Sarah Cooper: How I Turned an Everyday Observation into Whole New Career

Hello. How are you guys doing? I'm so excited to be here today. I'm going to talk to you about how I turned my everyday observations into a whole new career. And especially I'm going to talk to you about those tiny little ideas that you think nothing of, but that could become something really amazing if you'd only let them. So my story starts nine years ago. I was in a meeting, and it was like any other meeting when a product manager got up from the table, went over to the whiteboard and started to draw something. The room became silent as everyone watched what this product manager was drawing. And it turned out to be a Venn diagram. And it was sort of related to what we were talking about, but ultimately it just made no sense at all. But instead of everyone kind of making fun of him, something weird happened. Everyone started helping him draw the Venn diagram. They were like, oh, make this circle bigger and make this one smaller and change the labels. And I watched in amazement as this product manager just took the marker, handed it to someone else, sat back down at his desk, went back to working on his laptop while everyone else obsessed over this ridiculous Venn diagram. And I thought to myself, that was a pretty cool trick that made him look pretty smart. So I wrote it down in my how to look smart in a meeting, Draw a Venn diagram. Now, his Venn diagram wasn't as ridiculous as this one, but it was pretty close. Now, I put that notebook away and I didn't look at it for seven years. And then I came across it again. And I was at Google at the time and I had been in even more meetings than I hadn't been before. And it kind of re sparked this idea of what do the smart people do in meetings? Because without articulating it, I knew that a very large part of my job was to go to meetings and look smart in them. So I knew that if I went to a meeting and I said something really insightful that everyone was really impressed with, I would replay that moment in my head for days, sometimes weeks later. And I wanted to put together more of these tricks. And so I created a blog post called 10 tricks to appear Smart in Meetings. And I added some more tricks to it. Tricks like translate percentages into fractions. I remember when someone said 25% of people clicked on this button and someone chimed in with, oh, about one in four and made a note of it. I was like, those math skills are very impressive. Ask the presenter to go back a slide. It doesn't matter where in the presentation you Yell this out. It will immediately make you look like you're paying closer attention to that slide than everyone else. And your co workers will be so excited to see what you're going to say, but all you have to do is just kind of nod, look at it, and go, okay, we can move on. Ask will this scale, no matter what it is, just ask if it's going to scale. No one even knows what that means, but it drives engineers nuts and it makes you look really, really smart. Now, I was a little scared about posting this because I was still working at Google at the time, and I didn't want my co workers to think that I was making fun of them, even though I was. But I posted it anyway, and it just took off. It had a few hundred thousand views within a few days. It had a million views within a few weeks. And I was blown away by the response. And when I did that, I had no idea that some little thing that I wrote in a notebook would later become a blog post that would go viral. That would later lead to me quitting my job to follow my dream of writing. That would lead to me publishing my very first book, 100 tricks to appear Smart in Meetings. This is my first book, and as part of the reason that I'm here today, I'll actually be signing the book right after this talk. And if I had known this, honestly, I would have done it a lot sooner. I wouldn't have taken almost 10 years to do. Really made me wonder, you know, what other ideas had I just scribbled down and just completely tossed aside without even really thinking about them? Or what other ideas had I tried to do but just kind of gave up on before I even gave them a chance? And what other ideas have you guys written down in a notebook and just said, oh, whatever, this doesn't mean anything, even though it's something that you might be really excited about and you just haven't given it a chance to become something. I do this all the time now. There's a backstory here, of course. I am the youngest of four kids, and I have an older brother and two older sisters. And I was really, really close to my sisters growing up and really protective of them because they both had severe issues they were dealing with. My older sister, Charmaine, was born deformed with the bones in her face were underdeveloped, and she was in and out of surgeries all throughout my childhood. My other sister had a learning disability, and so I developed a great sense of empathy because of my sisters, and they're fine now and very happy and very successful. And I think that because of that, I minimized myself. And I thought it was kind of a noble thing to do. It was kind of a noble thing to say, well, what I'm going through is not as important as what everyone else is going through. But it meant that I didn't really speak up in meetings. I didn't really share my opinions. I didn't really take my ideas that seriously because it seemed like what other people were going through was just way more important and big and huge than what I was going through. I have always admired people that have been able to share their ideas, and you've probably seen a ton of that this week. You know, forgive the cliche, but they're able to climb up a mountain and say, hey, look at me. Look at all my ideas. Look at everything that I want to do. And they just kind of steadfastly shout it out. And they're so passionate and they believe in themselves. And I'm kind of the person that's behind the mountain that's like, hey, I have an idea. Maybe. I don't know, Whatever. You don't have to look at me. It's okay. And I always knew that I could climb up that mountain and be that person, but I would always talk myself out of it. You know, I've started a blog post and quit. I've started a web series, and I quit it. I've created a product, and I've quit. I just started things and quit them so many times over the years. And I will look back at something that I started five years ago, and I'll be like, that was pretty good. Like, why didn't I keep going with that? Why didn't I give it a chance? And there's this concept of how you can, you know, you do better for yourself in the future. You can think about yourself as future you, and you can think, what can you do today to help future you be proud of what you've done? But I like to think about past me. I like to think about past me who had that idea and past me who just didn't give it a chance. And for the first time, I started to have empathy for myself. And I started to think about how disrespectful it was for me to look at my own ideas and say they didn't mean anything and they didn't matter. And for the first time, I realized that not taking my ideas seriously meant that I wasn't taking myself seriously and thinking my ideas weren't important was the same as thinking I wasn't important. Now everyone says you have imposter syndrome, right? All the best people have imposter syndrome, so you should be really proud of that. But. But I'm like, what if my imposter syndrome will never be good enough? Someone sent me this quote, make sure the world remembers your name, but I don't even know who said that. And then of course, there's Nike. Just do it. Just go for it. Keep going. Keep persevering. Don't give up. But if you don't take your ideas seriously, you'll never be able to finish and follow through with it because you'll always think that it's just not worth it. Now we're always thinking about, what's my passion, what's the thing that I was really, really meant to be doing, and how do I find that? But I think we get obsessed with this idea of success and we put it up on this pedestal like this thing will never reach. And we think about this person that we really respect and admire and. And how we'll never get there and how what we're doing doesn't fit into what they're doing. And I think that leads us to ignore what might be sitting right in front of you. What I realized is the things that I gravitated towards when I was supposed to be doing something else were the things that ended up bringing me the most happiness. When I was supposed to be paying attention in meetings, I was observing my co workers, and that was the thing that brought me joy. And your passion might be the thing that you're already doing. You're already doing it and you just don't realize that it could lead to something really great. Once I started taking my ideas seriously and putting them out there, it led to the cooperview.com and all of these other observations. Like I would take walks and do the dishes, and when I would do these things, all these observations would come into my head. And this is the best way to figure out what your passion is. Where does your mind go? Where do you gravitate towards? I realized that on Fridays, every Friday, I would say, you know what? I'm just going to move all these meetings to Monday. And then on Monday, I would hate myself. And I turned this into a comic that got shared thousands of times. I noticed that whenever I sent myself a reminder email, 10 seconds later, I'd be like, oh, a new email. And be excited and not realize that's from me. Actually, I moved recently from New York to San Francisco And I created a few posts about all the observations of the differences between the two different cities. One of them is in New York City, someone might look rich, but they probably aren't. And in San Francisco, they might look poor, but they're probably a multimillionaire. And then, like Laura mentioned, I created nine non threatening leadership strategies for women because I realized I would always sort of try to make myself seem a lot nicer. Like in emails, instead of just saying, send me the presentation when it's ready. I'd add a lot of smiley faces and a lot of exclamation points and try to make it seem as nice as possible. And I really have no idea when I put something out there, what's going to resonate with people and what people are going to identify with. But I realized finally that if I don't finish it and I don't share it and I don't try, I will never know. So the point is, you have to do a lot of work, you have to finish a lot of work and you have to share a lot of work in order to realize what it is that you are meant to be doing. And I love this quote from Ira Glass about how when you start to create something, what you create at first won't be as good as what you want to create and you'll be disappointed in it. But only by doing a lot of work will you be able to close that gap between what you want to create and what you actually do create. So. So my advice to you is to take out those old dusty notebooks and look through them, see what you've been writing about, see what you've been doodling in the corners, or maybe start a new notebook. Follow where your mind is taking you, because it's taking you there for a reason. Thank you.