A is for Ambition

Welcome to the Lamplighter Effect Podcast. I'm your host, Noelle Russell, and I am so excited to be here with you. We are gonna be talking about the Lamplighter Effect and what that means. It really is a collection of 12 principles: love, ambition, mindfulness, purpose, leadership, imagination, gratitude, and harmony. Trust, enthusiasm, resilience, and success. And on this podcast, we are going to bring all of them together to show you what it takes to be a truly authentic leader in this world. We are so excited that you're here, and I hope you enjoy the episode. All right, welcome back. So last time we were together, we talked about love. And that is the first, not by any other reason than it goes along with my wonderful acronym, LAMPLIGHTERS, but it was the first one we chose to talk about leading with love. So if you haven't listened to that podcast, I think it's great, that episode, head on over and listen to that. Doesn't have to be first, but certainly is part of this series that we're doing. Before we start bringing on all of our guests that we've recorded and will be recording over the next few months. So today though, we are going to move on to the second letter in Lamplighters, and that's A. And A could be for a lot of things, but actually, as part of my own leadership journey, ambition has been a huge part of my success and some of the challenges that I've run into. So A is for ambition, and it is all about, you know, how do we think about success? I am an extremely ambitious person. There, you know, I took a test recently called the Enneagram test. I'm a 3, uh, so now you all can go and learn everything there is to know about me from that number, um, or certainly a lot of things. There are, uh, a lot of similarities between what was part of that analysis and how I experienced my life. But I want to give you some of the things that I have learned over decades as a leader. For those of you who are familiar with who I am, you know I started my career actually in Y2K. For those of you who remember it, it was the first time the world was going to end. And I remember leaving college early in order to join the workforce and help, you know, from an engineering perspective, help solve this problem. And I was focused on helping bring more developers into the world. So, I was teaching and consulting around enterprise Java. And I did that for goodness, almost 13, 14 years before evolving my career and ending up where many of you know me today in the world of artificial intelligence. But ambition, I've always been ambitious. I've always tried to do things that many people would either tell me or at least look at me like I had no business doing. And so, I'll talk to you a little bit about the things that I do and the way that I think as a leader and why I think ambition is so important. I also will tell you how kind of unfortunate it is that we live in a world now where You know, I don't know, I have a lot of people that I work with, I work for, I have, you know, that work for me that aren't very ambitious, right? That, that are happy kind of with the day-to-day grind. And not to say that this isn't for you if you're one of those people. Uh, I remember someone at a company I was working for, they would say to me, Noelle, why don't you just coast? Like, why do you have to constantly go and drive and move forward. And I just kind of thought to myself, well, I'm not a coaster. It's just literally not part of who I am. So, I don't coast. And so, ambition has become a tool that I've used to move myself past moments of kind of— I'm not saying that I don't take vacation, I don't relax. But I do like to do things. I like to accomplish things. I like to make an impact. And I feel like ambition is a big part of that. But there is a thing, you know, such as healthy ambition, ambition that is balanced. And that's why the Lamplighter Effect is so important to kind of understand holistically, because ambition by itself can become a bit toxic. But ambition combined with love, combined with enthusiasm, combined with trust, these other things help create a tension with ambition. That kind of settle it into a really healthy space that I've come to experience. So, I'm going to take you through a couple points that I think are important as it relates to ambition and things that I've come to internalize, and hopefully they'll be helpful to you today. So, the first one, I learned from a very early age to never give up. So, I learned this primarily when I first started my career learning a programming language when I was not classically trained to teach or learn. Any languages at all, human languages or machine languages. And we were in a world where people needed to learn Java and I wanted a job. So I learned enough Java to teach people how to do it. And I remember there's a, you know, there was that, I can't remember his real name. I always do this in my podcast. I mentioned something and then I can't remember it, but it was in the Catch Me If You Can. Was that it? No. It was the one with Leonardo DiCaprio and he was a con man. And one of the cons that he put on, not that I'm saying I'm a con person, but one of the cons he did was he actually went into a university and for multiple semesters, this person was able to pretend and fake like he was an actual professor at that university. Interesting story. You should look it up. I've read it multiple times, but years ago now. But I remember thinking at that time, you know, all I need to do is know more than the people in my class. And it was kind of the same philosophy that this guy had, though his was unscrupulous and mine was just trying to survive as a technology teacher. And technology was changing at that point. We were moving between kind of monolithic applications like PL/SQL and Pascal and all of these types, uh, Fortran, which was my first language, all the way to the other side of that, which ended up being more about client-server and building compiled languages. And so I learned C++, I learned Java, um, and I had to teach myself. I always tell people I went to the school of Barnes Noble, uh, the University of Barnes Noble to be exact, and taught myself everything I needed in order to be really good at that But I wasn't super intimidated by teaching something I didn't know 100%. I only knew enough to be much smarter than everyone around me, like the 1%, right? I only need to be 1%, maybe even 10% smarter than everyone around me. I didn't have to know everything, but I had to know more than everybody else. And so that was kind of an ambitious drive for me. However, as a Latina, as a woman, I was— and as a very young person, I was in my early 20s at the time. I go in and I start teaching, you know, people at this big, you know, tech company. And all the people in there are wearing suits. They're all older than me. They're all a certain demographic. They're all, I mean, 20 years older than me. I remember them multiple times being called kiddo as I'm trying to teach them a software program. I also remember when I was teaching that people would start asking me questions that were ahead of the game. For no reason other than I think to test my knowledge, which I've now learned requires me to now over-prepare for everything. But at the time, I was surprised that people would just ask me questions just to see how smart I was before they even could settle into learning from me. And that is something, again, that drove my ambition. Whenever I'd get a question, I not only researched that question so that I'd never be stumped again, I researched every surrounding question. So, if I got a question on, you know, JVM garbage collections or heaps or any of the— I would like dive in and read an entire book about it. There wasn't GitHub back then, so I couldn't really dive into those types of resources, but I would go and grab a book, or I would go online and read the documentation, heaven forbid, of some of the software that I was teaching. Um, I remember back then we were— I was, uh, a huge advocate, proponent, developer on, uh, WebSphere application server. Some of you may recall And again, I didn't just learn, you know, the stack traces of errors that I got as I got them. As soon as I got one stack trace, I'd use that to find other errors. So much so that by the end of like 5 or 6 years, I could kind of like The Matrix, I could look at all of the different errors that could happen on a page and I could basically within a few seconds be like, oh, I know exactly what that is. It was very impressive. And also though, required me literally on a daily basis to be like, there's more to know here. I never sat back and relaxed and went, I know all there is to know. I was constantly learning by doing, learning through practice. So the first thing I realized is I can't ever really give up that, and I don't want to. It's kind of how I embrace the idea of continuous learning at scale. Like, how many things can I simultaneously continuously learn? But never giving up, never stopping, never thinking that I'm not smart enough to learn it or that I'm not capable. I realize every single person who is good at what they do started not knowing anything about that thing, no matter what it is, from walking to talking to physics to multiple language polyglots, like all of them, right? So I think it's really important for us to remember that no one's born an expert. Everyone develops that expertise over time. And the best way to develop expertise is to, number one, set that rule. I'm never going to give up until I achieve the goal that I have set out to do. Literally the definition of ambition. But then I also, right, make sure that I have a purpose, that I have a reason for doing the thing. So many of you know, I have a son with Down syndrome. He's now 18 years old. So 18 years ago, I was about 5 years into my career at IBM when I had him. And interestingly enough, like when I had him, my, again, my instant reaction was not to give up, right? It was not to, hey, you know, even though they suggested I put him in an institution or I put him up for adoption, he was my firstborn child. So they were like, oh, you don't want this for your first. Like there are places for kids like this. But I didn't want that, right? I was ambitious. I wanted to give him the best life possible. And I was lucky though. I had someone sit down with me. From the Down Syndrome Association. I mean, he was 3 days old, I think, at the time, had just gotten his diagnosis. And this— the president of the Down Syndrome Association comes in and says something critical, something super important that I never forgot. Sat me down and said, you know, he is 99% you and 1% this other thing. And there's not a single thing he will not learn to do if you have the patience to teach him, if you have the stamina to teach him, because he may— where other typical developing kids might learn 1, 2, even 100 times, he will take 1,000, 10,000. It will take more, but it's not that he won't get there. And again, I'm not talking about the ambition to like fly or the ambition to do supernatural things like turn invisible. Like if I want him to read, he will read and he does now. Right? If I want him to do math, he could do math. It's just up to me to have a vision of how I want him to succeed and to consistently work with him and never give up. Ambition. I was the ambition on his behalf until he was old enough to have ambition for himself. And I think that's huge. Like creating a vision for yourself and for your life is a critical part of ambition. Like it's, it's not enough to just be like, oh, I want to go and crush that number. Why? And the main reason why that word, that term why is so important is because when things get hard, when things get like it seems like it's not going to work out, when it seems like the reward isn't going to be there, what's going to keep you moving in that direction? And what keeps me moving in that direction is that I work in a field that impacts my son, impacts my children, impacts my dad, my aging parents. I am passionate about driving progress in that area, so much so that the Tiny setbacks that seem huge at the time end up fueling, like lighting gas on my purpose and my ambition to solve those problems. So I think in addition to not being willing to give up, I think it's really important to create a vision for what you want and hold on to that vision. Look at that vision every day. As a matter of fact, I look at my goals of what I want. I look at it every day, not just once a day, but I write them down every morning and I also write them down at night. I infuse my mind so that I use this concept known as a reticular activation system, right? I write it down morning and night so that as I'm going through my day, I'm constantly being drawn to things that are in alignment with those things that I'm focused on. Reticular meaning eyes, right? That what you see, it's similar to, you know, sometimes we, I remember actually, gosh, years ago when the Nissan Murano had just come out. The Nissan Murano just come out. I saw, I wanted a white one. And the reason I wanted a white one was because I didn't see it anywhere. No one had one. So I was like, I'm getting a white Nissan Murano. Well, funny thing is, is as soon as I made that decision, I started to see Nissan white Muranos all over the place. And I was like, Wait, I just decided to buy this thing and they're everywhere. I ended up buying a beige one also because I thought no one had it. And literally the day I roll it off the lot, I see one in traffic. And it's just because I told my brain this is important and I want to focus on it. All of a sudden now my attention is drawn to those things. What happens in a world where we create a vision of what we want, we tell our brain to focus on it, and now all of a sudden things that were in plain sight before that we could not see all of a sudden become available to us. A relationship that could connect us to funding that we need, a leader that could connect us to a promotion that we deserve. Like, all of these things start falling into place. Critical, critical, as a critical part of ambition. So creating that vision for your life is huge. Now, I took years and years of practice to develop my vision. I don't think it needs to be super complicated, but The only way to start is to start, right? So write down what you want. I know a professor once said to me in a class, like he was teaching an exercise and he just said, we're going to take— it was the first class of the new year and he sat us down and said, we're going to take the class session and we're just going to kind of freeform thinking, write everything we want on the page. For that year. So it's early in 2024. Do that for yourself this week, right? Take a piece of paper, set a timer for 20 minutes, and try to use all of it and write everything that you want in your life. Not this year, not this week, not today, but in your life. What do you want it to look like? The funny thing about documenting it, writing it down, looking at it, is your brain will start moving you in the direction of those outcomes. Now, one of the other things that, you know, ambition is important, it drives us. But one of the other really important balances to ambition is measurement of success, right? What does success look like? So, as soon as I write down my goals, I don't make them SMART. Some of you are aware of the acronym SMART, which I will try to get it right. Right. Some of you can maybe respond to the podcast and tell me what it stands for if I get it wrong. But specific, right? It should be very specific. I like that part. It should be measurable. Also really important. A— oh, I don't remember. A— accurate, maybe? I don't know. R— realistic. This one I have a little bit of trouble with. I'll come back to it. And T, time-bound. So the A is the only one I kind of didn't know. But either way, the reason I don't know it is because I don't actually use SMART goals that often. I use them sometimes to drive very tactical things. But when I'm looking at my life, I actually want what I've come to know as 10X goals. And I actually, I was listening to a book recently. And they were talking about Serena Williams, the tennis player, and how at one point in her career, she had just won her 17th Grand Slam. And she was then planning like ambitiously, all right, I'm going to go after my next one, 18, the big 18, you know, kind of jazzing herself up, pumping herself up for the 18th. And her coach sat her down and said something that changed the trajectory of her career. And said, you are not going for 18. That's not the goal. You're going for 30. You want to be the athlete that does 30 Grand Slams in their career, not one more, 16 more, right? Or whatever the number was. And what ends up happening when you set a goal so audaciously bold and beyond almost your comprehension to attain is that you have to really get smart and think about who do you need to become to achieve that outcome, right? In my case, I mean, I've said this, I've reset my goal so many times, but at one point I wanted to make $1 million in a single year. That was my goal. At that time, I was making half that. What did I need to do differently in order to double my income? I had to change my job. I had to change my relationships. I had to change, I mean, I had to change everything. I had to change the way I, my setup. My office, my— what I did every day, right? I needed to completely reorient. And in order to reorient accurately, I needed to find someone with my same ambition that was 5 years ahead of me that had already reached my goal so I could mirror what they had done, model what was already working. The most important part of that though is measuring it, being able to measure it. There's a book out there called Measure What Matters. Most of us know it because we've been trapped in OKR-ness in some of the companies we've worked for. I love OKRs when done accurately and properly. Sometimes people grab onto this concept of OKRs and they create an objective and then they create 1,000 key results and they create no mechanism to actually achieve really strong results. One of my favorite parts of the OKR system is setting these ridiculously audacious goals and doing whatever you can to get there. Not toxically, right? Not like they did at YouTube or wherever it was where they ended up setting such a huge goal that everyone was so pressured to attain it that they ended up, oh my goodness, like fudging the numbers, right? And lying and cheating to get there. Like that's a sign of unhealthiness. We don't want to do that, right? That's where Lamplighters comes in where you have these other leadership principles that ground you in By the way, that's not trustworthy. That's not, you know, purpose-driven. You want to set goals, ambitious goals that stretch you. Because I remember, um, I was reading this book by Adam Grant. I absolutely love it. It was— it's called Hidden Potential, so I'll put it in the show notes for you all. Um, I love it, Hidden Potential. And one of the things that he ended up saying that I really thought was interesting is that growth sits right outside, right past your comfort zone. He didn't say it exactly like that. He said it much, I'm sure, much more eloquently. But, but like in order to see the growth that you want, you have to become uncomfortable. You have to get cozy, wear discomfort like a blanket, which is something that I try to do. So It's important to measure what matters so you can see, are you there yet? And if you're not there, get uncomfortable. Do things you aren't doing. So, especially in my world, I sell my consulting services. I sell my speaking services. And I have to have lots of sales conversations. I don't really like selling that much, right? So, what I have to do is get very uncomfortable. But guess what happens as soon as I get in that conversation? I realize, I can help you and I want to help you and I can help you in such a big way. I started becoming over the last 2 years a fractional Chief AI Officer for companies. Incredible. Like the amount of things I can help people with because I saw it at Amazon, because I saw it at Microsoft, and I can help them in their company apply it reasonably and responsibly. Like I get so excited, but I have to get through the discomfort of even getting on the phone. Once I'm on the phone, it's all good, usually, you know. But once I'm in the conversation and I'm serving people, it's amazing. But there is a huge amount of discomfort picking up the phone, dialing, setting an appointment, having a Teams call. Like, these types of things give me huge anxiety. But then I get on the call and I learn what their problems are And I just feel myself light up inside. Now, one of the tools and techniques I use to drive ambition in my day and my— really, I do it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. I do all of this with my husband. Every morning we get up and we plan our day. We then do monthly and weekly reviews. We, of course, do yearly reviews, which we just did. One of the things that I do is I set up these goals. Again, they're not SMART. They're a little bit specific. They're pretty specific. They definitely are measurable, but they're not so much realistic because I have to change who I am to get there, and then it'll be realistic. But I do that, and I also set— I go from what, what do I want to do in 12 months? I break it down by quarter. What do I need to do each quarter to achieve those goals? Then I break it down not just by quarter, but by month inside each quarter. What do I need to do if my goal is to do this in Q1? What do I have to do every month of Q1 to meet those goals? And if I don't, what do I, you know, how do I prepare for, you know, the, the strategic and tactical changes that need to happen in order to get there? The answer is massive action. I have to take massive action. I ultimately like Instead of talking to 100 people, I'll say I need to talk to 10,000. And I've done this, right? Because all you have to do is set a goal and then take massive action to get there. And even if I didn't hit 10,000, I would have hit way more than the 100 that I was going for. So, setting your vision is number 1. Then, set your goals, year goals, then quarterly goals, then monthly goals. Then, in each month, break it down by week. And guess what you do last? You break out each goal that you have on a weekly basis. You break it down to what do I have to do every single day to get there? It is a math, a mathematical equation. And once you figure it out for yourself, you can do anything you want. It is a function of what you do every single day that amounts to what you're going to— what you get to accomplish for the year and what you'll do in the next 5 years. Now, sometimes we don't even know where to start. And so, I do want to be sensitive to that because I've been there. I've been in those situations. Now, I've got this kind of ambitious machine going in my life and I love it because I get to achieve things that 5 years ago I never thought I could achieve. But, one thing I do often with my husband is we'll sit down and we'll do something I've come to call an idea storm, where we just kind of, instead of brainstorming, we just throw out ideas. Like all sorts of ideas. I mean, my husband is amazing at soccer, like phenomenal, um, was pro and, you know, has like done all these amazing things in soccer. Of course, we're older now, so he doesn't— he plays still, but he plays recreationally. But I was like, oh my gosh, you could use your skills and all the things you did to become amazing at this sport to train people. So we threw that down. I want to create a company, and of course I have AI skills,. So I'm like, oh my gosh, what if we took AI plus your soccer skills and put them together? We ended up launching a company called Precision Soccer, which was the ability to leverage data-driven results. Think AWS and the NFL, right? There's, what is it called? NFL Stats or something like that, right? So using statistics to actually measure, see some, see what I did there, right? Measure your baseline and then measure your Continuous improvement, develop ambition. Super, super cool. And we only got to it because we were throwing ideas around. One other idea was to build, you know, a product for men in this world. I, of course, am building products for women and we have tons and tons of ideas and we don't build them all. We just use it to get us excited about all the things we can bring to this world. Now, the last thing we do, and we've done this as a family actually, so I encourage you to do the same. We have one of those boards, smart boards in our house called a Vibe, vibe.us. It's awesome. Um, eventually this podcast will go video and you'll get to see me, uh, whiteboarding out some of this content. Uh, but in Vibe.us, we use it. We have a sheet and I broke it into a couple different categories. You can do this as well. And, and you could do it personally or you could do it together with your partner or you could bring your whole family in. I loved having my kids chime in on the things that they wanted. But we broke the, the board into 3 different columns. One column was what we wanted to have, physical things, a nice house, a pool, a cold plunge, infrared sauna, right? Like all these things that we wanted to have. And then the second column was what we wanted to do. Activities, experiences. Go on a Disney cruise, go to Universal, right? Um, go to Harry Potter Land, which happens to be Universal, but my kids aren't totally aware of that, um, my younger ones, right? But that's the idea. And then imagine the last— so there's have, what you want, things, do, what you want to experience, and then the last one is be. Who do you want to be? And I think who you want to be is so important because it feeds the experiences. Like, who are you going to be when you're in those experiences? Who are you going to be in order to have those things? And so, be ends up being things like, I want to be a good mom. I want to be a good spouse. I want to be a best friend. I want to be a great speaker. I want to be a good consultant. I want, you know, what do you want to do? And everybody chimed in and said, these are the things on the whiteboard. We were able to assign everyone a color. So, it became this beautiful tapestry and rainbow of what we wanted to have, do, and be this year. And we did it last year. And then, at the end of the year, you get to go, "All right, did we get there?" But not at the end of the year, meaning like a resolution, right? You set it and forget it. We revisited it every month. And as we got closer to the end of the year, we started upping the ante on trying to deliver on those results. So ambition is not a terrible thing, especially when complemented by other leadership principles like trust, right? Like purpose, like mindfulness. You'll see mindfulness in our next episode, so you'll get a chance to dive into that. But just take a moment and think about how important is it to be driven to do the things you are meant to do in this world? And if you are not aware or not sure what you're, what you're meant to do, grab a piece of paper, set a timer, and write out everything you think you want. Have, Do, and Be is a really incredible exercise. I encourage you to do it this week if you have never done something like that before. It's a great way to hold yourself accountable for the vision of the world that you want. That brings us to a close on ambition. It is just a small kind of view of some of the things that I personally do, personally think about when it comes to being an ambitious leader. It goes hand in hand with being a leader who leads with love, um, as we talked about in the previous episode. And in our next episode, we're going to talk about mindfulness. What does it mean to be a mindful leader? And I will get to share with you some of my favorite characteristics of mindful leaders. I call them the 7 virtues of mindful leadership. So I look forward to sharing it with you, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for tuning in to The Lamplighter Effect. I'm Noelle Russell, and and it's been a privilege to share this time with you. Remember, each step we take in our leadership journey brings light not just to our paths, but to those around us. Join us again on The Lamplighter Effect, where we'll continue to illuminate the path to mindful, inclusive leadership. Until then, keep shining brightly, and remember, you have the power to light up the world. If you're ever hoping to be a guest on this podcast, don't hesitate to reach out to us at requests@ailleadershipinstitute.com. See you next time.