INBOUND Bold Talks: Frederique Dame "Harnessing Happiness to Build Your Career"

Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much for being here. Very nice intro. Okay, so good afternoon. Thank you for being here and for finishing your day with me today. So I'm going to talk about harnessing happiness and how to live your best life while building your career and really building your life. So I'm going to start with a story. So when I was a teenager, I watched this movie, Working Girl, featuring Melanie Griffiths and Sigourney Weaver. And I just got inspired by this movie and I really loved this movie and I want it to be what they had. I love Melanie Griffiths in the character of Tess McGill, who was hustling and being passionate about business and connecting the dots and becoming a media executive by just hustling that way. So I just decided I wanted to be a businesswoman. So I went to my dad and my nickname is fff. So that's what people call me. So I went to my dad and I told my dad, dad, what would it take for me to be a businesswoman? And both my parents were dentists at the time and my dad, as a dentist has no idea what it would take for me to be a businesswoman in south of France of all places. And he just told me, he's like, well, if you study engineering, I think you have a pretty good chance to become a businesswoman. So here I am studying engineering, moving to London to learn to speak English, then make my way to Silicon Valley, where I started as a market research analyst in San Francisco, became a product manager in a enterprise software company, and discover a passion for social product. Back in 2004, I decided to join Yahoo to work on social product. Then I worked at a few photo sharing sites and most recently I worked at Uber for four years. So people will think that I had a pretty straightforward and pretty easy path towards becoming a businesswoman. But it was not easy. It was a lot of ups and downs, a lot of fallbacks, lots of, oh my God, am I going to have to go back to France? But I made it. And I made it because throughout this process, I decided to be happy and to make happiness my guiding force. So I'm going to talk to you about three principles that I've used in my career to really find that happiness and to really move forward toward that goal of becoming a businesswoman. So the first one I want to make is you need to find your. Why. What has really saved me is that I had this vision as a teenager to be a businesswoman. And I really powered through everything to achieve that goal. So what is it for you that you want to achieve in life? What is it that keeps you awake at night? What is it that makes you want to get up in the morning to do things and to really keep going? What is it that will keep you to power through when something is getting really hard? What is this vision that will be like, you know, it's hard, but I know what I'm doing it for. You really need to think through what is it that you're trying to achieve, whether it's personal or professional or something on the side of volunteering or giving back, what is it that really resonates with you, that will get you to the next level? Because life and work are cyclical. You're going to have ups and you're going to have downs. You're going to have amazing times where you need to really suck it in and really enjoy it. And you are going to have things that are going to be really, really sucky. But you need to just know that it's going to be temporary. So what is it that you're striving for in life? What is your why? And then once you have your why, you need to be daring. You really need to be daring and get outside of your comfort zone. Because nothing comes out of your comfort zone. You need to really look at what is it that you're trying to achieve and really get to the next level and grow and get better and have a fulfilling life. Because staying where you are is not going to fulfill you. But really what you need to understand is you really need to take a risk. And taking this risk is going to be mortifying and paralyzing. But really what I've learned is that to be able to take a risk, you need to deconstruct that risk. And you need to really look at what is your worst case scenario. And once you figure out your worst case scenario, you're going to realize that maybe it's not too bad and I can really make it happen. Being daring is all about trusting yourself to handle the results. And if you know you can handle the results, sorry, you can handle the results and you can work this worst case scenario, you're going to be fine. So what if you decided that you were going to be fine no matter what you're taking that risk, you have 10 different options, 10 different outcome, the best outcome, the worst outcome. And all of them are possible and you can handle all of them. When I studied engineering, I was scared. I was the oldest of 13 grandkids. No one had studied engineering in my family. Everyone was trying to dissuade me because it was hard, it was a male oriented space, like I would have no life and I would fail. So I went to my dad and I'm like, dad, I'm scared. What should I do? He's like, well, if you fail, you can always go back to dental school. Because they wanted me to be a dentist. And knowing that I had this option, I went full speed ahead with becoming an engineer. And next thing you know, I graduated with two degrees. But I really made it happen because I knew I could fall back on something else. And then once you have your worst case scenario and you know you're going to be fine, you're not going to be able. You're not going to obsess about it, you're going to put it on the side because when you don't really know what's going to happen, you're always going to be obsessed with the what if and what if and what if and then you're going to be distracted to really go full speed ahead with your risk. But if you know what is your worst case scenario, you can put it on the side and go full speed ahead into this is what I'm trying to achieve and this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it well. This is a team at Uber three years ago for my birthday and we were still a very small team at the time. And when I joined Uber, I was at a point in my career where I really, really wanted to. Sorry. I really, really wanted to. I really wanted to join an amazing team and have a mission that was fulfilling. I really wanted to have fun. I had been VP of Product for a while and it was not fulfilling to me. I really wanted to work at a startup and roll up my sleeves and really do meaningful work. So I talked to the Uber team and I really like them, but it was extremely risky. 80 people, a black car business that was pretty expensive. People would only use it on Saturday night and the regulatory environment was really, really bad. We could close the door, like at any point. But I also had 10 years of experience in product management. I had savings and I had connections and I knew that if it didn't work out, I could find another job in a minute. Or maybe not in a minute, but in six months. So I'm like, you know what the worst case scenario is not too bad. I'd be fine if it doesn't work out. But in the meantime, I really like that team and I really think I'm going to be Happy there. So why not just try it out? And next thing you know, I try it out, I give it my all, and four years later, this is where we are today. And it was pretty magical. But then you're going to fail, I'm going to fail, I failed, you failed. Because this worst case scenario is going to happen, right? It's not going to be perfect. And yes, things are going to happen because not everything is under your control. You think you control everything. You have this best product that you're shipping to the market and next thing you know the, the market shift or competitor comes out and your product is irrelevant or you need to change everything all over again. Well, you need to realize that there are things you cannot control and things you can control. And really the only thing you can control is how you respond. How do you want to respond? Do you want to be resilient? Do you want to be positive? Or do you want to be angry at things and be resistant to it? You want to be elegant? You want to be positive in face of adversity and in face of failure? Because 10 years from now when everything is going to be okay because you're going to be fine. Ten years from now, do you want to look back at the situation where you failed, where you kind of like look at yourself handling things negatively, handling things where you give up, or do you want to really look at things where you're really positive and you handle it with spoils and use hustling? And you look back at yourself and you're like, you know what, I did a pretty good job here. This was kick ass. This is one of my favorite nail polish. I like the name. So two years into my career I was a market research analyst and September 11 hit the market goes crash. My world crashed. I got laid off. So I was inexperienced. I just had two years of experience. I had very little savings because I had just started my career, I had no connections and I was on a visa, which means that I was going to be deported. And I had fought so hard to be in the U.S. i'm like, this cannot be happening. What am I going to do? So I decided to put everything in storage. I had a girlfriend who told me, you can stay with me as long as you want, no problem. And so I decided to hustle my way to find another job in the U.S. i'm like, I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to use the excuse of the market. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to keep Staying. I'm going to stay here. I woke up every morning, I joined yao groups because we didn't have LinkedIn or Facebook at the time. I went to networking events and next thing you know, I found a job in product management. I managed to reinvent myself and to find a job that I built my career upon, which I felt very lucky about. At the time, I didn't know it, but you look back and you're like, oh, my God, I'm glad I went through that and I'm glad I was open to it because this put me on a different trajectory. And I also realized as a people that so little, this very little people that I had in my network were so nice to me and opened doors and opened their address book. And next thing you know, I could find a job and I could get my job and I could stay in the US which was pretty incredible. So you need to be positive and you need to hustle because you never know what can happen. But then not everything is going to be perfect. You're going to try to be elegant and you're going to be kind of angry at life and things are not going to turn out in your favor. But see every failure or every hurdle as an opportunity to get better. Can you find in yourself something that you knew when you got into this situation was not quite right? Can you iterate on yourself and be like, you know, I want to look back and see if I could have done it differently if I had to do it all over again. I had this sign that didn't felt right, but I didn't want to listen to myself or I didn't want to ask the right question. Can you do it better next time? Can you iterate on getting better? Because this is key. You want to learn from your experiences. You want to look back and you want to really say, how can I do better next time? Because if you don't do that, you. You're just going to power through life and never learn anything or never learn to get better and better and be more resilient and to really be open to finding ways to get better. So really think about how to iterate on yourself and really think through asking the tough question, but don't beat yourself up. This is one of my favorite pictures. We had a hackathon at Uber one day and in product you do retrospective. And this hackathon went really terribly wrong. And we had a lot of things to manage. And one of the finding was lower the number of WTF per minute because we had a lot of them during the weekend. But I love this image of, like, going back and be like, how can we do it better next time? So we do it with our product, but can we do it with our lives? So that said, I really hope that your next phase starts now. Think about what drives you. What is it that is your guiding force every day that makes you get up and do things, be daring, get outside of your comfort zone within that framework, and really get to the next level over and over again. And then when you fail, fail elegantly be because the experience is going to be much better, because you're going to find things in yourself that you didn't know you had. And people will remember you as being someone with poise and someone they want to be around when things get tough. So, with that said, thank you very much.