323: Pivoting into a Professorship with Alex Budak

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I also love the serendipity that how much my class has changed. And even if the syllabus hasn't changed that much, the magic of teaching is that every single class is different by virtue of the magic alchemy of which students might be in the class or which student responds in some way to a question. You just can't predict what will happen. And it's magical when you sort of let go of needing to control and just let the magic of a classroom happen. It's absolutely wonderful.

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.

Welcome back Pivoters. I am so excited to be here today with longtime friend Alex Budak. Alex is a UC Berkeley faculty member, social entrepreneur, author and speaker. Fun fact. Alex and I went to the same high school. We were a year apart. I graduated in 01. Alex was one year after that in 02. He is teaching his wildly popular course Becoming a Change Maker while also directing the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program and teaching in their Executive Ed programs. So we're going to be talking about pivoting into a professorship today. He co founded Start some good in 2011 which has helped over 1200 change makers in over 50 countries raise millions of dollars to launch and scale change initiatives. We're also going to be talking about his brand new book. Well, brand new, we're within the one year bookiversary Becoming a an actionable, inclusive guide to leading positive change at any level. Alex, welcome to the show.

Hey Ginny, it's so fun to be with you. Thanks for having me.

There's another fun fact that I don't know if I ever told you and I decided to save it after I had hit record. I don't know if you know this, but when I left Google you were my very first coaching client that was paying me directly when I didn't have a full time job. You were the person who gave me hope, literally a month or two after leaving that it was going to be okay. I wasn't going to make zero dollars, I wasn't going to run my savings into the ground. You showed up at the perfect time. It was in 2011, right when you were starting start some good. And it was you. You always have a special place in my heart because when you enrolled in coaching, I had this feeling like it's going to be okay. So thank you for that.

That's so fun to hear. And you're the first coach that I ever worked with. And the work we did together was instrumental. I remember it actually remember because I was in the early days of my life as a social entrepreneur where I didn't have an office, so I would just work from hotel lobbies in Washington D.C. and I remember we would take calls together there. And so funny that that's where we both started. And it's been fun following your journey as well.

I remember that I was always working out of a laptop too. I distinctly remember having calls with you while I was working from home at my mom's house in Mountain View. And then you're globetrotting. And that was so cool because even connecting then was a decade after we had both graduated high school. So we have these every 10 year touch points of high school days. Connecting for that really pivotal moment for both of us coaching and doing what you were. I was so impressed by you. 2011. And now here we are in 23 talking about your first book, becoming a professor at UC Berkeley. I mean, just what a treat to follow this along of such a long arc of staying in touch.

And let's see what happens in the next 10 years, what our 2030s meetup looks like here.

What will a podcast be in 10 more years? We'll be in the metaverse, probably, sadly.

Oh my goodness. Well, I thought in eight years of pivot podcasting, we have yet to cover how to become a professor. I know you have a very serendipitous story behind this, but I also feel like you could help shed some light because a lot of people who hit mid career and start to feel like, oh, I do know something about the world or about my industry might have in the back of their mind that it would be interesting to teach someday or be an adjunct. So can you just fill us in? Like how did this come to pass that you became a professor at I'll say a relatively young age. How old were you when you got the position?

I think I was 32 or 33.

And is that young to become a professor?

Yeah, I think I was the youngest faculty member at that time. I went through sort of an idiosyncratic route. And so I guess I should say, you know, there's the traditional route to go, which is doing your PhD and going through the sort of tenure track process. But I'd imagine that if you're already thinking about that, you're probably on that track already. And that's perhaps less interesting than the sort of pivoting that we did. And so my story is unique, of course, but maybe I can share some experiences that could help your listeners think about teaching. If that's something that they would like to do.

That would be great because. Exactly. Of course, if somebody goes through the PhD route, it's more the path is laid out, whereas you came through the side door and that seems a little harder to do on some level. Or, and let's start with how you got this role and then I'll ask you some follow ups about what it's like and how you blend this with other work.

Well, a lot of it is just finding the door that's open and then sort of seizing it. So I initially joined UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business to help them launch a new leadership center as the executive director for the center for Reinventing Leadership. And if you haven't heard about it, that's because it didn't last very long. It had a one year contract. And after about six months it became clear that we just didn't have the fundraising that we needed. And so the dean made the decision to shut the center down. At that point, I had my foot in the door. I found that I really liked being at a business school and was kind of trying to figure out what's next. So I was reaching out to mentors for advice and talking to different people about what might I do or kind of, how do I make sense out of this? Do I stay at Berkeley? And then I met with a guy named jstowski. He's the senior Dean of Instruction, basically the one that oversees all the faculty, all the curriculum at Haas. And he'd always been a mentor to me. And so I went to him to just ask for some career advice, thinking, what should I do next? I was laying out a couple of sort of obvious next steps, but I'll never forget what he said. He said, but Alex, what do you really want to do? He could tell my heart wasn't really in it. What do you really want to do? I said, well, what I really want to do is teach. And then imposter syndrome and all those other things came on. Thinking about how faculty are older than me, they have PhDs, I could probably never do it. I said, I really want to teach. And to my shock and delight, he said, well, what do you want to teach? He didn't shut me down. He said, what do you want to teach? And that moment became super clear for me. I said, well, I want to teach a course called Becoming a Change Maker. And he said, okay, sounds interesting. Put together a syllabus, show it to me, and we'll go from there. So I shook his hand, leapt out of my seat, walked out of his office, closed the door, and then immediately pulled out my phone and googled how to create a syllabus, because I had no idea what I was actually doing. That began the journey of teaching in higher education.

Now you can have ChatGPT write your syllabus.

That's right.

Actually, my husband's been doing that. He's been for whatever wild ideas in his imagination. He's more of an artist than, but, you know, with a Jungian academic leaning. Anyway, he's been having ChatGPT write the syllabus, then do the deep dive. Write the lesson, write the workbook for every single micro point that he can imagine. I love how you open chapter one, or the introduction, actually, by telling us about your first day as a professor. You say, January 24, 2019, 10:00am I remember that moment vividly. I strode to the front of the classroom. The words, the world has never been more ready for you. Leaving off the screen behind me in size 140 font so that even students in the back row would feel their weight. And you say, while it's not uncommon for students to feel first day jitters as they begin a new semester, we rarely hear what that first teaching day is like for new faculty members. So here you are, having googled how to write a syllabus. We could come back to that process. But let's fast forward to your first teaching day. Was the imposter monster in the room with you on that day as well?

Oh, for sure. Because most faculty, when you start teaching at a university, you usually inherit an existing class, and so you usually have a syllabus. You usually have even slides. And you have this sort of track record, which knows, like, okay, I might be an unknown faculty member, but at least I know this course has worked before. And I walked in as both an unknown faculty member and an unknown course. The course that I created was based off of everything I'd learned to that point. My work as a social entrepreneur, my work running an incubator for social innovators. But it was brand new. Like, there wasn't anything like this at any other university. And so a lot of imposter syndrome there, where I was thinking, literally, would anyone be in the classroom? But I opened up the door, and what I saw almost moved me to tears. I saw that not only was every seat taken, but people were sitting, like, literally in the aisles and in the windowsills, like the class was oversubscribed. And that was so moving to me because I was putting something out into the world with literally no idea how people would respond. And to see that these students really wanted it. I mean, that moment, to this day, still moves me and motivates me to keep teaching, to keep supporting them.

How do you think that happened? Was it from the description alone?

Perhaps the description. Perhaps. I kind of tapped into something. I do think that universities, we talk more about this. I think they're very good at delivering some of the tangible, hard skills. At Berkeley, lots of students are data science majors, which is great, but I think oftentimes they're looking for sort of a why or a purpose behind it. And I think this class they saw as a chance to explore some of that meaning. I also write the description in the class in a very inclusive way. I think leadership classes can often feel exclusive. It's only for a certain type of person, a personality and experience level. And I wrote it very inclusively. And so my hope is that in doing so, everyone saw themselves in this class. So it was business students, of course, but also students from across campus. And so, yeah, I think we sort of tapped into something that was latent in students, but they were excited to explore.

So it was called becoming a change maker. What do you think it was? What made the description inclusive in a way that gave people the confidence to sign up.

Everything I do is leading with inclusivity. So talking about how it doesn't matter, your role, your sector, your major, where you're from, what you do, that each and every one of us can be a change maker. That's the fundamental belief that drives everything I do. My teaching, my speaking, my writing. And I think that became clear in the way the syllabus was designed, the lecture design, and even the course description was the idea that each and every one of us can become a change maker. And that's why? Those words that I put up on the screen, this idea that the world has never been more ready for, I truly believe it and I truly try to bring that into the teaching that I do. This idea that there's never been a better, more important time for each of us to step up and lead change from where we are, and that's crucial, from where we are, that you don't have to be a CEO or executive director. We can all lead change. And so I think that inclusive message hit home with people.

And was this class. I'm still so curious. You kind of make it sound so easy. Like, I was involved with the school. You had tried this, setting up this institute that shifted this mentor kind of helped you open the door. Was this first semester of teaching this class, was it set up as a pilot? Like, okay, Alex, we're going to give you one class, this one semester. See how it goes. I don't know, I just, I'm just so curious, kind of how the contract was set up, because what if it didn't go well? What if the students didn't sign up? Like, how was the certainty of the opportunity heading in?

Yeah, academia is not great with giving you certainty.

Right? That's what I figure.

This is a one shot, but I think in some ways you can lean into that. And that's what I did. I sort of figured, well, look, I've got this one shot, let's go for it. I could also have looked at it and said, I gotta be cautious here because I want to make sure I get a second chance. But I sort of figured, look, I'm lucky to even get this chance. Like, I'm thrilled to be here. Like, let's really go for it. I don't want to leave anything on the table. And so I brought it all out in terms of like guest speakers. I wanted to bring in exercises I wanted to try. And I think in some ways it's that freshness, that outsider perspective that actually allowed me to do really innovative things in the classroom that maybe if I had a longer leash, maybe I would have been more cautious about. In some ways it's sort of counterintuitive, perhaps, but I said, look, I've got this one shot, let's really go for it.

That's so awesome. I forgot about the guest speaker aspect. That's such a value that you can add, having come from the business world in this way.

And it's so important, I think, that students can see a bit of themselves in the guest speakers that come in. And so I'm very deliberate in terms of the people that I select. I want to make sure that maybe not every single guest speaker will resonate with every single student, but that every student will have at least one that say, yeah, they're doing this so I can do this too. And so we bring in leaders from the social impact world, from the traditional business world, from medical doctors, to just innovators across all fields. Because again, I want people to see how change happens in every field, in every sector and in so many different forms.

Now, did you start as an adjunct and then you became faculty? How does that work?

Each school does things a little bit differently. So generally there's like a two track kind of a two tier system. So there's the kind of tenure track and then there's the non tenure track. At Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, we call it the ladder faculty, those that are climbing the academic ladder and then the professional faculty, people like me that bring professional experience in. And so that's sort of the differentiation. Different schools will do different things. Sometimes it's adjunct, sometimes it's a lecture. The titles all depend on the university. But yeah, I'm sort of on the professional side of things.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Okay, I have so many questions for you. Let's actually rewind. You Google how to write a syllabus between that moment and the first day of class? Was there somebody who helped review the syllabus with you, who helped vet it to say yes? Alex, we think this makes sense. This is consistent with not only how to run a semester or a quarter, but also the caliber of Berkeley course. You know, like, how did you get the feedback heading in? It's probably a lot of work creating a syllabus. Actually, I know it is because I've seen them. I partner with a wonderful woman named Allison Kluger at Stanford gsb. She has a strategic pivoting class that I almost fainted because she teaches it with Alex Rodriguez. It's based on my book, and I know how much work goes into it.

Yeah, exactly right. It's a very collaborative process. And also, I learned that the process of creating syllabus takes a lot longer than I could have ever imagined. So I put together that first draft pretty quickly, and knowing it was rough, but I reflected back on all the lessons that I had learned myself as a social entrepreneur. I got to bring a number of the books that I had read that have personally affected me. I thought about the lessons I had learned from working with different change makers. Of course, my big secret is that I'm teaching at a business school, and I've never actually taken a business class before. I studied public policy in graduate school, so I never actually took a business class. So I also had to learn sort of, what does a business classroom look like? Put together a very rough first draft, and had a couple of mentors that took a look and provided some early guidance. But then one of the lessons that I learned is the importance of early champions. And so I took a shot and reached out to the dean of the business school, told him about the class, and fortunately, he was really excited by it, and he was nice enough to give some feedback. He helped to give some, like, business jargon and some sort of academic heft to it to sort of say, hey, you're talking about this, but this is actually a field. Why don't you call it this? To give it a little bit more kind of academic weight. But then it goes through a number of different sort of approval processes. And I remember the first time I got feedback, it was just marked up with so much red pen. And it seemed to me that they hated it everywhere. From, like you say, this book was published in 2008. It was actually 2007. I mean, that kind of level of detail, but also just, this doesn't work. This doesn't make sense. And so I went back to Jay, my mentor, and said, wow, this is really tough feedback. Can we still do this course? And he's like, oh, Alex, this is great feedback. This is totally fine. This is how we do it in academia. And so this woman was just so brutal on my syllabus. But that's just sort of the culture is looking for all of the weak points. And so listening to a number of different people and building as we went, I think it became a much stronger syllabus. Again, took a long time, took some patience, but it came out much stronger on the other end.

How many years have you been teaching it now?

I've been teaching since 2009, so my fourth, fifth year. Yeah.

Okay. How much has the syllabus changed over these last. Almost five years, the actual syllabus.

So kind of the nuts and bolts of it haven't changed that much. I think that's because the reception, the first time I taught it was pretty strong. I've changed as we've gone. I've made small tweaks, but the fundamental building blocks, I write it down in sort of three pieces. This changemaker mindset, that's your way of seeing the world around you and your role in shaping it. Changemaker leadership. How do you engage others in the change with you vision and influence, and then change maker action? How do you take those challenging but crucial first steps? That structure has stayed completely the same. What has changed, of course, are the individual lectures and then also tailoring it for different groups. So I began teaching undergraduates, and I love undergraduates because they have this raw energy and enthusiasm for changing the world, and they just need a bit of guidance and support and sort of ways of focusing that energy. I also began teaching in the MBA program, and I sort of showed up ready for those same idealistic undergrads and the first day of class, and I was, okay. This is a much different group. I found that whereas undergrads. And again, everything I teach is based in empirical research and data, but undergrads just kind of trust me. And the MBAs were very skeptical. They said, show me the data, show me the research. And so I learned to start doing that, even though, again, I didn't actually change the ideas that I taught, I just changed the way that I taught it. So making sure that I lean into a bit more of the research, empirical data behind it. And then also with MBAs, they have more work experience, talking a little bit more about classroom discussions and encouraging them to apply these lessons tomorrow versus what will it be like when you get your first job? And then how could you use these lessons?

Yeah, that's so interesting because the MBA students are probably much closer to you in age, and any given handful would be older than you and more experienced.

That's right. And then also I teach executives as well, so that's everywhere up to 50s, 60s as well. And so it's fun to be able to teach all these different audiences and sort of try to meet them where they are with their own skepticism, their own opportunities, but to help, again, that lens of inclusion, that idea that each and every one of us can be a change maker.

Yeah, it's so interesting how you're adapting the material for these different groups. It does exactly go to what you're saying, that it can be anybody. And then all of this rigor that you've put into the syllabus, I'm imagining you were able to parlay it right into the book. How much did the book then change or evolve what the syllabus had changed reached?

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, which could be helpful to those of your listeners who are thinking about going to academia or into teaching, came from Morton Hanson. He's a professor at UC Berkeley, and he talked about this idea of the academic flywheel. So we often hear about the flywheel as Jim Collins work, but in academia, the way he said that he thinks about his work is that he teaches a class. Once he gets that sort of refined, then he's able to write a book based off of it. He writes a book, and by writing the book, he gets in front of executive audiences and companies that bring him in to speak, which give him new case studies, which feed into the teaching that he does, which feeds into the book, and so on. And so I found that it's this wonderfully virtuous cycle that the book that I wrote is very clearly tied to the class that I teach. In fact, a big reason I wrote the book was based off of my students. I didn't set out to write a book, but so many of them would tell me, hey, this class is like life changing, which is, I mean, so meaningful to hear. It's life changing. I wish I could share it with my friends from other universities. And so have you thought about writing a book? And I ignored the first few, but after enough students asked me for it, I thought, well, maybe there's something there. And so as I wrote the book, it gave me a chance to sort of further refine that structure that I mentioned, but also to go deeper, to maybe take a case study that I touch on briefly in the class and go much deeper to reach out to that person, interview them, talk with them. And then by having that deeper case study, well, that makes me a better teacher because then I bring in so much more depth, updated stories, personal insights from talking with them, which then Just makes the class better. Class leads into the book, leads into speaking, and it's been a really nice virtuous cycle there.

I love that you share that. And to just picture the academic flywheel, which could also apply to anybody who teaches courses in general, even if it's not in a university setting. I love Jim Collins flywheel monograph. It's kind of this side shorter. You can read it in an hour off of Good to Great. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Let's talk about time commitment, because I too, over the years have had friends or family members who teach at universities, usually in an adjunct sense. If it's not their full commitment. I know it can be a lot of work and not always for equal pay, especially if you're a professional and you're used to earning a certain amount for time and energy investment. And yet they all say it's deeply rewarding. So can you tell us a little bit about the time commitment involved and are you trying to juggle other aspects of your career or is this your main focus?

Now, technically, the appointment you have is based on how many units you teach. And so at Berkeley It's a two unit class, which means that you meet two hours per week and it means it's a 25% time appointment. So ideally it's supposed to be about 10 hours. Realistically, when you create a class, especially for the first time, your first time teaching, it is so much more than that. It's not even funny. There's no way around it. It just is so much work. I think your listeners that have done anything kind of creative like this, whether it's writing a book, launching a podcast, launching a YouTube series, like, it just takes so much time up front and you're not fairly compensated. There's just no way around it. It just is so much work. If you're gonna do it well, I would spend lots of late nights, especially the first time, creating the class. Like, you know, the night before, I'd be changing slides and. And there's also just the mental space it takes up. I just remember that first semester I would always be thinking about the class. I'd be thinking about, oh, this is a fun exercise to do, or maybe I should say it in a different way. So I think you should prepare yourself that especially when you begin teaching for the first time, it's all consuming. It's a lot more than whatever your contract will say that it is. It does get easier and it does sort of smooth out over time. You move from Sort of creation mode to sort of polishing or iterative mode. But most people that are adjuncts will teach one or two classes per semester, which means that they'll need to do other things alongside that. What's great about academia is it gives you a lot of flexibility. So I get to sort of choose when I want to teach, I get to choose when I want to grade. And so it works very nicely in terms of other things. In my case, I have another staff job at UC Berkeley. So I'm full time at Berkeley and I'm sort of half time teaching, half time running other programs. But many of my friends who are adjuncts or professional faculty members, they will have consulting practices on the side. They'll write books, coaching practices, and then teach maybe one class. And so I think you do have to prepare yourself that for most professionals you will probably make less teaching than whatever else you could be doing. But I can just say from my own perspective that there's honestly nothing I've ever done that's been more fulfilling than teaching. My wife Rebecca, hates the days that I teach because I come back so lit up that I often can't sleep that night that I'm tossing and turning, just so energized from the classroom experience. And I think here's the great secret is that hopefully no one from Berkeley is listening, but I would honestly do it for free. It gives me so much joy and so much meaning. It's just the best. So that's not to say that everyone will get that same psychic reward. And it is a lot of work, but it's also incredibly meaningful.

I really do hear that from people. They always say it's so rewarding no matter how much work and all the administravia. For some reason I. Cause I haven't done it yet, so I don't know what I'm talking about. But I just think about all the grading and the admin and all the things you need to do. But I love hearing that you come home so energized. What do you think energizes you the most? Why does everybody say it's so rewarding given that, you know, you could go on a speaking circuit or you could be teaching in other ways. But there is truly something I hear from people about teaching at universities that seems to have a special sauce somehow.

Well, in my case, I just live for this magical moment, the moment where someone realizes for the first time that they can be a change maker. Sometimes it happens in week one, sometimes it's week 10 or 14. But it almost always happens throughout the semester. And it's just magical to be part of. There's such a positive energy in the classroom, such excitement. I mean, what a gift to be around people who want to learn, who want to grow and get to spend your time with them. There's a saying that I love, which is that one person teaches and two people learn. And so I learn a ton from my students. I think that's something that the best faculty members will get out of the teaching experience as you learn how other people are thinking about things. I also love the serendipity that how much my class has changed. And even if the syllabus hasn't changed that much, the magic of teaching is that every single class is different by virtue of the magic alchemy of which students might be in the class or which student responds in some way to a question. You just can't predict what will happen. And it's magical when you sort of let go of needing to control and just let the magic of a classroom happen. It's absolutely wonderful. And then of course there's also just the reward of meeting these amazing students and getting to keep in touch with them, hearing from them years after they've taken the class and see what they're doing, how they're applying the lessons. And that's really meaningful and wonderful to see.

I love this phrase. One person teaches, two people learn. That's so beautiful. And how you put it of the alchemy of who is there and the magic and serendipity of teaching is that every single class is different. That's so exquisitely said. That's a mic drop right there.

Thanks. It's the best to get to teach. And the way that each class changes depending on who's there, depending on the guest speakers, depending on the lessons that each thing builds upon, the next truly magical.

I hear something very similar from again, friends and family who say it keeps them young as well. I know you teach executives and MBA students, but something about teaching undergrads kind of taps them into the next generation and what's coming. And that goes back to one person teaches, two people learn. Because even if you are the expert in a sense teaching the material, you're just learning so much about who's coming up and what this generation is like, for better and for worse. Do you find that as well?

I joke that I self identify as Gen Z because I love my Gen Z students.

That's really funny.

I think really similarly to them. But it's also this privilege to sort of get into their minds and see how they think. As part of my class, there's no final exam. Instead there's a final change maker project. So students work in groups. We give them a bit of seed funding. Seed funding. They need to if they're running an event, they have money to buy pizzas and put out what we call minimum viable project. Students can choose any type of positive change they want to lead and have this amazing vantage point to see, well, what are the things they want to create change in. And so I get to see that this generation, you know, for instance, really cares about sustainability, climate. They care about diversity, equity, inclusion, racial justice, they care about mental health. And I think it's an important vantage point that I have to get outside of my millennial bubble and see, well, what are the concerns and what are the ways that these students want to address those concerns through their change making.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Speaking of DEI mental health, do you ever feel it's fraught as a professor trying to navigate these things with this younger generation? I mean, I also went to grad school for semester and a half. It was quite challenging actually. The environment in all kinds of ways. But I could tell especially that it's really tough on the professors to manage the intensity around all this. And different people have different things that they care about or that they're triggered by or what you're supposed to say or what you're not. And then that doesn't always apply to everybody. It just seems like these issues are very prominent right now and they would be very tricky. As a professor, how Is your experience with that.

I think people make it out to be more than it is. But I just try to be really thoughtful about the way that I talk to and engage with my students. I see them as human, I think they see me as human. That none of us are perfect when we lean into that. I do have to say I see a lot more mental health concerns than I ever remember when I was a student. I think part of that is very healthy because I think the Gen Z is more comfortable talking about it. So that's great. But also as a faculty member, I'm constantly thinking how do I best support my students? There's research done by Lori Sientos who's found that just an inordinate amount of students are having anxiety, even suicidal ideation. And so thinking about in my class, knowing the fragile mental health of many of my students, I try to be very thoughtful about that and try to give them the big perspective. On one hand, I'm grateful that the lessons that I teach them can actually be supportive. We talk about things like a growth mindset and flexibility, adaptability, which can be resilience, can be useful to students, but also recognizing that they're humans. One way that I try to give them flexibility is we have multiple papers that are due throughout the semester and I give students a choice of which ones they do. They don't have to do all of them. That way if they're having a bad week, they have midterms or finals, or they just don't feel like they can do a given paper, that's fine because they get to choose and they have some more autonomy. And I think that's a healthy thing again, to try to meet students where they are versus sort of forcing my rigid approach onto them.

Are there any other resources, books or podcasts or courses that you turn to to improve your skills As a professor.

I think I learn most just by doing. And so I try to be very self reflective. After every class that I do, I make some notes. I have a Google Doc sort of write about, oh, this went well, or this slide. Students laughed, this one student seemed confused. And so it's really like a deep reflective process where after every class I'm thinking how could this be better? I also love talking with other faculty members and seeing how they do it. But in terms of like a process, it's really quite self reflective. Like right after class, really thinking about what worked, what didn't, and then looking back at that as I plan for the future semesters class.

That's awesome. Yeah, you can always tell as a facilitator when people start nodding off and, like, they can't keep their head up because they're falling asleep. You're like, oh, maybe I lost them there.

Or learning which jokes land with an executive audience and which ones don't land with an undergraduate audience and tailoring it.

That's so true. Well, this has been very illuminating. Thank you for sharing so much of your perspective and experience on this journey. Is there anything I forgot to ask you about in terms of pivoting into a professorship that you think would be beneficial for somebody who's curious about this path?

So professorship is an amazing way, if this is exciting to you, to start teaching. But as I look back on my career, even though this is the first time I've had the formal title of teacher, I realized I've actually been teaching in everything that I do. Like, even in Start Some Good as a social enterprise. I was teaching people how to launch their social ventures. When I ran an incubator, I was teaching. And so if teaching is exciting to you, you don't have to wait until you have a classroom, until you have a syllabus, until you have students, you can start teaching from where you are. There's ways to mentor, to give back, to. Just find ways to teach your team, your direct reports. And so don't let the lack of a formal title stop you from teaching. And I would say the more you get comfortable in that sort of teacher identity, the more naturally these other opportunities will flow to you as well.

If you could give people one specific experiment, like one tiny step that they could take next, what would it be?

So if you're excited about teaching.

Yes.

Go write down a list of three different classes you'd be excited to teach. Don't be constrained by disciplines or by what currently exists. Again, becoming a change reader didn't actually exist at any university when I created it. Write down three titles of a class that you'd be excited to teach, then choose one of them, and then maybe write a description of what it could look like. But just give yourself that white space to sort of think about, what could I teach, what would be exciting to teach? And then perhaps give yourself a little bit of a chance to describe it.

Ooh, I love this idea. This is a great homework. Thank you, Alex. That's so cool. And then you could somehow, like, ab or split test these three.

You know what? Actually, there is a way to split test. I'll add to this experiment. You can pick one, or you can basically set up three. One Hour zooms, if you even have the energy. But you can actually see what the interest is. Like how many people sign up for each topic and sort of test them as a next step and see how it is teaching an hour or having a conversation for an hour.

It's a great way to go because it's a big commitment once you start teaching and knowing you have 30 hours of content to fill. So yeah, start with an hour and see how people respond to it and also how you respond to it if you enjoy it.

Yeah, I didn't even ask you. So it's 30 hours, that's a semester.

A two unit class is 30 hours. Yeah. A three unit class would be 45 hours. It's a lot of space to fill, but it's also kind of a joy to think about. How do you best leverage that time.

You know, twice now. This is like one of my quirks. I was, well, dating someone and then friends with someone they were getting. I don't, I forget what the degree was, but I basically like took their master's with them and did all the readings. So the professor was assigning all these interesting books and I would just get these syllabuses and like gobble up the reading and then talk about them with my friends. So I was like getting a shadow master's. And then when I met Michael, my now husband, when we met, he was just starting an mfa, a two year MFA in New York City. And I did so much of that reading, like I just took myself again through a shadow MFA degree doing all the reading. So I feel like just the syllabus alone is such a treat to get your hands on. And in your case you get to actually write it of like all the books you want people to read and the articles and just curating the most epic set of materials to help inspire your students.

What you're getting at is curation is a big part of this. There's original material that I teach, kind of new ideas based on my own research, but also a lot of it is finding the brilliance that's out there already and then curating it for students. One of the promises I make to my students is that, Jenny, I don't know if you remember this. @ UCLA, I think you also studied political science. And I remember we would take poli sci classes where the reading that the professors would assign is just unreasonable. I remember picking up a course pack reader and I think it was like 2000 pages for a 10 week class. I was like, there's no way.

You could possibly read This I read two books every weekend, like two full books every weekend to prepare for just the following.

Week. That's why you did better in college than I did. Probably. But I made a promise that was if I ever got to teach, I wouldn't do that. Then instead of assigning as many books as I possibly could, I would assign fewer books. But kind of essentialist. The better books, the things that really resonated with me, the things that actually made a difference on my own changemaker journey. And so I hope that the curated list actually really helps people. It's not just throw as many things as you can. It's like these are the best things to read to help you become a change.

Maker. Well, on that note, you know, I'm going to ask you what those books are. Of course we're going to add Becoming a Change Maker, which is your beautiful book. What are the other go to's? The less is more that you put in the.

Syllabus. I love the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I love Multipliers by Liz Weissman. I love the Power of Moments by the Heath Brothers. And then there's also some chapters from other books as well. I love some of Seth Godin's work. I love Young Me Moon from Harvard, her book Different. There's some chapters scattered throughout. But yeah, in terms of core books, love Carol Dweck and Liz Weissman's.

Work. Amazing. Yeah, I haven't read Multipliers, but I've heard great things that it's worth reading. And it's like finding the multipliers, the people who really well, as you talk about, really create change. Like do more with.

Less. The one sentence from it that really sticks with me is Liz says, stop asking is this person smart? And instead ask in what ways is this person smart? And that's something that I bring into my classroom as well, is trusting that everyone deserves to be there, that everyone has something to give and to say, how can I bring that brilliance out of.

Them? Amazing. Thank you for sharing that, Alex. Thank you so much for letting us in behind the scenes in this process. Where do you want to send people if they want to learn more and keep in.

Touch? Changemakerbook.com if you want to check out the book, it's available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and any of your local bookstores as well. And I also love connecting with folks on LinkedIn and so I'm pretty good about responding. So feel free to reach out. Let me know what resonated with you from this conversation. Find me there and let's continue the.

Conversation. Yay. I love it. Yes, there's an alchemy happening right now with who's Listening. And also Alex was on a ton of shows for his podcast or for the book. So I like these days searching somebody's name. And because it's the best search engine for podcast interviews, when you don't have your own show, it's the best way to find. So if you search for Alex Budak, you'll find all his interviews and be so impressed by the rounds that he made. As I was. Oh well, thank you Alex. It's so fun to have a reunion every.

Decade.

I'm already counting down the days until 2033. It'll be.

Great. Exactly. I can't wait to see what happens between now and then. Huge thanks again for being here for sharing. Your students are so lucky to have you and experience your work. And Pivoters, thanks so much for being here listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day everybody. Thanks Alex.

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 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.