The One When Suzy Says Networking Doesn't Work

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Hi, it's Susie Welch. I am, by way of introduction, a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business in New York City. I teach a class called Becoming you, which is about becoming you, figuring out who you actually are, what you should do with your life. I actually also teach a class called Developing Managerial Skills, which is how to be a good boss. A boss that your team loves and that your bosses also love. I love teaching that class. Sometimes I feel like it's like the stepchild we don't mention. It's actually a bigger, longer class than Becoming you and more students take it. So I love both of my children, and I'm here on this podcast to talk to you about all things having to do with life and work. I know that some of my former students listen to this podcast. Hi, how are you? I miss you. But also new people. And so I'm really happy that everybody is here. This is a new podcast. We love to hear from you. Chime in. As always, I'm going to start with a little bit of a rant and. And a rave. And I wanna talk about a topic that's really near and dear to my heart, and I'm sure near and dear to yours. All right, so look, I gave a graduation speech, as I've mentioned here before. I gave the commencement speech at NYU Stern's graduation. I was the faculty speaker and I had a bunch of different advice. And one of the pieces of advice was not to network. This is a huge common topic for me not to network because networking is boring and mercenary and everyone hates it. And not only that, it doesn't really work. I actually, if you were to ask anybody who's ever been successful in their life, they would tell you, if you ask them, how did you succeed? They would say to you, I got incredibly lucky. That's what most successful people tell you. I had good luck. I had a good idea. I had two good ideas. And then they'll talk to you about their friends. I had friends who helped me all the way along. And so my advice is don't network. Make friends, make lots of friends, and don't expect that everybody's gonna be your bestie. Now, I actually posted about this, about making a lot of friends and considering each a tile in the beautiful mosaic of your life. I posted about this and I thought everybody would go like, aw, that's lovely. And instead, some people got really bent out of shape and said, no, I hold my friends to really high standards and I don't want anybody abusing me or bringing me down. And of course I don't want anybody abusing you or bringing you down. For God's sake, what do you take me for? But then I started to think about my own friends. Now actually, one of my great goals in life is to create a class at NYU called Becoming Friends about actually how we do become friends with people and how we stay friends with people. And that research is temporarily on hold as I am busy doing other research. But I started to think about my own friends. And so I wanna have a little rant here about some of my closest friends. And it's actually super relevant to me today and super relevant to me lately because.

I very recently almost lost my best friend. I've had the same best friend since I was a young woman, since we were both tennis counselors, we were in college and we met, we were extremely different. We became incredibly good friends. We've often tried to understand our friendship. I think it comes down to the fact that we have the same sense of hum and we're both passionate people. Anyway, we stayed friends our whole life. I'll talk a little bit later about something that happened in the middle of our friendship. And to make a long story short, I was actually with her one Thursday and she was receiving a huge award because she's done amazing things in her life and the whole room was standing and cheering. And two days later she was hospitalized and very seriously with an incredible infection to her brain, which is very, very, very rare, came on very suddenly and it was just freak. It was a freak of nature. It could happen to any of us at any time. And there were of days there where I was literally thinking, please God, don't let this happen. I just can't live without her and the whole world can't. And it looked pretty bad. And she had great medical care, she's a great family. She was lucky to be in a great city with a great hospital. And she's fine now. It's been about eight weeks. She's home and she's going to be. Well, that's not usually the fate of people who have what happened to her. But I gave a lot of thought in those hours by her hospital bed and visiting her and thinking about her and praying for her about what it would mean to lose her. And so the whole idea of friendship. Okay, I have to pause the podcast for a moment because everybody in the room, in the studio, the pummy studio, is staring at something. I know what it is. And that is that Pierre. Yep, Pierre went underneath my cup and he did. Did he Drink my entire glass of water. Okay, fine. Excuse me for a moment. My friends, I'm not gonna say that I've seen Pierre drink the first few inches of my coffee and then have finished the coffee myself. I'm not gonna admit that maybe that has happened, but that maybe has happened. And that's okay, because I gave my. Almost gave my left for Pierre last week. As you know, if you listen, if you're a regular listen to this podcast, you know that Pierre almost drowned last week, and I threw my body into the pool to save him as he almost hit the bottom of the pool. Like the Titanic, if The Titanic was 11 pounds and had green eyes. Okay, so I almost lost my dear friend. And I started to think about my friends, and I thought, hey, do I live up to the standard that I'm always exhorting people? Like, I'm like, every friend is just a tile. Don't judge them. Each tile is a part of the beautiful mosaic of your life. No tile would stand alone. I said, okay, let me just think about some of my friends. So since you were all sitting there asking, who are Susie's close friends? I'm just going to run down the list now and see what we think about this. So I have an incredibly close friend. She's a great academic, which is something I became late in my life. And her name is Nancy, and she started off as an academic. She's a great scholar. And we've been friends since we were 18 years old. I'm now 17 64. Look, I'm a professor of management, not math, so I don't know what the numbers are, but that's close to 50 years or so. And here's the important thing about that. We hated each other. At the beginning. We hated each other. So we were both young girl intellectuals at Harvard University. And I wrote an editorial about Bob Dylan's new album. And Nancy, who was one of the smartest people you'll ever meet in your entire life, was a great thinker, as she always has been. And her specialty is philosophy. And her dad was a Lutheran minister, so she knew a lot about religion as well and about Bob Dylan, his new album, it was right after he converted to Christianity. And I wrote, how much you love this album has to do with how much you love Jesus Christ. And I published this article, and she ripped me to shreds and insulted me and criticized me and took me down intellectually. And I remember thinking to myself, I hate that girl. Who could ever like her? And she went on to be one of the Great friends of my life. We disagree constantly about everything. We have strong political differences, strong philosophical differences. We've had a fight about whether that was, I can assure you, was definitely between us. During the conversation, we had a big fight about whether or not that table actually existed. Philosophers think about that kind of thing. I do not. Okay, so there's a friend, and you know what? She's a big tile in the beautiful mosaic of my life. And that friend that I mentioned earlier, who is a very close friend of mine who I almost lost, we had a disagreement that kept us apart for 15 years. 15 years. We were separated because her husband didn't like me very well. And we are now dear friends. And my own husband loved him and we all reconciled, but I had a 15 year fight with her. And yet she's a beautiful tile in the mosaic of my life. I have a really close friend who years and years ago, gave me advice that I did not want to hear, very important advice about keeping my mouth shut about something that had happened to me. And instead, I flapped my lips and I told everybody, and she said, it's gonna come back to bite you. And it did, very shortly thereafter. And instead of going back and doing what I should have done, which was thank her, I got mad at her. And I didn't speak to her for several years until I came to my senses. And she was waiting for me. And she's a good friend. I have a friend who I made during the pandemic. I was lonely in a new town. I bought a house in a place I had not lived before. And then I thought, oops, I have no friends here. And I was introduced to him. We had not one overlapping thing in common. He was a photographer for Conde Nast. He knew nothing about business. He was completely disinterested in business. But we shared an interest in art. And one day, out of the blue, I texted him a photograph of a painting that I was thinking of buying on auction. I'm not a fancy collector. Don't get that into your head. It was like some cheap painting that I found on auction. And he wrote back, bye, bye, bye. And we became incredibly close friends just based on art. And we almost talk about nothing but art. We also talk about our children.

But besides that, we talk about art. And he doesn't have any interest in what I teach, and I don't really have any interest in his photo shoots. And yet he is a tile in the beautiful mosaic of my life. Okay, the last one I'll mention is a woman who could not have more different politics than me. She's in Florida, and she's an outrageously outspoken proponent of political philosophy that I don't like very well, to put it very mildly. But I know her in the context as a person who rescues animals, and she's done more for the plight of suffering animals than almost anyone I know. And I have been excoriated by friends and family for staying close with her despite her very outrageous political views. Outrageous to some and not to others, but to those up here in the Northeast, they are. And I've always said, look, I'm going to take the parts of her that I love, and I am going to let be the parts I don't love. Maybe this is a really radical and bad thing to do. Maybe. I mean, believe me, she is fully aware of how I disagree with her politically. I have just gone right to it with her. I have said to her very clearly where we disagree and why. For instance, we disagree on immigration policy, where I think we should have open borders, and she does not. And I've spoken to her very bluntly about this and made every case to her, and she pushes back. But at the end of the day, I've seen her do heroic things, heroic, costly things that I have never done myself, to save the lives of animals who are in extreme cases of cruelty. And I choose to include her beautiful tile in the mosaic of my life. And you may have issue with that. And lots of people who responded to my posting about this really did have issue. They maybe would not have her tile in their mosaic, But I choose, and I just put it out there to you, I could go on and on. And really, I could, if the people were not, like, making this chopping motion near their neck, the people sitting in the room with me. So I'm gonna stop now and just say, I ask you to consider this. I ask you to consider your mosaic. You know, you don't want all your tiles looking the same, right? That's been always my philosophy, take it or leave it. But I put it out there. And I do think that friendship is such a valuable, invaluable part of our lives. And the more varied and the more different our tiles are, the more beautiful our mosai ends up being. And I hope that I am that tile to many of people who I'm friends with. I am so wildly imperfect. I know I'm not everybody's full mosaic, except for maybe Pierre's, but I'd love to be a tile in your life. Please let me be a tile in your life. Okay? Sad, sad, sad, sad. Anyway, I hope that I am, and I'll leave it at that. Okay, that's the little man rave. I'm taking a break. I would drink my water except for that the people in this room, my team, saw Pierre drink the water from that cup. And if they weren't here, I'd actually drink that water on this break. But pretend that I'm gonna run downstairs and get something to drink, and we'll be right back. Listen to this good music.

Okay, we're back. We're having a discussion about whether it was right or wrong for me to drink the glass of water that Pierre drank from. I did it. I did that. I went there. I drank from the glass of water, and you wouldn't do it, would you? Jorge is saying he would not. When his dog licks his fork, he says it's the dog's fork now. Okay.

Nigel has actually taken a bite of something, and I have then taken a bite of it.

Yeah, but I. What I want to know is why you would ever feed your dog from the table. That is wrong.

Well, it's not the table, it's the couch.

You can't feed the dog anything. No human food. It's a slippery, slippery slope if you continue to feed your dog from the table. I'm feeling. You do that too, don't you, Jorge? No. Well, then what's he doing licking your fork for? How'd that happen? I don't have a dry table. It's just like, I eat on my couch. Okay, so you eat on your couch, but are you feeding the dog human food? No, not really. You're just lying right now, aren't you?

All right, all right. The dog portion of this podcast is now over because there are people who are not obsessed as we are. Let's move on with reader and listener and platformy kind of friends who have written in with questions. Sophia Borzalari, what do we got?

Okay, the first question is, what advice do you have for us living in a conservative community that often requires us to conform, to fit in and survive? Survive instead of letting people be varied in their own unique ways?

Okay, all right. So this is a question about living in a community that doesn't let you let your freak flag fly in some way? Okay. And I use that phrase just to mean let your own individuality, your authenticity is not allowed to be shown. We happen to know, because we know a little bit about this person who wrote in that they're living in a religious community. So here's the thing is, like you make your choices when you join a community and you make your choices knowing what kind of values they have. And this is true even if you go work in a company. I go to work at this company and I absolutely cannot bring my sexual orientation, I can't bring my video game addiction openly to work or whatever it is. You know, there are some companies where you go in and everybody starts the morning by saying, well, I was just talking to my therapist. I mean, I've worked in companies where people like compare, like their therapist visits and you have to decide what matters to you. So I spent the weekend with two people who work in finance. You do not bring your whole self to most finance jobs, I can assure you. Not on Wall street you don't. And they made the decision to work in finance because as one of them said to me, I'm in the stage of my life where I'm building my personal wealth. And the value is to build personal wealth. And the options are build personal wealth in a finance job that's gonna pay you up the wazoo, or go work at a company where you can talk about your therapist and your hangnail and everything else, what new shampoo you've tried and everything else. And so to this particular individual, as a person of faith, myself, I have incredible respect for you. Working and living in a religious community, it's an incredible sacrifice. The faithful people are grateful to you for doing it. My son and daughter in law were married at a beautiful church in a community of monks. And the holiness and sacredness of that experience is second to almost anything I've ever experienced in my life. I'm grateful to that community for existing. But when you join those communities, just like when you join a company in finance that has certain norms around how much of your whole self you can bring forward, you make a deal, there is actually no kind of perfect place probably where you're getting absolutely everything you want. You're making exactly the money you want to make and you're also letting your full self hang out. That happens. When that happens, keep that job. Fight hard to keep that job. Do your best. I am just going to ask a very personal question here. Now you're never going to answer the truth, but members of the Becoming team, can you let your freak flag fly here a little bit?

I talk about my therapist.

I know that's right. We do talk about therapy. No, no, we do talk about therapy here in the little headquarters of Becoming. And we talk about our dogs. I mean, I endeavor myself as a leader, if you could call me that to create a workplace where people can bring their authentic selves while we still continue, I believe, to have high standards around performance and so forth, it's hard and it's a slippery slope for a manager to manage it because, you know, there may be variation on how much people want to bring their personal selves to work. So it's a choice, is what I'm saying here. I really appreciate this question. It's a tension. We manage our whole lives long. I talk to my students about it all the time in becoming you because they're deciding where they want to work when they graduate from business school and they're looking for the job that gives them everything they want. You know, this much money, this much freedom, this much growth, this much autonomy, this much this, you know, something's going to give. In the real world, something's got to give, and you've got to choose yourself. What's got to give? What's going to give? That's on you. That's on you. You. That's why it's really good, by the way, to know your values. That's why we do these exercises about knowing your values. I mean, that's why becoming you spends nine hours, in some cases, and depending on the length of which group of students I'm teaching, on excavating your values and figuring out what they are. So then when you are in a. In a workplace and you go, oh, something feels wrong, you can immediately know why. Oh, there's a values mismatch. That's why we do it, and that's why you should do it. All right, all right. Do we have another question?

Okay, the next question is, do you have any tips for older people getting back into the workforce?

Well, as an oldster myself, my main tip is if you're listening to this and you're not old, which is like, just never get out of the workforce. I'm sorry, the person who wrote this question, that doesn't help you at all. So let me get to your question in a second, but let me just speak to the new ones first. The youngsters in this world. And I mentioned the new ones. It's one of my favorite stories of all time. I'll quickly digress, which is that I was in a supermarket shopping when my son Roscoe, who's now 35, was five years old, and he was sitting in the basket. And my little daughter Sophia, I had two children then. That was before I had four. And she was sitting in the basket behind him. And we pulled up alongside a woman who was Looking at the grapefruits. And Roscoe looked at her. He's five, very precocious. And he said, are you old? And the woman said, why, yes, I am. And Roscoe stared at her, like, with this like gimlet gaze, looked into her and he said, well, we are the new ones. I mean, this is a completely true story. He literally said to that old woman, well, we are the new ones. It was like, you know, she was like, oh, ha ha, ha, ha ha. And I was like, oh, that is freaky and weird. Okay? So he said it and. But he got it in a way. The young ones are the new ones. If you are listening to this and you are one of the new ones, then let this be a warning to you that leaving the workforce is at your peril. I get that there are times where you want to get off that super highway. It's hard to stay on, keep one foot on. That's a bad mixed for, you know, keep one wheel on, stay in somehow. Stay on LinkedIn, have a side hustle, have a gig, keep yourself in it. Cause getting back on, when you've been completely off, getting back on is hard. Here's the good news. It's easier than it used to be. Okay? It's easier than it used to be because people now understand mental wellness. They understand taking a mental health break. They understand that you, if you say, I stayed home to take care of my sick spouse for two years, people understand that in a way that they didn't used to. Okay? Further advice for you. Find a skill that's in demand and go acquire it. You're not going to have certain skills that are needed. Do you know about AI? Do you know about whatever field that you were in? If you want to stay in it? What skills are now relevant? You may have to go back to school, or not necessarily on ground school, but an online kind of setting to get the skills that you need and set your expectations very low for that first entry level job. It's not going to be pretty for a while. No first job ever is. But if you're good and you apply yourself, hopefully there'll be opportunity for you. So two answers there, one for the new ones, which is stay in if you can, in any way you can, keep yourself relevant. And if you're out and you want to get back in, find the skills that are relevant and acquire them. The best news about that is that it's easier to acquire new skills than it ever has been. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck.

All right, we've come to the portion of the POD where we do, where I bring to you an exercise that I do in class that helps you excavate your values. I've mentioned values roughly 17 billion times in this podcast already because it's super important to know what they are, what your values are. It helps you to make all sorts of decisions around jobs and life and relationships and even vacations and so forth and so on. And I use an exercise in class which I adore. It's called Whose Life Do I Want Anyway? And the genesis of this exercise is. This is my son, my oldest son. Hey. The same son who said, we are the new ones, okay? That same son went on to be a very good athlete and quite a good student. He went to a good college, went to Stanford, all right? He graduated with a degree in American Studies. I remember my husband asking me, what is that? And we didn't know, but he graduated with that. And when you graduate with sort of a vague degree without any kind of skills attached to it, and you've gone to a fancy college, what do you do? When you don't know what you should do with your life, what do you do? Rhetorical question. The answer is, you become a consultant. That's what he did. He was recruited away to be consultant. He hated every minute of it. And they didn't like him very well either, because his heart wasn't in it. Nothing was in it. He was chasing girls all around town, and he didn't put his mind into his work. And he got fired. And we had warned him he was gonna be fired over and over again, and he didn't pay us any heed because we were the old ones. And when he got fired, he came home and I lost my.

Mind on him. And Jack cleverly left the room, exited stage left, let mom deal with it. And I stood over him and I screamed, what do you want to do with your life? What is it? Why can't you make up your mind? And he just sat there silently and in a complete loss. I said to him, whose life do you want? Anyway? It was really a desperate moment because I thought, if you can't tell me what you want to do, tell me who you want to be. And I came to find out over many years just what an incredibly thought provoking, provocative question this is, and how much it really does help us surface our values. And I would like you to ask yourself whose life you want if you had to switch lives with somebody. And look, don't get too bent out of shape about the details of this okay, you're not going to always have to be them. You don't have to marry their wife or live in their house. Okay? But if you could identify whose life you would want, if you could have anybody else's life, who would that person be? Just jot that down and jot down, what is it about their life that I really want? Is it that they're rich? Is it that their life is very fascinating? Is it because they travel? Is it because they've got a fantastic family? Is it all of those things? And then right next to that, jot down, what is it about their life, if anything, you wouldn't want? Okay, well, they had a little estrangement from their family or they got a divorce or whatever it would be that you wanted not to have. And if you do that for five or six or seven people, if you make a really exhaustive list, I guarantee you you will see patterns start to pop. That for most of the people that you're putting whose life you would want, you're going to start seeing the same things pop up. You know that they are extremely relevant, that they're in the news, that they have work, life, balance, I don't know what it is, okay? But you're going to see some pattern start to emerge. And you're also going to see in the column that you've jotted down what you don't want about their life, another pattern, some other patterns emerge. And you're going to start to see pretty clearly some beginnings of what your values might be. Say for instance, just for sake of argument, that every single person you put down is a spectacularly wealthy business person or entrepreneur, that something about wealth is going on with your values, or something about being famous for being a leader. Is it going on with your values? There's nothing to be ashamed of. Any value is a perfectly fine value if it does not hurt somebody. Okay? There's no reason to be judgy about other people's values and really not about our own either. But say what you're seeing on every single, you know, or six out of the seven that you put down is something around not having a boss. Oh, this person, I really admire their life. No one's ever been their boss. They're their own boss. You just keep on seeing that as a theme. Hey, there might be a value there about self determination that you should really look hard at. And maybe this is why you're very unhappy in your job. Because you've got three bosses. You should be thinking about different life choices. So this exercise it's fun to do it with other people who know you well, or it's fun to do it alone and then compare notes. You will see patterns. Look for the patterns. Don't do it for just one person. I had a student one time who did it for. Had 34 people on his list. Man, you could see the pattern so clearly. This was very defining. Sometimes I do with people who are on the older side, the old ones, and they have trouble putting down more than three or four people. I think part of that is just kind of a lack of flexibility in being able to imagine you could have had a different life. I get that. But I push you to do it again. Don't get too tied up in the fact nobody's really gonna make you do this. Let yourself dream. Let yourself imagine. Whose life would it be? You don't have to know them. They could be living or dead. They could be famous or not famous. They can be any. There's anybody. It could be somebody. It could be your father. Okay. It could be your best friend, or it could be, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow. What do I care? But just make a list and write down what it is you love about their lives, what you would want, and what you would give up about their lives. What's the oh for you? Okay. And take a look at those patterns. I hope that's a really helpful values excavation exercise for you. I just love it. I've seen it work a million times in just helping people realize what it is that are some of their core values. All right, break time. Little tiny break. There's no real reason for a break except for that I get to stop talking for a second. We'll be right back.

Okay, we're back. And one of the exciting things is that I actually talked about whose life do you want anyway? On a reel on Instagram. And some people submitted whose lives they wanted to have. And Eliza Zinn is going to tell us, Elisa, who are some of the people that people submitted?

So one person submitted Enya, who's a millionaire Irish singer who lives in a.

Castle with her cat. Yeah. Okay. I mean, Enya, man. First of all, I totally dig Enya. And actually, one thing you should know about her is how much she has influenced other really big artists. I mean, some people think she's kind of niche, but if you. There are artists. She's a hugely influential artist. Go listen to her. If you do not listen to her, let's just do a little survey here in this room. Enya, do you know who she is. Oh, my God. No. Jorge, right now, when you produce this podcast, please put in a clip of Enya. Do you know who she is? Okay, thank you, God. Aliza, do you know who Enya is?

This is sad. I am one of the old ones. That's definitive now. All right, so we're gonna put a clip of her in right now. Like, she has songs that have literally. How many monthly listeners does she have on Spotify? Hold, please. Hold. Listeners. Check it out.

4.3 million monthly listeners.

Okay, so 4.3 million. I thought she'd have more than that. But she has songs with billions of listeners. Doesn't she has a song with how many billions of listens? Well, she's a little bit before Spotify. Yeah, I guess that's true. All right, let's return to the main point here, which is somebody would like. Somebody would like to be Enya. They'd like to be a Irish singer in a castle, which is all true about her living with her cats. I'm telling you, there's a value there around castles and cats, but also just. I mean, this is a person whose solitude is a. Is a big value. Solitude and artistic creation and expression and just being able to be really quirky. One thing about Enya, she's a known weirdo, and somebody's really digging that about her. I mean, who knows what this person may be working at Citicorp right now, and they would rather be Enya. That's an important thing to know if you are that person. Okay, who else? Now that we've had the diatribe on Enya. Who else? What else? Yeah. Now we're about to be Enya's biggest fans. Yeah, she's listening.

Another person said Oprah, but not for her riches, but because her hope is to leave people better than she found them.

Yeah. I mean, Oprah comes up on a lot of people's lists and for different reasons. And what I love here is that the person identified the reason. Because some people say they want to be Oprah because of her jet. Okay. Or because of other things that she's done and the ceilings that she's broken through. But here's somebody saying it's because she makes other people's lives better. And that is. Look, that's a real impulse in some people. I think it's a beautiful impulse. We measure for that. In my class, Becoming youg, we actually have one of our tests that people take. It shows where you are in the altruism scale with that impulse, and people are all over the place on it. So that's a very interesting value, that altruism impulse. That's a true value in some people and not in others. If you want to get my views on what you have, maybe drop me a ping me or DM me on one of the platforms, and maybe I'll give you some feedback on that.

All right, so this is the part of the program where every week I sort of. I believe firmly that everyone is a mentor that you can learn from, from everybody. This is not about having idols. This is not about having idols are people who you worship from afar, and mentors are people who you think come in and, like, save your career and rescue you and clear the path for your career to be great. And, you know, those kinds of mentors. This, like, knight in shining armor who gallops in and makes your career great for you. This is a total myth. In my entire long career, again as one of the old ones, I've only seen that happen one time where somebody was truly a mentor like that. And I think that more often you have a collection of mentors. But my strong advice to everybody is that everyone should be a mentor. Everyone knows something you don't know. And mentors should be people who you know and don't know, and that you should be watching everybody and a student of everybody and taking something. And so in that, I've talked a lot about different mentors that I do know, like Betsy Smith, who's the CEO of the Central Park Conservancy. And I talked about my students being mentors to me. But today I want to talk about a person who's been a mentor to me because we're almost the exact same age. I've been watching her from afar since I was 21 years old. And when I was 21 years old, I went over to my brother's house. This was 1981, and he said, have you seen this new album? And he held up the first Madonna album. And I know she's controversial. I know in some ways she's kind of lost on the younger generation. I grew up with her, as I said, the same age. She's a little bit older than I am. And I've seen her in every single one of her incarnations of herself. And so there's been times where I've been exasperated with her. There's been times, like everyone else, where I've said, what did Madonna do to her face? I've liked albums of hers. I've hated albums of hers. I've loved songs, and I've been To her concerts. I had to leave one of her concerts because I brought my daughters to one of her concerts, thinking the time has come for my daughters to see Madonna live. And we sat down in our seats, and she walked to the center stage, and she said, I can't even say it on my podcast, but it was not something you would want, your young daughters. And I said, oh, darn. And if this is gonna go on. And then she, like, went into another, and I. It was. And I had to go. So, I mean, I. Believe me, it's not like I take her hook, line, and sink her. I think she's done some crazy things, but she's truly a mentor to me because I am a huge believer in constant reinvention and fearlessness. Do I come anywhere close to her? No. I couldn't touch the hem of her skirt. When it comes to fearlessness, she is incredibly fearless, and she just doesn't. She's something that I really wish I could have, and I've worked really hard on having my whole life, but I can't have it, which is she has zero Fs given. I'm a good girl, and I follow orders, and I'm very compliant, and I am pretty much drawing inside the lines in my life. And if the teacher says, this is what the assignment was, I did the assignment. And she had this certain fearlessness about her. She still does. And I admire that in her. And I watch her, and sometimes I feel like, oh, God, she really pushed it really hard too far. And other times, I am fascinated by what she has made possible for women following in her wake. Do I think that she's a nice person? Probably not. I mean, my impression is that she's probably not, like, you know, like. But I don't think she cares about being a nice person, and I don't care if she is or not. You know why? Because she's not my friend. She's my mentor. And I will say recently that she said something that really endeared me to her. Her to me. I think she's not a particularly endearing person in general. Again, I don't care. Not a friend, but a mentor. And also, I just really love her music. I love running to her music. But here she is. She's done crazy things with having six children and on her own, really. And she actually said recently in an interview this working while being a mother is very hard to figure out. And she was. No, that's true. Being a mother and working is really hard to figure out. And she was saying, I Don't have the answer on it. I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I'm not sure I got it right. And once again, I was reminded about what I loved about her, which was her incredible honesty and candor. And she didn't care how the world judged her for saying that. She just told the truth. So that my secret mentor had you. Nobody expected it to be Madonna this week, did they? But in general, for what she's taught me about how to live, I really do consider her a mentor from afar, believe it or not. And so this is what makes. My whole point, is that even Madonna can be your mentor. Okay.

Now I think we're gonna move on to the Stump Suzy part of the podcast. All right, go ahead. Who's got a question?

If you could use a time machine, would you rather have one that only goes back or only goes forward?

Oh, that's hard, right? Because, like, I mean, it's hard because I'd go back because I miss my husband. Okay, so there. So I'd go back if I had a time machine, but I'd like to come back into the present because I happen to like the present very, very much. And I'm excited about the future. But I. If I could go back, I could.

Okay, that leads us right into the next one.

Is.

What singular trait do you value most in relationship?

Ah, well, I had a great marriage. So let me think about this for a second. I was very blessed to have a great marriage, great long marriage before my husband passed away. But, so what trait do I like the most in marriage? So one thing that's really great when you're in a marriage is when you're like, Jack was like Team Susie, and I was Team Jack. And I see with my sons who are married that their wives are like, you know, they're each other's biggest team cheerleader. They're never adversarial, they're tall, totally allies. And I really love that when I see that in a marriage. And one thing drove Jack and me out of our minds was when we would go out with a couple and their idea. Have you ever had this experience? You all have been had this experience where you've gone out with another couple and they consider it to be normal practice where the wives are going to sit and talk to each other, bitching and moaning about the husbands, and the husbands are going to be over there bitching and moaning about the wives. Have you ever had that experience? It's the worst. And actually, one time, Jack and I went out with a Couple. He was a big renowned professor at mit. Jack was teaching at MIT at the time. And the wife immediately kind of peeled me over. We were at a fancy restaurant. She's going to peel me aside. She starts going on about the husband this, the husband that, and he's across the table, and I can hear out of one ear that he's sort of putting the wife down. And Jack, God bless him, Jack said to him, he said, let's just stop this conversation right now. Susie and I don't do this.

That was pretty great. He said, susan, I don't do this. That didn't last much longer after that. It was pretty awkward. But we don't do that. We didn't do that. And I really love. In a relationship where you got each other's backs, and if you disagree with each other, of course you're going to disagree with each other. You do privately and you work it out, but you're the first line and last line of defense for your partner. That's what I dig. What do you think, Jorge? You're married. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think what I. What I value the most is being able to be vulnerable with the other person. Like, not having to put on any sort of, like, brave phase or pretend like you're not feeling something that you are. I think that's what I value the most in my own personal relationship. I love that. And it's so true. I don't think they're. I think they're aligned. I think, you know, when, you know, somebody's totally got your back and they really are going to believe in you and they're rooting for you, you can be vulnerable. Hallie's getting married in September. What do you think? Halloween. I.

The top thought that goes through my head is, and then it's so fun to go home and talk about it with your significant other, of how that's not you, you know, and how great it is, and how we have the ability to create what our relationship looks like. And just because that's normal for some people, it's not normal for us. And what we value in each other is that I can tell him exactly what I'm thinking when I'm thinking it, and that we nip anything in the butt before it gets to that point. I wouldn't think in a million years to go to somebody sitting at the same table as us, across from my fiance to talk about him. It's just.

But you see it. It happens.

I've definitely seen it. And you almost catch Yourself. Like, is this really happening when somebody brings it up to you? Because it's so abnormal to you? Because it's not something I could ever think about doing.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I always feel like my favorite trait in relationships is like. Or my. The way that I know that the relationship is going to be successful is if I know that they know how to handle me when I'm upset.

Yeah.

Like if. Like. Like, if someone is being the worst version of themselves.

Yes.

If they make you feel worse. Like, if you feel like you're getting dragged into a hole, that's probably not a good sign. Like, you know.

Yeah, no, that's really true. That's really true. That's right. When they, like, know how to handle you. When you're really not your best self. That's such a good point. All right, well, this conversation is making me miss Jack. Let's move along. Okay. What have we got? Anything else to stump me?

If you could teach the entire world one concept, what would it be?

If I could teach the world one concept. How about this? It's better to be the author of your life than the editor. It's better to be the author. When I realized that. Oh, my God. Right? So we edit our lives. People give us the narrative of our lives. We're told what to be, the world tells us what to be. Our parents tell us what to be, events happen, we believe certain things about ourselves, and we kind of bump along, and our life. We become very adept editors of our life. Okay, here's the script. You edit it. That's what happens. And instead, there's this moment where you think, wait, I can be the author of this script. I can actually write this script. I'm going to throw this away and I'm going to write my own version. That realization happens for some people at 18, and for other people, it happens when they're 80. But that day, it happens. And you think, I am now the author of my narrative. That's a huge, huge moment. And you have to fight for it. It just. You have to fight. Unless you have the best parents in the world who say, here, let me put the pen into your hand. Write the narrative of your life. Which, like, exactly one parent in the world has done that. Yeah, maybe one. I was going to say zero, but maybe one. I didn't do it. I was busy. I busy. Spent years telling my kids who they were and what they should do until they finally taught me that that's just not the way it goes. And they had to be who they were. And finally I handed the pen over to them. About the same time, I realized the pen was in my own hand. And I said to them, go live your lives and go be who you are. And my job is not to write your script, but to clap. And that's what I do. I clap. And occasionally I'll edit. And you know how I edit? I ask a question. They know what I'm coming for them is when I say, have you ever wondered? And that's. That's the beginning of my editing. But they have the pen in their hand. And I think that is the one thing that I would if I could teach anybody anything, because I think more happiness comes out of you being the author of your own life. More joy comes from that than any other one directive that I can think of offhand. All right, that's it for the stump the Suzy questions this week.

All right, it's time for our last quote, and I always end this podcast with one of my favorite quotes, and I thought it would be really fun to have a final quote from Madonna. But unfortunately, Madonna's lyrics don't give us much digging to do because they're all very okay. Writing lyrics are not her strong suit, but her music's fantastic. One of my favorite Madonna lyrics of all time is bitch, I'm Madonna simply because I say it to my children when I want them to do something, and I pretend that, like. Like, you know, it matters to them who I am. Anyway, I do want to say that I heard a quote the other day which I'd like to leave you with and let you ponder, because I've really been pondering it. I've tried it on people. I don't know who said it, though, but I saw it without attribution. And here's the quote, which is that if you want a life where you don't spend your time looking at price tags, then get a job where you don't watch the clock.

So I guess that the point of this would be, like, if you want to become so financially secure and wealthy that you are not checking the price tags on things, then you have to have the kind of work that you love so much that you are not watching the clock, that you're so invested in, that you are doing with such a passion that you would not be looking at the clock. And I have found this to be true. You can be sure that Jeff Bezos, for example, did not watch the clock when he was starting Amazon. He just worked and worked like it was in a fever dream, kind of thing. And I'm thinking about sharing this notion which I have experienced to be true, as I've said with my students. I think that I'm gonna get a lot of pushback from Gen Z on this, which is, why can't it be both ways? Why must it be that to have the kind of wealth you have to give up your sense of time and yourself and work life balance. And a lot of them have pushed back on me over the years of teaching becoming you, saying, wait, why does it have to be that way? That you, if you want to have money and financial security, that is, that comes with a lot of money and that you're not looking at price tags and you're not saying how much is that dress and how much is that vacation, and you're just doing it. Why must I then make work the primary thing in my life? And I don't have a good philosophical answer for you. I think that the answer is that's just the way it tends to go. I need to think about it. I don't know if maybe it's wrong, but there's wrong and then there's just the way it is. I don't think that's going to change. I think that businesses and generally the economy reward people who work as if work is the most important thing in their life. Again, is this right? Is this wrong? I gave up a lot by not having work life balance. But I did it knowingly and willingly. I don't have regrets around it. And so I, I put it out there. There's the quote, if you don't want to. I'm paraphrasing it because it went by in a jiffy and I was like, whoa, that's something I have to share with my class and I'll share with you. If you don't want to have a life where you're looking at price tags, then have a job where you're not looking at the clock. So putting out there, you may have a very strong negative reaction to this, or you may be having a reaction that is just exactly true, or you may be thinking, look, I saw the price that my family had to pay for my father or my mother having that, knowing that that was true. So I put that out there as a thought that I am pondering and I will do more pondering on that quote. And that's what I leave you with this week. I hope you come back next week again, I'm Susie Welch, and this is becoming you. And thank you so much for being with me. I love you very much. Even though I don't know you. You know that I do. Okay. Bye. Bye.