Everything I Learned in Life I Learned in 10th Grade English

Welcome to the Becoming youg Podcast. I'm Susie Welch. I'm so happy you're here. I am a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business in nyc. And this podcast is about what the heck you should do with your life. Also, anything that happens to be on my mind, which can be anything at any given time. And we'll just hope that you are enjoying this podcast and using it to think about big questions and small. And also, if you're watching us on YouTube or follow me on Instagram or other places, you can notice that we do have a Pierre cam going during this podcast. And right now, Pierre's in his usual stance while I'm about to opine and he's fast asleep. What is it about my voice, Pierre? What is it? You would think that this dog was at work 20 hours a day. All right. Hi, everybody. We're in the middle of a heat wave in New York City, and it just sort of reminds you that there's something bigger than us and that you cannot control the weather and that. I don't know, I don't mind that reminder. I'm not crazy about the heat, and it's unsafe for a lot of people. But I'll tell you, I like to be reminded every now and again that there's something bigger, much on my mind lately. Isn't that a surprise? And actually, one thing that's really been on my mind a lot, and it should not be. It should not be. And that is this idea that maybe I would really like to teach a class about business through novels. I mean, if my boss is listening to this, his head's probably blown off his body right now because I am already, like all of you, doing more than I probably should be doing. And I love becoming you. I love teaching it. I'm changing it a lot for next semester because I've come up with these new tools that I've spoken about, and I love teaching managerial skills. That's actually one of the most enjoyable things I do in my life, is teach a class about managerial skills. I love talking to people about what it is to be a good boss. And I think people, when they take that class, they take it. They sort of experience it two ways. They experience it as, okay, I'm going to take this class and learn how to be a better manager. But also, when they're listening to it, they're thinking, is my manager doing this? I mean, I think you sort of hear through two different ears. I love teaching that class. And so the idea that I might Add to my repertoire. Another class came to me because here's why I am writing the Becoming youg book. It won't be out for a year, so this is not a sales pitch, I'll tell you that, but I'm working on it. And I was writing about our capacity for change because becoming you is a transformative process. You start at the beginning and you think, I'm not exactly where I want to be. What is my life meant to be? You wouldn't be doing becoming you the process, unless you were sort of thinking, am I doing the right thing? Or what is the right thing? And so the whole methodology presumes that you're open to change. And I was writing something about this idea of change. Change is very hard. Nobody really says, oh, gee, I'm dying to change, and just leaps into it because it's going to be so much fun, right? And I was pondering this and when I went to bed it was like 11 o' clock and I just finished writing and I kept on thinking, there's a thought, there's a thought, there's a thought. What could it be? And there was a quote that just kept circling and I couldn't grab it. And then I went to my desk the next morning and I typed in a few of the words from that quote and it popped. It is the last line of the Great Gatsby. And in that moment, the protagonist, and he's not a hero, he's an anti hero, Nick Carraway is standing on the dock after so much shit, Eeeet has gone down in the Great Gatsby. And we've all read it in high school, so no spoiler alerts there. But a lot of bad stuff goes down with very fancy people who look very perfect from the outside, and a lot of terrible things happen. And at the end, nickaraway is considering all the horrible things that had happened. And he says in his mind, and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. And you know, like you, I wrote high school papers about this line and you can look it up and think about it, but really, I think the general scholars agree, your English teacher agrees and I agree that this line is basically a meditation on how we don't change, that we try to go forward and we are pushed back, the waves push us back into the past, and that we really keep on reliving who we were and we cannot break out. And actually, Great Gatsby is a story about how much we want to change and how much we want things to be different. That's what Jay Gatsby was all about, was reinvention. He was a person who totally made himself up. I'm sorry if I'm jostling the cobwebs of your mind. Somehow this book really stayed with me over the many years that I think I've probably read it five, six times. But the book seems to conclude we just get pushed back out of it. And so I thought, wow, I would love to teach some of the big questions of life to my business students through novels. And I put it out there into the great universe on LinkedIn. And a lot of people said, yeah, that's a really cool idea.

And.

And I would say this is not an original idea at all, because when I was at business school, at Harvard Business School, in fact, I took this exact class, and it was taught by Robert Coles. He was famous then. He's since left this universe, but he was famous then. As a child psychiatrist and an author, he wrote 80 books. And he wrote the Moral Life of Children, which was one of the most unbelievably important books to date. And I think it went on to be a very important book about what is the moral life of children. If you're a parent, you've often wondered if children have a moral life or not, because they will be very, very naughty. And when do children develop a moral life? That's what his question was. When do they know right from wrong? And so, anyway, I started thinking about what books I would have. So this has been so much on my mind. I, over the years, have accumulated a lot of knowledge about business and human nature, and part of that has been by reading some really great business books and hopefully being a part of the writing of some of those books as well. And reading, reading, reading. Business, business, business. But what is business if it's not life? And actually, some of the most important things that I've ever applied in business or some of the most important lessons that ever guided me correctly in my career, forget business, but in any career, have been what I've learned through literature. And so I don't know. I really dig this idea. And actually, for this podcast, I thought about which books actually had the biggest effect on me. I just jotted them down and the questions that they raised for me, which really have helped me in my career. So I'm just gonna run through them. Okay, so I would say the first is the Iliad by Homer, which is a long poem that was written in, like, oh, God, somebody's gonna have to look it up 2000 BC. I think I remember when I read it in high school, and then I read it in college, hating it a lot because it's really, really, really hard to understand. And I finally. I was writing about it again in Becoming you because its lessons have stayed with me. And it's about why we fight. Why do we fight? Why must we always war with each other? Are our fights with other people always just a proxy for our fight with ourself to discover our identity? That is heavy. And so when we are starting to have conflict with people in life, like a spouse or at work or with a roommate, what are we really fighting about? Are we fighting about who we are? That poem raises those questions and I think kind of answers them by saying, it's just one long battle to figure out who you are going to be. Hmm. Becoming you territory. I was totally changed by a book called Them by Francine Duplexis Gray. It was actually a memoir. It's called A Memoir of Parents. And she. So it's not a novel, but she writes the story of her life through her parents. And when I finished reading it, I walked downstairs, I was completely mortified. And I held it up to my kids, and I said to them, please don't ever do this to me. I mean, it is a brutal depiction of her parents, who are important intellectuals in New York in the 20s and 30s, and she just destroys them. And it was the beginning of a theory that I began to have, which is just amnesty for all parents. When you're 21, what your parents did to you, what they didn't do for you, you gotta let it go. Let go of the victim mentality. Some parents suck. I get it, okay? Believe me, I understand. And I've been a parent, and at a certain point, how much more time can we spend blaming them? They screwed up, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. But if you define yourself by what your parents did to you, you're taking a lot of energy that you could be putting on defining who you are and redefining and changing the narrative of your life. And that book. I really respect her as a writer. She's again, another person who's no longer with us. But I was stunned by how much she still had bitterness. And I thought, wow, what if we could transform that emotion into something more positive? Now, she was a great writer, and so maybe that's what she transformed it into. But it made me really think about what. We hold our parents responsible, but more importantly, when we stop holding them responsible for this. Now, Jorge, our producer here, is about to become a parent. And this is going to have new relevance for you, Jorge, shortly, when your child starts blaming you for everything at around age seven. Okay, Another book, really, really, really powerful. Think about it all the time. Is Peace Like a River, Famous book by Leif Enger. And this is a book who asks, who do we believe created us and who do we trust? I mean, your employees will have existential questions, your colleagues will. And if you haven't thought about these things, you don't want to be basic, okay? That's actually sort of the beauty of bringing literature and poetry and music into your life. I mean, my class, dms, has tons of music in it. Becoming you has poems in it. And this is me, I think, subliminally making this lesson to my students, if I can be so bold as to say that, that they should open their aperture to not just read business, but also read novels. Okay, one or two more. I loved the Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Love it. I quote it to people and I recommend it to people. And you know what? It's funny. It's a novel, and it's outrageously funny and incredibly sad. But I'll tell you this. It has the same theme as that book I just mentioned them by Francine Duplexis Gray, in that it is about what we hold our families responsible for and our parents responsible for, and do we change the narrative or do we keep on holding on to that narrative? All right, and then finally, I quote Dostoevsky all the time. I quote him to my children. I quote him in the book. But, you know the big question from Dostoevsky, Oh, God, there's just so many. But it's really, are we meant to suffer? And that affects everything that you do in work, like, how much fun are we meant to have? And that's a value. And my new tool, the Values Abacus, which I'm working on diligently so that everyone can get it and start using it, I'm so excited about it. It measures what your actual lived experience is against what you would like your life to be. And it does it along 14 different values continuums. And one of them is how much pleasure you want in your life, how much fun you want. Fun's of value. Not everybody wants the same amount of fun. But speaking of that, I'm a person who has never valued fun. When Jack was living, I valued it a lot more than I value it now. But right now, I really value work and impact and what I'm doing. But I've noticed lately that I'm so low on the fun quotient that I'm actually up in my fun game, my friends. And tonight I am throwing a party, totally psyched about that. And guess who's coming? It's a bunch of my academic friends, a bunch of professors from nyu, and if any of my students are listening and you think that we don't have fun, we do. We have it at Susie's house, okay? And I'm having a party with the other professors tonight, and we're gonna talk about you.

How much we love you, how much we love you. And I'm going to party tomorrow night in Boston. Okay? So there I'm actually trying to up my fun quotient. Please pray for me, okay? Because it's hard. It's really going against the grain for me just to do something that's super fun. I know this is not a problem for most normal people, but it has been a lifelong struggle for me. And that's because when I was really young, I fixated on this quote from Dostoevsky, that suffering was the origin of consciousness. I remember when I said it the first time, it was in ninth grade. And I said to my sister Ellen, I have to do this, I have to do that. Don't you know, Ellen, suffering is the origin of consciousness? And she looked at me with, like, absolute disgust on her face, and she said, you must be kidding. You don't honestly believe that, do you? And I said, yes, I do. And I've actually lived by that dictum, perhaps incorrectly, for 64 years. So I'm gonna test out having fun over the next couple of weeks and see how it goes. It's an effort. Isn't that pathetic? Okay. All right. I think that's it for my rant today. Just about novels and poetry and movies and music and putting it all into the big pot that is your brain for life and figuring out who you are and not just sticking with one kind of stream of messaging coming at you, but taking it all in. And then also the final part of it. Me sort of saying, as we read these books and listen to music, we are thinking about and forming and testing out our values and. And that is the work of our life. Especially if we're trying to figure out what to do with our life. We have to know what our values, along with our aptitudes and what interests us. That's all part of the becoming you methodology. And so I'm all about you digging up into all that stuff and figuring it out. Okay, that is my rant and rave. So Far.

All right. Speaking of opening your aperture up, we're gonna do what we started last week. I'm starting this new thing where I'm like, playing a little bit of music, and I'm telling you just like, this is just a great song for you to hear and what it means to me, which I'm gonna play right now for us, so we can just hear it.

To be the girl with the most cake. All right, so that song, I'm sure some of you are too young to know it, but that is the great Courtney Love, who is the lead singer of the grunge band Hole. And that's her song Doll Parts. She sings, I want to be the girl with the most cake First. I have to tell you this. When my kids were in middle school and elementary school, I drove carpool one day a week, even though I was working full time. But I wanted to at least try to show up a little bit like the other mothers. So I drove carpool and I used to blare that album and other grunge music into their faces until one of the mothers called me and said that it was. I had to stop doing that. I didn't understand why I wouldn't play fabulous music for these kids. But apparently they objected to, especially to corny love and whole. And to this day, I'm told that my own children, if ever she comes on any kind of playlist, they have ptsd. Anyway. She was married to Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. They were like the king and queen of the grunge scene. That's my favorite kind of music is 90s grunge. And I love all music and I love new music especially. But they were fantastic and they were really challenging the culture. And this is a song that is just about unbelievable, unfettered desire to swallow life whole. And she just wants everything. She wants the man that she's in love with to love her more than anything. She wants to be a fantastically huge, important success. I mean, I should note here that I'm not oblivious to the fact that they both had very bad drug problems. He, of course, ended his own life, and she was addicted to heroin. Okay, These are very bad things. She's. I think she's a recovered person now. But I mean, they. This is not like they were perfect people by any means. Perhaps that was the problem of the other mother in the carpool, but they made unbelievable important music and changed the world with it. But what I related to in her song, driving the kids in carpool to my very button down job at The Harvard Business Review at the time, or I was actually at Bain when this came out. At 1994, I was still working at Bain was just this desire, this actually sort of hunger that you felt was not going to be fed. To really want it all and to live it all. And so actually, the value that this is around is the value of scope. I often tell my students that how big your life is, how big and chaotic and filled with unexpected things and how exciting your life is, that's on a continuum with having a calm, harmonious, controlled, predictable life. And somewhere along the way, usually not out loud, you make a decision about where you want to be on that continuum. And that continuum is, we call it scope. How large or how small do you want to scope your life? There's no right or wrong answer, just right or wrong for you, okay? And you can be a person who chooses to have the biggest life. A lot of excitement, a lot of new. Everybody you meet is a friend. You do things very spontaneously, and you know what comes with that? A lot of chaos, okay? And a lot of. Sometimes you can feel emotional or even physical unsafety in those kinds of situations. And at the other end of the spectrum is to have a life where you know where you're going to be on June 17, 2025. You can look at your calendar right now and you'll know where you're going to be.

And.

And things are predictable and often quite harmonious, and you really have control over your life. You give something up down at that end of the spectrum also, and you maybe give up a little bit of excitement or spontaneity or whatever, but it may be worth it to you. This is a values decision that we make accidentally or we make not explicitly, but we certainly make it implicitly. And there's a really big problem if you're in a relationship and. And one member of the relationship has a value of having a really big scoped life, and the other person has a value of having a rather small scoped life. One of these days you're going to start having an argument about it, and you won't be using the word scope. You'll be blaming each other for something, and you won't be saying to each other what the real truth is, which is this is a values decision and you disagree on it. And this is true about sort of what company you join. Also, some companies want to change the world. They want to reinvent an industry, and they want to. And there's going to be a lot of stops and starts, and there's going to be a lot of chaos and confusion, and there's going to be a lot of mistakes and hard times because you're trying to do something gigantic. They're scoping their dream huge. And other companies are like, we're not trying to boil the ocean. I know that's jargon. Sorry. We're not trying to change everything. We do this one thing incredibly well, and we're just going to keep on doing it. And this is our market and audience, and you got to choose what your value is. It's really good to know your value because you should go put yourself at a company that is pretty much where you are scoping your life as well. This is a huge value that's totally tacit and implicit. But I think everybody's life would be a lot better if it wasn't. Well, anyway, I'm off the charts on scope. I always have been. My life could be. Is very large right now, and it could be bigger, and I would still be happy. It's just in me. It's always been in me. Even when I was a little girl, I had this dream of having a very large life. And I think when I heard Courtney Love screaming, basically, I want to be the girl with the most cake. I had this bubble over my head which was, I want to be the girl with the most cake. You know, I'm not hurting anybody with it. I don't want to be judgy about values. I don't think I've ever hurt anybody with my dream of a life. But I think that I was really, really lucky when I married Jack, because I married. I was lucky for a million reasons when I married Jack. But one of them was that our dream of a life in terms of scope was exactly the same, and it made it very easy to make decisions. We were very, very aligned, and that feels very good. So, first of all, do yourself a favor. Go listen to Courtney Love's greatest hits. She made some bad music in there. I'm sorry, Courtney, for saying this about you, but, I mean, she had some bad years, and so there was some bad music in there also where she was just. I might have not been completely sober, and some music was just made that maybe shouldn't have been, but she had some unbelievably raw, spectacular, talented, unique songs, and check them out. And I one time, actually, a friend of mine said to me, I'd love to go to concert with you. What's your favorite music? And I said, oh, I love 90s grunge. And they said, well, do they ever play around here? Okay, this was a person who liked opera, by the way. Do they ever play around here? And I said, no, they're all dead. So that's the problem with grunge. Almost none of them made it. She's still with us, and, you know, it's actually in my bucket list. Although I don't really actually have a bucket list. But I would love to meet her someday. Love to meet her. Hey, Courtney, I know you're listening, so why don't you call me up? Okay. All right, that's the. Listen up. This time, it's Courtney Love and Doll Par.

All right, we are returning. If you could see what I'm seeing right now, friends, you would see Pierre literally curled up in a ball with his head buried because he can't. He's so tired of me talking on this podcast. I'm sorry, Peter. Okay, we're going to take questions from the audience. People write me on Instagram and find me in other ways. And, God, I love hearing from you. I try to answer you individually, but occasionally I get a question that's so universal that I say, can I answer that on my podcast? So let's answer some of those questions. All right, team, read me one of those questions.

Hi, Susie. I'm 21, and I just graduated first in my university, but I don't want to continue what I'm doing. I want to make it big, but I just don't know how or when. People are calling me mental, but I think getting into sales and just learning how to sell for a year will help me with an important skill. Should I just go for it? I look up to you, and it would be crazy if you could help out a kid who's really just confused about her life.

Okay, my dear whoever sent this, you are a genius. You're a genius. Okay? Because if I could tell you one thing to do to go get a big life, I literally would tell you to go into sales. This is. I mean, you are smart. Okay, first of all, you graduated first in your university fee. Is that what that letter said? You graduated. Okay, so you're very smart. Anyway, but this question is genius. And. And so I want to just point out, I just talked about Courtney Love singing. I want to be the girl with the most cake. So do you. Okay. You said, I want to make it really big. You have a high value of scope, and you probably have a high value on status, and also something that we call radius, which is basically how big an impact you want to have on the world. I bet you're very, very high on all of those. And when the values advocate is finally out there for everyone to use, you'd probably score off the chart on those three. And I admire you for knowing that about yourself. And if I could tell you to go do one thing, I would say go into sales. To know how to sell will hold you in good stead. Your whole life, you're always selling, and the number one thing you're selling in this world is yourself. So if you can learn how to sell, you learn how to read people, you learn empathy, you learn how to not oversell. That's the biggest mistake most salespeople make is they try to oversell. And that's not. Sometimes the most powerful thing you could say to somebody is, you can't. This is not the right product for you. You can't afford or whatever. And they want it even more at that point. And so I'd say you got to learn what it takes to persuade people to want what you are selling. And so go do that. Get some cred selling. Learn who you are. That's what selling teaches you who you are. But it also teaches you so much about other people. So do it. I hope that helps you. I hope it encourages you. And good luck. Please check in with us, please. When you make it big, we're cheering for you. All right, another question from audience. I love that last one, by the way. Go ahead.

Hi, Susie. Can you help me with some advice? I relocated to Florida for a new job. I was terminated in four and a half months. I feel so defeated. I've been seeking new opportunities, but I cannot get any job offers.

Ugh. It's so stinking hard to be where you are. And feeling defeated is a part of the human condition. So let me just say a couple of things. It's hard for you because you moved for your job, and so now you're in this new place in Florida and you're without a job, and you've been looking around for a job. I don't know if it's just in Florida and you're not getting any callbacks and you feel terrible. So, number one, what I want to say to you is, if you're feeling defeated like that, hang in there. I know that sounds like a platitude, but there's lightness on the other side of the dark. And when you write the story of your life and talk about your life and when you help other people down the road, which you will, you will use this time of your defeated sense of Self as an example of how you got out of it. I mean, there's a whole argument in life that all of our hardship is meant to hone us to help somebody later who's having that exact trouble. Okay? So sometimes if you think about your trouble and you think I'm going through this because someday, the way life works out, I'm going to turn around and I'm going to help somebody who's exactly in my place. It can be actually very empowering to think there's a reason for this and it's going to be helping somebody. And so I put that out there to you. I think that my concern for you is that you're doing something that really worries me about too many people, which is you're getting tactical before you get existential. You're sort of looking for a job without knowing what you want to do with your life. I don't know what landed you in Florida. I don't know how much you love the job, but I'm wondering if you've gone up yet to 10,000ft and said, what are my values? What are my aptitudes and what interests me, and figured out your area of transcendence. You may have to leave Florida. Maybe that's too expensive for you right now because you just relocated. But I think you gotta start thinking about what you want to be because I get the feeling you're just applying for jobs that are nearby or are abutting the job that you just were let go from. And maybe this is time. Maybe this is a gift to you to reconceptualize yourself and try something new in this world. And I want you to know that every person has gone through the Valley of Despair like you. Everybody has. I know that sometimes I seem like a very successful person. I've had periods in the Valley of Despair. I've been fired. And I remember sobbing to Jack, I'll never work again. And feeling like I never would work again. I remember deep, deep despair. And I remember when he said to me, like, oh, get out of it. Get over yourself and all this stuff, thinking he just doesn't get it. He's never been fired. But guess what? He was right. And I did work again. I crawled out and I was better and stronger for it. And it actually, if you think about it, that experience in the Valley of Despair is allowing me to help you right now. Right? I hope. I hope. But I went through it so that I could help other people going through it. So don't give up if you're feeling really Blue, get out of the house and make a phone call to somebody and just know that there's lightness coming. And you're going through this because you'll help somebody and think about what you really want to do. You may really have to shake things up. You feel like you've just been really, really shook up. You feel like, ugh, not more change. I just got laid off after this big move. Let me just do something that's convenient. You may not be able to do something convenient. It right now. You may have to really kind of turn the page in a big way. And please, please check in with us and let us know how you're doing in a few weeks. Okay? Thank you so much for writing. Honored that you asked me. All right, we have time maybe for one more question from the audience.

What do you do when you have no idea what you want to do for work? Where do you start?

I mean, is this a setup? I mean, for goodness sakes. I mean, thank you for writing. I mean, what you got to do is not easy. It is that you have to figure out your values very hard. You've got to figure out your aptitudes very hard. And figure out what interests you. Not as hard. Okay. Most of the time, we have pretty keen sense of what interests us and what doesn't. And I have some thoughts about that. But I would say come to one of my totally free webinars where I talk about the ways you can do this or just follow me. On social media, I give all sorts of hacks to figure out our values and aptitudes. You can test for. For youscience.com and that costs a little something, but I think it's money well spent for you to know how your brain works. If you can't do that, just to ask people, what am I really, really good at? I asked this of somebody. I write about her in my book. Again, not coming out for a year. Sorry about that. I asked her what she was good at, and she said, I'm good at making people feel welcome. But you don't get paid for that. And the answer is, yes, you do. You just gotta figure out what job that's a real asset at a company. Okay. People have built whole careers on making other people feel good about themselves. So you are not in an uncommon place. So many people say, what should I do with my life? The world is so big and it feels like so many opportunities. And then sometimes I feel like I can't do any of them. It's big and small at the same Time. It's very confounding. You've got to take that first step and dig in and figure out what your values are. In the meantime, it's not a bad idea just to do some work, because sometimes work is kind of just iterative. And you think, okay, I like this about it. No, but I'd like to tweak that. And you sort of have a zigzaggy curve career while you're figuring it out. So don't. You don't need to get into paralysis while you're doing. Becoming you. You can work. That's all data that you're gathering about yourself in the world. All right, Good luck. Stick with us. Okay? All right, now a little tiny break, and then we'll be right back.

Okay. We've come to that moment in the show that you've all been waiting for. I know Pierre's been waiting for it, where I decode corporate jargon. Okay, what's the corporate jargon for me to decode today, guys?

You actually used this phrase today.

Is it boil the ocean?

Let's not boil the ocean.

I want to say, of all the corporate jargon. I don't. I. I don't mind boil the ocean because it's so vivid and it's. And usually it's used like this. We can't boil the ocean. And you know what? You can't. And I think it's just. I'm sorry, but I'm going to push back and say this is an overused bit of corporate jargon which you probably should not use as much. But you. Or you could simply say, look, we can't do everything all at once. Okay, but it's not a bad metaphor.

But what does it mean?

Like when you're boss. When your boss. Okay, thank you, Sophia, for saying, what the heck does it mean? What it means is you can't do everything all at once. It's too big. What you're describing, the task that you're describing, the goal that you're laying out is doing too many things at the same time all at once. It's unrealistic. Okay? You can't boil the ocean. That's unrealistic thing to do. Okay? You just can't. And that's what they're trying to tell you. They're telling you that your Jack used to have another metaphor. This, I think it was, your eyes are bigger than your bowl or something like that. And meaning that, like, you're just. What you put in your bowl is your eyes are like what you want to Eat is more than you could eat. And it's like this idea. Look, I want to say one thing about this piece of jargon. I probably have been accused in my career and in my life of saying, you can't. People have said to me, susie, that's boiling the ocean. And I've gone and done it, and I've taken it sort of as like, yeah, just watch. Okay? So I don't want people tamping down your dreams and telling you you can't do too much. But if you've got a good mentor who is telling you you're trying to boil the ocean, I would listen to it closely, but that's. You know, they're dream editing.

It's like you bit off more than you can chew.

Yes. Yeah, that's the same one. Do you have anything better than that, or is that the only jargon you got?

Yeah. What does it mean if someone says, this idea won't scale?

Oh, okay. That is jargon. This idea won't scale. That's a very, very. Thank you for asking that one. It basically means we can't make this bigger. Okay? There's just not. There aren't enough resources. There's not enough of you. This is a good idea. But it's like, okay, for instance, a restaurant that only serves really delicious cherries once a year, okay? That idea will not scale because there's just no economics in it, and there's no way to get enough of those cherries, and there's simply not enough people who want cherries once a year. Okay? And you know why I'm thinking about this is that one time Jack and I were in Japan, and they brought out the dessert, and I was really hungry because the dinner didn't fill me up, and it was like these three beautiful cherries, and I thought, oh, that's great cherries. But then I actually am still thinking about those cherries. They were not wrong. Those were the most delicious cherries I've ever had in my life. And apparently it's scaled, but it's an idea that just does not have the resources or economics behind it to go big.

Right. I feel like if you said that to me, I would take it as, I just don't love this idea.

I think that if they're a jerk and they don't want to be honest with you, they could just sort of shut you down by saying, this idea won't scale. But I think within business, I've heard it said between people who are truly discussing a business idea, truly discussing a business idea, like, yeah, I think it's a good idea. It just can't. We can't scale it. Okay. And there's just not the economics to scale it. It definitely could be used as a jargony way to tell somebody who is not savvy about business. Yeah, shut up.

Yeah.

But almost all business. Almost all business jargon is, yes, shut up. Okay, we'll take this offline. Yes, shut up.

Like the ocean boil. The ocean is like, let's not make this harder than it.

Yeah, that's right. Let's not make it harder than it already is. And also, now that I think about it, we can't. Boil the ocean is probably just another way of saying, just shut up. I mean, actually, almost all corporate. All of us, all corporate jargon we can agree is just shut up. Okay.

Now my team will try to stump me with questions. Let's have a few questions, and then we'll let these kind people go. From this episode of becoming you. Go for it. What do you got for me?

If you could know the absolute truth to one question, what question would you ask?

A hard question to answer. Because, like, I, as some of you may know or may not know, I'm a faithful person. And so I kind of feel like with a lot of the big questions, I actually buy into the truth about them. Like, you know, for instance, will we see the people we love after we die? And I kind of believe. I do not kind. I believe, yes. This is hard for me because I feel like I have access to some of the questions now. I actually just to this point, exactly, had lunch today with a really dear friend of mine. Love her so much. She's also lost her husband. And we were talking about how hard it is afterwards. This is what widows talk about when they're all by themselves. And she actually said to me, I wish I had what you had that way, because I can't go where you went. And it was sort of interesting to me. I thought. Never thought about it that way. And she was like, I just don't. I can't access that. And I thought, oh, I was so lucky to have that. So I will say this apropos of almost nothing, except for that she actually said something really brilliant to me later in the lunch about something else. And she said that when you. She has a bunch of people on her team who sometimes hate to go to meetings or hate to go see clients or hate certain things about their job. And then they come back and they complain, that meeting was stupid, that client was stupid, that thing was A bore. And she forces them, when they do that, to write down five golden nuggets of what they learned from the horrible experience. And at first they said, no, no, no, we'll never do it. And then she forced them to do it. And they found out that even when they went to horrible experiences with clients or meetings that were really terrible or bad, they somehow still could extract five things that they learned. What a fantastic discipline. Do you notice how I've completely avoided this question by making some to talk about something else? I was like, what? No, but. No, but this is actually. And actually, when she said it to me at lunch, I said, let's go make a reel about it right now. And then I told her I was going to steal it and use it in a reel. But this idea that she takes these. She has great young people who work for him, but she said they complain about a lot of stuff too often. And then when they come back and say, like, we hate those people. They're stupid. Whatever. This happens in business all the time, and you know, it does, is that you complain about clients, you complain about customers, you complain about this and that. And she made them, like, extract what she had they'd actually learned from the experience, and she wouldn't let them stop until they had. And so, you know, if you think about any bad experience you've ever had and you forced yourself to do this. So, like, let's just use an example from Susie's life. Like, I blew up Quadio. Okay? I mean, I. This was a music tech company that was started by my son and my grandson, and it was really great. And then the pandemic kind of killed us. And we made some. I. I was chairman of the board, made some very stupid engineering decisions. Plus, the pandemic killed us. But I'm. I was boneheaded on engineering. Did not know enough about it, and we all lost money. It was not a good thing. I finally was able to sell it. Thanks be to God. And it's. Somebody is fighting to make it live another day. But I would say this. When it was over, I felt like it was the most epic fail of my life. And I wished it had never happened. Although there was great joyous moments in it. And I made something incredibly good friends. We're still lifelong friends, but I could go back now and I could tell you 25 golden nuggets from that experience. One of the worst things that ever happened to me. And actually, I just recently said to my team as we are going into the engineering for the values abacus I say to them, I have finally learned why I had the Quadio experience, because I have all this experience around app development and product development now that I did not have. I use Quadio as an example in many of my teaching experiences, and I've written about it in the book. And so, while it was a harrowing experience, and I've never felt like I've failed more or failed more people than I did when we had to shutter Quadio. I got so many golden nuggets out of it. What a cool thing to do. What a cool discipline. And therefore, I have very much not managed not to. You have stumped me because I had to make up answers to two other questions. All right, I'm gonna give myself one more chance. What's more, one more question. But don't you love that golden nugget stuff? I think it's fantastic.

Okay, if you could eliminate one human emotion to improve society, which emotion would it be?

Dog. So easy. Jealousy. Okay. Jealousy ruins so many people. Jealousy, terrible. Just makes people small, bitter, you know? Like, I have to say, I feel very, very, very, very fortunate. I mean, believe me, I am the least perfect person, you know, but this was not in me jealousy, ever. I just am happy for people. And when I see somebody who's really, really good at something or really, really beautiful, I just feel how happy for them. The other day, I was walking down the street, and there was a woman walking in front of me wearing short shorts, and she had just unspeakably beautiful legs. And I pulled up alongside her. I said, you have the best legs I've ever seen. She probably thought I was hitting on her. And I then smiled and look. Hi. Bye. And she said, oh, thanks. But she was showing them to the world. They were gorgeous. And so I don't. I think that, like, that's my feeling about jealousy. If you can get that out of you. If you have it in you, by the way, unbelievably natural, normal human emotion. It's been written about in literature, speaking of literature, as we did at the beginning of this podcast. It's been spoken about in literature. It's written about in the Bible. I mean, as old as time, people have felt jealous, and it's been so destructive, it wrecks marriages, it wrecks friendships, it wrecks businesses. There's nothing good about it. And so if I could take it out of humanity, that is what I would take out. You did not stump me. I've seen it ruin so many, and I've seen it ruin careers. Instead of being happy for somebody, you got a new co worker who comes in, a new colleague comes in, and they're really good. You thought you were the best one. You thought you were the top. You were at the top of the heap. And then another top performer comes in and you just hate them, and you start feeling really small. Guess what? There's another way to go about this. Learn from them. Cheer them on. You look great and you learn. And it's not easy being unseated, right? But if you can turn that into something positive, if the golden nugget is this person made me better, they elevated me, then that's really, really good for the good. I have a little business example of this. I was working at cnbc, which was the undisputed king of all business networks at the time, mainly because there was not very much competition in business networks. And Fox decided to open a business network. And you can say what you will about Fox Business, there's some incredibly good reporters at Fox Business. But Fox Business decided to open up right under CNBC's nose. And they said, we're coming for you. And you know what? Everything at CNBC got a lot better. They elevated themselves like crazy. They were like, our shows are going to be better. We're going to get everything faster. And they got better because there was another person who was there coming up alongside them, another network coming up alongside them. So that's a way to use jealousy or fear of somebody else being good to the good. But in general, jealousy's bad. And if you got it, you got to work on getting it out of you. And that is it for our show. I'm so glad you came and were part of Becoming youg. I love you and I appreciate you for being here and I love doing this podcast. Thank you for listening. I'm stunned by how many people are listening. It makes me feel great. And I will be back with you next week.