are you doing all of this? I think it's because I'm too scrappy to hire an actual podcast producer who would be on the call with us and finding all these links and whatnot. This is agile podcasting at its finest. You have to be the interviewer, producer, audio editor, all kinds of things.

Yeah, no, that's that. I'm just again, sorry. We took one went sideways here and Joe Rogan doesn't. Will never have that. How many millions of dollars they're going to pay him? He'll never have that superpower.

You know what? That's true. But he doesn't need that.

I guess he doesn't need that superpower. But you know What? Thank you. I'm going to start to value my skills at $100 million from here forward should. In fact, I just read Conscious Luck. It's the new book by Gay Hendricks. He wrote the Big Leap, which is about zone of genius, upper limit problem. And I love. I can't. I'm not going to say I recommend everybody go out and buy this book right now. I'm going to give you the key takeaway is that you can decide to be lucky. You can decide to be lucky from this day forward, if you haven't already thought of yourself as a lucky person, which if you live in a daily state of gratitude, maybe you do. But you could say, I hereby commit to being lucky and have abundantly good fortune in life and business from this day forward. How delightful is that?

And you know what? There is evidence to show that.

So I keep on saying I've been thinking about talent a lot because actually one of the things I'm working on right now is to change the way that at least in healthcare we do executive talent search, maybe a show for another day. And there's been some studies that look at the level of talent on some metric IQs like that. And then they mash that up to earning potential and success or like that and it doesn't match up. Exactly. And that there is some factor, there is some luck factor. And you know, people, I guess I should say there's iq, there's eq, there's drive, there's energy, all these things that people think are part and parcel of success. And then there is this luck factor. And that people in academia have looked at this different psychologists and it's interesting to read those papers because they can't seem to tease out things that happen that allow people to be successful. And I think that what you described is exactly that. It's the people who either made their own luck, were lucky, were at the right time, at the right place, had chosen the right path. And so in my mind it was so right now on espn. So back to the media. Espn, the Last Dance. The Michael Jordan phenomenon on ESPN is off the charts viewership. I think it's eclipsing major sporting events of the past. The amount of people are watching this. But Michael Jordan's dream was to play professional baseball, not basketball. So imagine if Michael Jordan would have basically been, you mentioned minor leagues. I basically would have been a minor league baseball player. Now at one point I think they actually brought up, he actually did this during. He had like these two, this period in his basketball career. Where he sort of took a break from basketball, started playing baseball and really didn't make it, and went to minor leagues and played local pro teams, whatever. But what if Michael Jordan had just stuck with it and became a baseball player? We probably would never have heard his name. Nobody would be wearing his clothes. And ESPN would be. I don't know what they'd be showing. They wouldn't be showing this. But for whatever reason, luck may be a part of it, whatever it is, he decided to stick with basketball also. And that's the path that he took. And what if, as you're describing earlier in this period of the next six to 12 months, during the pandemic, that people go, maybe I thought I was going to be a basketball player or a baseball player, but I should be a basketball player. And part of this is that luck formula. And they become successful because of turning whatever's happening over the next 612 months to a chance to reflect in that and moving into another space.

Well, this is exactly why I just recorded that episode for recent grads and even small business owners be willing to be the exception, because can you imagine if everybody lets this message hang over their head like a dark cloud, you're graduating at the worst time in history. You're going to earn less for the rest of your career. I just cannot think of a more disempowering thought. And the converse which I share in the episode is maybe you're graduating at the most interesting time in history. And that's equally true. How would you approach your life differently if you held that thought? So maybe that's a nice parting inquiry for all of us to end on. Where are we trying to Michael Jordan ourselves onto a baseball team where we'd be better off in basketball? Going back to the Atul Gawande example. Wow, this one's really tying all the themes together.

We had this all planned out, people.

Now we just need Joe Rogan in the movie Jaws with Michael Jordan as his sidekick pivoting, surfing. I don't know where this is going.

But maybe it's not luck. Maybe it's just the universe stepping in. You mentioned that the Earth, all the things that we've been doing to the Earth and how it's responding to us and those kind of things. Maybe some of this is also. Sometimes you just have to let the universe kind of step in and have it come to you. And still those waters, it is straight.

Up, the universe stepping in. I mean, it is truly the planet Mother Earth stepping in, the universe stepping in, the collective stepping in the collective stepping up, the chaos of the world getting magnified through the expression of the virus and how contagious it is. I mean, we are living in epic times and that does not diminish any of the pain and suffering. It's just to say that if you're still here, if you're still listening, if you're still with us, let's decide to keep doing the work here and myself included. I don't know what the hell my life and work is going to look like on the other side. I'm still just happily in my Harlem bubble, but I look forward to seeing it unfold. Well, I keep encouraging Michael to start his own podcast so we'll see if enough listeners. Right. It's really interesting way to think out loud, which you pointed out. I didn't quite realize that's what we're doing here. But I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for us to be able to connect and talk shop and fumble our way through this sort of ongoing pandemic conversation. Thank you so much Michael.

Thank you Jenny. Thank you to all the listeners taking their time to listen to us and be well.

Thank you listeners. Please submit a question for us. We never really have any clue what to talk about, especially in the red ocean of pandemic podcast content, so leave us a question that will definitely give us a head start. Pivotmethod.com/stay safe and sane everybody.

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 Pivot List, a curated 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.