The Killer Career Question We Never Ask Ourselves…But Must

All right.

Rainy Sunday morning running to the pottery studio.

I'm here.

Okay. In the studio. That noise you hear in the background.

Is my daughter on the wheel.

Hi, Eve. And now I'm gonna open the kiln.

I'm so excited, and I don't know.

Why I should be excited, because I'm actually a rank amateur potter. I've been doing it for 60 some years, and I'm bad at it. And I'm gonna open the kiln, and I'm so excited.

Why?

Because I love pottery with every fiber of my being, even though I'm really crummy at it. My daughter's a MAGN potter. Her stuff is so gorgeous, and she's hard at work at it. And let's open the kiln. Oh, man.

Oh, man, Eve. Well, I'm not gonna cry.

It's not the worst pot I ever made. Because I'll tell you something that that would be very hard to be since.

I'm so bad at this. It's okay.

If you're watching on YouTube, I'm showing it to you. I made it for my office at work.

I keep doing it because I really love it.

I love it, and I don't care how good or bad I am at it. And actually, that is what we're gonna be talking about for the next 30 minutes, which is this the kind of work you should not be doing. I should never be a potter. We're always asking ourselves about our careers. What kind of work should we be doing? But in fact, a really big and important question we need to ask ourselves.

And what we're going to really look.

Closely at for the next 30 minutes is the kind of work we should not be doing.

Hello, I am Susie Welch, and welcome to Becoming you. Today, we are going to talk all about the question that you absolutely must ask yourself. You must. But we never ask ourselves when we're talking about our careers. And here's the question. The question is, what kind of work should I not do? Not what kind of work should I do? What kind of work should I not do? We never ask it, but we really have to. Okay. That's what the podcast is about. Today. I am a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business, where I teach a class called Becoming youg, which is generally about figuring out what to do with your life. And part of that is figuring out what you should not do with your life. And if you would like to know more about the Becoming youg methodology, and I hope that you do, please go listen to episode 46 in which I lay it all out. But in short, becoming you is all about you painting a self portrait of yourself with data. Data about your values and your aptitudes and your interests, and then identifying what you're. What lies at the intersection of those three spheres, because what lies there, that's your purpose. That's the work that you were meant to do. Now, we talk about values on this podcast all the time. Everyone loves to talk about values. And the number one person who likes to talk about values is me. And they matter. They matter so much. That's what you want to do and what your wants and motivations are. But in some ways, the trickiest and most powerful area that we excavate in the becoming you process is aptitudes. Aptitudes. So those are very tricky and very important. And they are the talents and gifts that you are uniquely good at because they were born into you. Now, I want to stop here and really explain what aptitudes are just for a moment, because it's not a word that we use. Everybody agrees what it means. All right? So I like this exercise. I do it in class, and I'm going to ask you to do it right now. If you're not driving a car, for instance, and that is grab a pen. And if you grab a pen, or imagine that you're grabbing one and you sign your name with your non dominant hand, it's terrible. It's very awkward, it's very uncomfortable. You could do it, and if you practiced it for years, you could probably make it legible, but it's just. It's kind of unnatural and it looks icky and you would rather not do it, but you could if you had to. Now switch the pen to your dominant hand or imagine that you are and sign your name. And it's the most natural feeling in the world. You could do it day and night, and everyone can look at it. It feels great, okay? Just taking this little exercise. Think of it this way. Aptitudes are the dominant hand of your brains, okay? They're what comes naturally to you. You know, they show up very early and you see them very naturally in things like athletes and artists. You know, you can see pictures of Taylor Swift singing with a guitar when she was three years old, or people who become professional athletes or like K A ball, like in a way that's not normal when they're young. And those aptitudes show up very early. But aptitudes of the brain, they often don't show up until you're 15 or 16. Somebody's a very good writer, or they have an incredible way of putting together information and drawing conclusions very quickly. There's eight big cognitive aptitudes that are in your brain about how you process information, whether you see information up close or far away. We'll talk about this in more detail as the podcast goes along. Aptitudes. These eight big cognitive aptitudes, plus certain aspects of your personality, they're not skills. We're not talking about the stuff you learn. You can learn to get better at some things, but you've got wiring in you. Your brain works a certain way that makes certain kinds of jobs easier for you. That's what your aptitudes are, the underlying cognitive and emotional wiring that makes certain kind of work more aligned with what you're good at. And we end up for a long time, too long, frankly, thinking that we can be good at anything. We can be. We have aptitudes for everything if we just try hard enough and the context is right enough, and we really tell ourselves that story. So in some ways, this is a really good and positive thing. I almost hate to say this, because this is a really positive response to too many years, too many eras, when it was thought that, you know, oh, for instance, only white men could be doctors and lawyers, right? Or when women in general, girls in general, were made to feel that their options were really limited, okay? And so the pushback against that was to tell people of every gender and every background, look, you can do anything, all right? And I get that response that had to be said. And so I think that's one dynamic that was going on with this sort of cultural stuff. I also think that this, you can do anything if you really try stuff, is a positive response to another bad dynamic that occurred and is still occurring, which is that a lot of very young people have general anxiety, and in fact, too many young people think that their lives have no meaning. And if you doubt me at all, I refer you to Jonathan Haidt, the very famous social scientist who wrote the Anxious Generation. You have read it. Please go read it. And I'm very lucky that John is a colleague at nyu. He teaches there as well, and he's a friend, and he serves on the board of the Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing at nyu, where I am the director. And we had a big conference last week. Professor Height presented there, and he showed research that showed something like 20% of high school 12th graders think this. They think that they would describe their lives as being without meaning and purpose and that they call themselves generally useless. And so the cultural response to this has been, don't feel that way. You can do anything you want. You can be a doctor or a lawyer or an entrepreneur or a movie star. You can do anything. These are grownups who feel very brokenhearted about kids being told they can't do stuff and kids feeling genuinely that they're stressed out and useless. And I want to stress, I think, that that this response, this encouragement, you can do anything is generally great.

But.

It'S not true. I mean, as a message, it's just not true. You can't be great at everything. You are really good at something, but you are probably not great at everything. For instance, with all the trying in the world, I could not be a potter. I'm bad. I'm bad, bad, bad. How bad am I? Let's talk about how bad I am. Okay. I had the vase. If you watched on YouTube, you saw the vase that I took out of the kiln at the beginning of this podcast. And when I was making that vase, it was over the weekend, and my daughter Eve, who is, again, a professional potter, was at the wheel, turning out one absolutely magnificent pot after another. And I was over at the table, and I was trying to glaze it, and my first attempt at glazing it was criminally bad. So I did something that you never like to do in the pottery studio. I went up to the sink, and I washed all of the glaze off. Okay. Glaze is expensive. It's hard to apply. I washed it off, and then I did a second attempt at it, and again it was extremely poorly applied. And I'm very bad at it, by the way. I'm enjoying this the whole time. Totally loving what I'm doing. I love it. We're listening to music. It's fantastic. I'm with my kids. But I went and I washed off. And then the third time, I made a mistake and had to go wash all the glaze off. My daughter muttered herself, well, I guess I need to order more black glaze glaze, because I was wasting all of the glaze. She's an art therapist, by the way. She said, well, I think what's really going on here is some kind of regression. And she went on to explain that in art therapy, sometimes we go through a process where we regress to very childlike behaviors while we're making art to sort of make up for childhood trauma or whatever. And she thought, I my pottery that day, my performance was so poor that I was regressing. And I looked at her and I said, eve, can we just get this Straight, I'm just really bad at pottery. And she said to me, you know mom, you really are okay. So that's how bad I am. Again, one of my favorite things in the world to do. But I'm not going to try to become a potter. And I think because of this realization, I think it's actually better to tell people, kids included, the truth. And the truth is that you are wired to be really good at some things and not at others. And you know what? That's okay. This leads me to the second reason why I think it's really tricky to excavate aptitudes. Okay, the first one is that there's cultural, cultural tide against it. But here's the second reason, and this is it. It takes work. It takes a lot of work to know your aptitudes. For most of us, I mean, some people, their aptitudes are very obvious from a very young age. I mean, there's artists, there's singers, there's athletes. Last night I went to go see a Broadway show. There was a seven year old actress and she was belting out a song and I thought, this kid is standing in the middle of a Broadway stage at 7, singing and dancing. What was she like at 4? I'm telling you, she was presenting at 4. Her parents knew at 3 she was going to be a performer. Some people just present incredibly young. A lot of athletes do. You hear stories about it. But for the rest of us mere mortals, you know, it takes a lifetime of iteration to find out what your aptitudes are. They're not presenting when you come out of the womb. And that is the case for most people. And so what ends up happening to find out our aptitudes the good old fashioned way, which is not good at all, is that we bump from job to job and job through our career. And when we don't succeed, we're like, well, the boss sucked or there were politics. Until eventually we get hit over the head with the data enough times that we eventually realize, oh yeah, maybe it was me. So here's my thinking about that. It just doesn't have to be that way. That's the crazy thing. It doesn't have to be the way that way. That's why it kills me. Because there are tests, there are very, very good tests that can tell you about your inborn cognitive aptitudes and your emotional aptitudes. Right now. Okay, now I'm going to tell you about my favorite tests and how to take them. In a minute, I'm going to run through my four Favorite aptitude tests in a minute. But first let me tell you something that I should have told you earlier, I suppose, which is what aptitude tests can actually tell you. Okay? Now listen. There are thought to be eight. Eight fundamental cognitive intellectual aptitudes. All right? So for instance, let me just give you an example. Sometimes that's the way to do it. You are wired with your inborn cognitive proclivities to be a generalist or a specialist. In other words, you can be a person who likes to gather a little bit of data about a lot of things, and that can be your aptitude or you're a specialist. You like to bore down into something deep, deep, deep. I always liken a generalist to the mayor of a small town. She knows about the parking problem. She knows about the regulations at the cement plant. She knows about the swimming pool that's going in. She just knows a little bit about everything. And she's very good at knowing a little bit about, about everything. And that's why she's a really good mayor. Okay? And then you can have a specialist, which is that person that you bump into in a cocktail party and they are a professor of like mushrooms in the, you know, in, in the northwest of the United States. And they can tell you about like a new kind of mushroom that's growing in the Seattle area and it's blue at night or whatever, and you just want to die, die, die. If you're a generalist, if you start talking to that person, you would rather just drink cyanide, get out of there. But I mean, these are two different kinds of brains, the generalist brain and the specialist. And I bet you a million dollars while I'm saying this, you already know which kind you are. But imagine what it feels like to be a generalist in a specialist job or to be a specialist in a generalist job. It doesn't take. You could have to have the best boss in the world and that's still going to end up imploding for you. Okay? So I had a student one time. We knew he was a specialist and he got a job right out of college as a generalist because he wanted to go home, he wanted to be near his girlfriend, in his church. He went back to the Washington area and he got a job. His uncle had a really large multi million doll dollar landscaping firm and they put him in a whole bunch of different divisions. A generalist job. And they did it because they thought, oh, he's a fancy mba, he wants to be a boss. Okay? Two years later, the family was almost in tatters over it because the uncle wanted to fire him. He was miserable. He hated being a generalist. He didn't put it that way. He just hated everything about the job. One day there was a rainstorm and he started to do some research on his computer about a boxwood blight that was killing all the boxwood trees in this area of the mid Atlantic states. And. And he got obsessed. Why? Because his specialist brain became completely on fire. And he found out there was actually a new revolutionary way to deal with boxwood blight. And he researched it, and he researched it anyway. Long story short, two days later he had a 90 slide presentation for Uncle Juan. And now they have a $2 million business knocking out boxwood blight, which my student runs for his Uncle Juan. They took him out of a generalist job. They let him be the specialist he was. And. And you know, he got lucky because it happened by accident. I mean, he would have gone to another job and probably been called a generalist because he had his mba. That's one example. There's another. Another aptitude is how much we're wired to come up with ideas. You can be a brainstormer who somebody just spews ideas like crazy. Or you can be a person who is an I, what's called an idea contributor. You come up with one idea or you every now and again, or you shepherd other people's ideas. You're a very good listener. You add on. Well, but some jobs need brainstormers, okay? If you're in social media, you need to be a brainstormer. I mean, there's a lot of job. And there's other jobs where brainstormers are not right? Because you shouldn't have a million ideas if you're an airline pilot, okay? You just know, should know the rules. You should be a process supporter, all right? But you could be a brainstormer with a jillion ideas and be in the exact wrong job or a person who is a idea contributor, not a big idea generator. And it's not. This has nothing to do with raw IQ or intelligence, by the way. This is just thinking style, which is what aptitudes are. And you gotta get the right job, the right fit. It's all about alignment. Really good to know about yourself. No value judgment on this, by the way. It's how your brain works. Why not do what your brain is good at, naturally. Why, why put on that suit that's two sizes too small to live your life, you know, but instead of knowing this data about aptitudes we just try to be everything to everyone all at once. Okay, we do. The world tells us we're good at everything and so we try to be good at everything until the world finally tells us to stop it. So, case in point. I'm usually a case in point, right? For instance, I was a natural writer and reporter. All my aptitudes are around verbal communication and writing and reporting and synthesizing things quickly and oops, I found out it didn't match my values. I had values that were not correct for being a reporter. And I decided then, based on my values, to become a consultant. I never asked once, will I be good at that work? Okay, Now I had very good grades and I was at business school so it was assumed that I would be a good consultant. And when I got there, they trained me like I got the skills of being a consultant and I could do the work, I could do it, but I was a B plus. I would give myself a B plus. And here's the thing, the work did not interest me very much. I could manage it, but it was not anything aligned with my natural aptitudes. I can see that now so clearly. One, because I've been tested up the wazoo. But also I just remember how I would look at that work and I would say, ah, I can do it, but it's so hard. It felt so unnatural. And then I got to Bain and I was in their manufacturing practice and what did I do all day? I did financial and economic analysis. I did, I could do those things. I was trained to do them as skills and I got expertise in them. I could do that stuff. I'd gone to business school and it was so ill fitting. But actually after a couple of years of it doing B work, they always gave me good ratings and everything. It became very clear that the reason why I was doing so well overall was that the clients really liked me. And why did the clients like me? Because of my reporting skills, because I could chat with anybody and I could ask them questions that really helped us to understand them better. And finally they shifted me into client management where I got went from B plus to A plus plus plus. Okay. It's where I belonged in client management because it really played to my natural aptitudes because I could talk and I could listen. And that happened to me. I was lucky because I was at a big good company that could shift me from job to job. But that is not usually the case. Usually when you don't succeed in your job, the company says that's the job. We had for you. Bye. Bye. All right. But I was lucky. I was at a big company and they were really interested in making sure that I was doing the work I was best at. Okay? But usually what happens, as I said, is when we're not working in accordance with our natural aptitudes and just our learned skills, we usually stall out and we get so unhappy, we leave or we get let go. That's what happens. And that.

That's the problem. And that's why we don't know what we're good at, because we don't do the testing. And we wait for the world to tell us. And that can take a really long time. All right, there's this big cultural conte. We could be good at anything if we just tried hard enough. And then there's this second factor that aids and abets it, which is that we don't go searching for the information about what we're good at early enough. So those are the two reasons that we don't find out what we're good at. One, because there's this big cultural context telling us that anything is possible and then aiding and abetting it is that we do not go searching for the information about what we are truly good at, which is getting to this bottom line here, which is that we do not ask and we do not answer this important question, which is, what work should I not do?

We'll talk more about aptitudes in a moment. I'm Susie Welch. We'll be right back.

Hi, we're back. I'm Susie Welch. This is becoming youg. We ask all the time, what should I do? What should I do with my life? But how about also asking, we really should ask, what work should I not do? Now you're wondering, Susie, how do I do that? How do I ask and answer? What am I good at? And what am I not good at? Which is my big suggestion in the pod today. And so I'm going to tell you about the tests that I really like. By the way, we will put a link to all of these tests in the show notes. So don't drive off the side of the road. They're all going to be in the show notes. Okay, number one, there's a test called Youscience. I have no skin in the game. I have no financial interest or involvement with this company, youscience.com I think the test is around $40, and it actually tests your cognitive aptitudes. It takes 87 minutes. I know, it's expensive. I get it. There's also A good book out which is going to be less than $40 that describes everything in YouScience. It's called you'd Hidden Genius. It's by Betsy Wells, and it can tell you everything that's in the Youscience test. But I really like this test. All of my students take it. So number one, youscience youscience.com the second is the enneagram. The Enneagram is incredibly old. It's a very scientifically validated test. Now, the earliest evidence of the Enneagra, which is a temperament typer, is from the Assyrians. And it's been since then academics have taken a deep involvement in the Enneagram. What the Enneagram tells you is which of nine personality types you have. And the reason why this is important is that your personality can be an aptitude. And the Enneagram will tell you, look, this is what when you're good, this is what you're good at. And when you're bad, this is what you're bad at. And so I happen to be an enneagram type 3, which is an achiever. I know that's probably coming as a shock to most people, but each one of these types is incredibly important and you can, number one, you can find out Enneagram. I suggest that you use the Reti version of the Enneagram. R H E T I. You can find it online. Type in reti enneagram. I believe it's $14. Again, I know that's not free, but I don't think that the free Enneagram tests are nearly as good as the ready. So I am going to urge you to spend the $14 and find out which type you are. Then say goodbye to your relatives and friends and go to YouTube and type in your personality type from the Enneagram and they will see you in two weeks after you the rabbit hole that is YouTube enneagram. But you'll find out a lot about yourself. All right, now we get to two tests that I myself, yours truly, I have invented these tests because I didn't think there was anything that did what they did. So the first is the Career Traits Compass, which I have to tell you this, you're going to be mad at what I'm about to say. It's still in beta. It's coming. If you're on my newsletter, if you get my newsletter, we have your email and you'll know about it the day it comes out. And the Career Traits Compass tells you whether or not you should be a leader or an Individual contributor. I'm going to do a whole PODC about it when it comes out. And that is coming to you. All right. But there is a final tool which I love, which just came out. It's now finally out of beta. It's out there in the wild. It's called pi360. And this is a tool that's like the big 360 feedback tools, except for it's cheap. I think it's $12.99. I think that's what it is. I'm sorry it can't be free. I wish I could give it to you free, but it cost me something to develop it. So that's the truth. And what it does is it allows you to get up to 40 people to anonymously, totally anonymously report back to you how the world experiences you in terms of the quality of your relationships, how you are with people, the quality of your ideas and the quality of your execution. And the world will give you a report card with pi360. So you can go to pi360feedback.com or go to my website and you'll find it there. And again, it's $12.99. That's incredibly important data on your aptitudes because you may find out that you think you're. You're great with people. And PI 360 may tell you you're not so great. And you may think you're terrible with ideas. And Pi360, the feedback is going to tell you, guess what? You are actually great with ideas. And it's really important because you may not know these things about you. That's the whole point of this. We don't ask ourselves and we don't find out the real data. So those are my four favorite tests. I invite you to try all of them. You'll get a better self portrait of your aptitudes with them. And if you had to do just one of them, I'm going to suggest the you science because I think it really gives you incredible data. Again, I'm sorry it's not less expensive, okay? But it's worth it. Now, here's one more thing you can just ask yourself what you're not good at. You know, that feels really hard. It feels really hard. Without being defensive, we get all up in our knickers to say, okay, what am I really bad at? I mean, I'm 65, so maybe I'm very comfortable with doing this. Like saying to you, I'm really bad at pottery. I could do a whole podcast on Stuff I'm bad at, but I'm old, and I've gotten over myself. I think when you're younger and you're trying to make your way in the world, or when you're. You've had some recent stuff that's been hard. It's. You don't want to beat yourself up so much. They're doing accounting on what all the things you're bad at. But if you could actually come clean with yourself about the stuff, you know, that comes hard to you. It's the beginning of the journey. And it's so. It's so freeing. There's no shame in it. I remember one time, there's a famous, famous, renowned interior decorator named Bunny Williams. You can read all of her 4,000 books. And one time she was at my house. I've been very lucky that she was decorated one of my homes. And she was complimenting my daughter Eve's pottery, because my daughter Eve's pottery, by the way, if you'd like to see more of it, Eve Krista on Instagra, her pottery is gorgeous. And so Bunny Williams was just saying, your daughter's pottery is magnificent. It's beautiful. And Eve, because she's a magnificent, dear human being, said to her, bunny, my mother's pottery is also beautiful. And Bunny, in a moment of extreme candor, which is the only kind of moment she ever has, it was extreme candor, said, your mother's pottery is childlike.

And I remember Eve feeling so sad for me. And in the moment, I was a little bit stung, okay? But then I remember just. And now whenever anybody looks at my pottery, I say, it's childlike, isn't it? But whatever. And then I thought to myself, you know what? That's why it's my hobby, okay? You know, I don't have to do it. I just do it. Cause I love it. And I want work to be fun for me too. I want it to be fun for you. And I want to be successful. And so that's why I do work that's aligned with not with what I'm bad at, but with what I'm good at. I don't do what I'm bad at in my profession, all right? And sometimes people want their purpose just to be their work, or they want their work to be about their passions and their interests. But if that was the case, I would have tried to be a potter like my mom and my daughter. But I'm not. You have to know what you're good at, and you have to, have to have to know what you're bad at, too. In my case, like pottery. How about you?

Becoming youg is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Muskan Nagpal and Kristen Muller, with help from Elisa Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddie Paul, and Tanya Joji. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is becoming you.