Thinking of Pursuing Your Passion as a Career? Please Think Again.

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Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to Becoming youg. It's Susie Welch. I'm a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business. And, you know, before that, I had a long and crazy career, which you stick around. You're going to hear about it one way or the other. I'm really glad that you're here. In Becoming you, we talk about figuring out who you are so that you can have a life that is more meaningful and fulfilling and. And if you're lucky, also happy. So I'm really glad you're here. I'm actually going to start off with a story that made me really sad. But whatever, it's an important story to me, so I'm going to share it with you. And also we're going to go along, we're going to have some questions from the audience and that I love. And actually, in today's episode, we're going to look at one of my favorite mistakes. This is something we do on the show. I talk about my favorite mistakes because I learned so much from them. And I got a big fat favorite mistake for you this time. At the end of the episode, as usual, my team will try to stump me with. With questions. And, I mean, I gotta tell you something. I don't know where they come up with these questions. I don't know where they do. Okay. But they do. And I endeavor to answer them. So stick around and you'll hear that as well. But first, here we are. I actually don't have so much of a rant today as I have a story, which I'm going to try to tell without crying. Okay. I have a story about something that happened to me this week. And in a way, it is a story about ChatGPT. So you're thinking, okay, what is going to make Susie cry about ChatGPT? But it's a little bit also about.

The experience of being a widow, I guess. So here's the story. I have talked incessantly on this podcast about this tool that I've invented which measures your happiness. Basically, it quantifies your happiness. You know, I'm not a big fan of the term happiness, if you follow me at all, but I do have this tool that's coming, it's actually in development now, where you talk about your current lived experience, and you measure it on 15 dimensions, and then you are also comparing it to what, what you would like your experience to be on those 15 dimensions if you had the perfect life. And it actually. Then there's an algorithm which sort of adjusts for certain things, and you get a number that talks about the variance between the life that you're living and the life you want to have. That tool is coming and we think it's going to be available to everybody for free in September or so. That's what it's looking like. Met with the engineers yesterday and it's super exciting. But look, we had to name this tool. And so for a long time we've been calling this tool the. The Values Abacus. Why? Because when I was trying to explain this concept to my students, I got a little wooden abacus off of Amazon and I stood up in front of my class and my poor students, just taking such pity on me, stood up there with a little wooden abacus saying, it's like this. There's continuums and there's trade offs. And they were like, yeah, great. Thanks, Professor Welch. And then I came to discover that not a lot of people know really what an abacus is. And the tool itself is not really like an abacus, which is a calculating tray, really. It was the first calculator. I've learned a lot about the abacus since I started this naming project because I love that name because it was my first original name for it, but it doesn't really tell what it does. Well, a lot of names for values tools are taken like ValuesQuest, Values Explorer, Values Calculator. I mean, they're all taken with different values tools that are out there. None as good as mine. And so if you're a writer, okay, if you were a writer and you've ever had to name something, you know about what this experience is like, you become like a dog who's got a bone in their mouth. Okay, you're like, crazy. Okay. I would use the image of a dog having a steak, except for that I'm a vegan, so I'm not going that way. But it's a. You're crazy. You can't get it out of your mind when you've gotta name something. And if you're wired the way some writers are wired, you just can't let it go. You're thinking about it constantly. Somebody is talking to you about. Like in my case, I had my family to my house for 4th of July and they were like talking to me about how the peaches were doing in the orchard that we inherited along with the house, which is a lovely thing. And they were talking about the peaches. And I was like, literally couldn't even answer their questions. Cause I was fixated on naming this tool. Well, very luckily, I have A very good friend named Jane Reese who listens to this podcast. Hi, Jane. And she is a ad person by trade. She's run advertising agencies, and she's probably the most creative person I know. And very fortunately, I texted her and told her I was thinking about this naming thing. Man, she was along for the ride with me. So after I wore out every family member talking about what I should name this tool, and incessantly talking about what the tool does, how it does this, it does that. Let's go up to 20,000ft. Let's get down in the. In the trenches. And we have these two young, wonderful interns. They immediately turned to ChatGPT and said, let's just ask ChatGPT. I looked at some of the names and they were, ah, they were okay, but they weren't exactly right, and they were too cutesy or they didn't capture it. And so Jane and I were just like. Literally, I woke up one morning at five, because that's when I wake up, and Jane had already texted me. Cause she was still at it. And I fell asleep at night texting Jane about this name. And at one point, my son, we were blueberry picking, and I literally came up with a name while we were picking blueberries in the woods. We also went looking for newts because my son and his wonderful wife Eva, who don't listen to this podcast so I can speak about them freely. They're, like, very twee. They're Brooklyn hipsters. Like in the dictionary, Brooklyn hipster. Just open it up. There's a picture of Marcus and Eva, and literally this is how twee they are. When we went bl. Blueberry picking, Eva was wearing a dress. Okay, she was wearing a gingham dress with little cute boots and socks. I mean, she was, like, adorable. Like a Vogue photo shoot could have come out and just taken pictures of her being twee picking blueberries. Then we discovered a newt. That was exciting. It's very hard for me to be twee, act twee, but I love them, and so I'll go along on their twee adventures. Anyway, we were picking blueberries, and I was doing the name with them. I was, like, coming up behind them in the rear. We were way up in the mountains in the nature preserve behind our house, and I was coming up with names, and they were like. I could see them making eyes at each other. It was. It's torture. And I was thinking and thinking, thinking about this. So right around that time, they. A little bit later the next day, they went home because they have Lives and people eventually go home. And Jane and I were really frustrated, but we were still going at it. Jane, my creative friend, and she actually said a funny thing to me. She said, you're so close. You're so close. I think it's gonna come to you tomorrow. And I thought, I'm not so close. So I sat down at my desk and I thought, okay, I'm gonna be like my interns. I'm gonna be like the new modern people in this world. And I put in my dilemma into ChatGPT. And I said, I'm making a tool that does this, that, and the other thing. And it shot out names that weren't as cutesy as the interns version, but they were also not right. And I was just in despair. I thought, okay, I can't help myself. Jane can't do it. ChatGPT can't do it. It's failed me. And then I was standing in the kitchen, and then suddenly the name Values Bridge came into my mind. I don't know if it was ChatGPT that kicked my rear end or what it was, but I thought, my tool tells you how long the bridge is between the life you're living and the life you want to live, and becoming you is a journey. It is a journey. I actually have a slide that says, becoming you is not an overnighty kind of thing. It's a journey. Your life is a journey. I know it's a cliche, but it's is a journey, okay? With lots of twists and turns and detours, hills and valleys. Yeah, that cliche works. That metaphor works. And I thought, you know, sometimes people take becoming you or do becoming you, and the bridge is like a little short bridge, and it's themselves. They throw a piece of wood over the stream, usually of their own devising their own stream, and they cross it. But other times, you gotta construct the Verrazano Bridge. And for those of you who don't live in the New York area, that's a gigantic bridge. It's like. It's like our Golden Gate, okay? And that's what becoming used. And that's what my tool is. It tells you about the bridge, length of the bridge. And so Values Bridge came to me. It felt real. It felt authentic. I could cry. I wrote Jane, it's Values Bridge. She was crying, and she said, you did it. How do you feel? And I said, I feel like I got it. And she said, great. And I felt such a relief. And I thought, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna walk the dogs around the pond. We have a pond in our backyard up in the country. It was early in the morning still, and I walked out to the pond. And one of the things I love about the pond is, first of all, it's just incredibly beautiful. And I'm really lucky to have a pond. But one of the reasons I really, really love it is that not long after I moved there one morning, a single swan showed up and moved into our pond. And if you're not aware of this, swans mate for life and are always in pairs. They're one of the few species in nature that the animals mate for life and they stay together. And when one of the swans dies, the mate stays alone for the rest of his or her life. And this has been recorded in nature. And it's. Jack and I had a long history of giving each other pairs of swans. On our first date, on our first serious date, I gave him a nest with two eggs in it. And he said, what is this? And I said, it's a metaphor. We're about to be born as a relationship. And he said, what? And I said, what? What's wrong with you? You've never gotten a gift that was a metaphor before. And he said, I don't even know what you're talking about. Talking about. Anyway, he bought right into it, and we ended up giving each other pairs of swans for our. The duration of our long, happy marriage. So the point where, like, friends would give us pairs of swans and our house was. It was like a swan repository in our house because we gave this as a signal of our love to each other, our enduring and forever love to each other. So we were always painted swans, like, in my bedroom, I still have a painting of two swans together, blah, blah, blah, everywhere. So strangely, although perhaps not right after I moved into the house, this single swan showed up. And I was like. I literally said, oh, hello, God. Because who would put this single swan on my pond? Whether you believe in God or not, it is a pretty amazing coincidence. I mean, and I do believe in God. So just for the record, there was this single swan, and the first day she showed up, much to the chagrin, I had one of my daughters visiting me, much to her chagrin, I named her Susie. This just drove them out of their mind. And I would literally shout at her every morning, good morning, Susie. And if I was ever with kids, they would say, stop it, Mom. It's weird. Don't do that. It's freaky. And I would say, she's my swan and there's my Girl. And I went on for the time afterwards, every time I saw her, greeting her by name. And usually I was just with the dogs. And the dogs came to know her as Susie. And one time sir threw himself into the water and chased Susie to the center of the pond. And she was, of course, very, very unaffected by it. Cause swans are just very calm, but she could always fly away. But they had a good relationship with her. And I had a really special relationship with her. I saw her every single day. And after a while of me greeting Susie, she would follow us around our circle of the pond. So she would greet us as we came out of the house, walk down the hill to the pond, and then she would paddle alongside us as we circled the pond, which is like a 15, 20 minute walk. And it's that long, not because the pond is big, but because I have to stop and throw sticks for the dogs every five seconds or they lose their cookies. So anyway, Susie would follow along with us and I would talk with her. And I came to love her as a fixture of my life. And I thought, well, this is a beautiful metaphor. And if I put this in a novel, no one would believe it, but it happened to me that I have a swan named Susie. So that morning, after I came up with the name for the tool, I took the dogs for a walk. It was July 6, and there had been three days of fireworks the nights before because all the towns around me in successive order had had fireworks. Okay, that's going to be a relevant fact later. And I walked down to the pond and we started to walk along. And like maybe three minutes into it, I thought, wait a minute, where is Susie? And I started to look in all the places that she usually was because she wasn't right next to us. And I was like, I got very upset. And I went over to this little area that she likes to sleep, and I thought maybe she was nestled in there and she was not there. And I literally got kind of frantic. And I was like, susie, Susie. Okay, I know it's weird, okay, because it's my name. But like, I obviously come to identify with this swan and I couldn't find her. And I looked everywhere and we did the whole walk. And then in an act of complete franticness, we did the walk a second time. I mean, I. And the dogs are like, okay, we've had quite enough. I mean, it's exhausting to them. And I couldn't find her. And I kept on circling the pond and calling her name. And I felt despair.

Because I have grown to love this swan and the metaphor she is for my own life, of just her devotion to her lost partner and her aloneness, which is part of my life, which even though I have a full and very happy life, and part of it is this podcast, and part of it is all the work I do. But, you know, at the end of the day, right, that's what widowhood is. And I had a good friend who was a widow. After my first year, I called her and I said to her, does it ever get easier? And she said, you just made it through the first year, wait till you hit the second year. That's when you realize how long forever is. And she was so right. Anyway, I'm a happy person, by the way, and I don't mean to get more than here, because I have a happy, joyful, wonderful life, and I have very happy memories. But, okay, just to be very real with you, like, forever is a long time when you lose the person you lose. So I got very upset, and I was like, where is she? And I was actually shouting at the dogs. If you had a video of this, you would have seen me shouting at my dogs, where is she? Where is she? Because a lot of times one of the dogs goes missing, and I say to the other two dogs, where is he? Or where is she? And then, of course, because dogs have a different sense of smell than we do, they go find the missing dog. For me, the dog that's usually missing is Pierre, because he's little, and he goes into the. We now have a big cowbell around his neck because he goes missing so often, but he. He just vanishes. And I'll say to the dogs, where is he? And they go and find him in the woods or wherever he is. And I was shouting at them, where is she? Where is she? And she wasn't there. And so I actually became very upset by this, and I started to cry, and I thought, where could have she gone? So I ran inside and I unbelievably went to ChatGPT, and I typed in, I've had a swan who's been on my pond for the longest time. And this morning she's gone, where is she? And will she come back? I actually typed that into ChatGPT.

And I was that desperate. And the cursor pulsed and pulsed, and then it said back.

Something along the lines of, swans are very devoted to their habitats. They don't leave. The only reason they would leave is. And then there were four reasons, and the first was that they saw a fox or other animal of prey that had access to them. And I thought, well, that can't be her, because there's no way she could just go out to the middle of the pond. And then they said, changes in habitat, blah, blah, blah. And then the fourth one was disturbances, like fireworks. And I thought, that's it. Those damn fireworks. Which made my dogs dementos for the past three days. Oh, my God, the fireworks scared her off. And then the last line said, but because swans are so devoted to their habitats, they often return.

And I just, like, was a mess. I mean, I know this sounds wacky, but everything about it was like, okay, she's going to come back. The fireworks sent her away, and she's going to come back. And so she's. I'm sad to say she's not back yet. I've not been up into the country for the past three days. I've been in the city. But I'm going back today, and I'm going to tell you, the first thing I'm doing is I'm going down to that pond and I'm looking, looking for my Susie. I really want her back because she just represented so much to me. But I will say that it was the first moment ever that I didn't hate ChatGPT. I generally hate AI with everything in me. I just hate what it. The potential it has to take away jobs and wreck people's lives and replace writers in general, as that's what I am. And I've had, like, a real. Like, I. I actually wrote a Wall Street Journal piece about AI Grief, which is just this sense that, oh, my God, how much change can we take? Everything is constantly changing. We live through the pandemic. We've lived through this. We live, and now we have to adjust to AI. So I've written about AI Grief before, and I generally am like, okay, I know what's coming, and I'm not a Luddite and I believe in technological change, but I just felt like I've had enough change, thank you very, very much. But here, AI kind of came to my rescue and it gave me hope. And so I have thought a lot about that. And I thought, well, you know what? I think I'm going to learn more about this technology, and I'm not going to hate on it so much. I think I'm going to really love it when Susie comes back. I want to say that just ending this story right now, that every time I tell this story to my children, they completely freak out that I call the swan Susie. And maybe I Should stop that, but whatever. There's my story about the swan and chatgpt and naming my tool. And not a rant this week, but just sort of a reflection on how crazy life can be and how poetic and poignant it could be. So everybody please root for Susie coming back. I will report right away if she does. I mean, I'll post it on my Instagram. Believe me, I will. I've often tried to. Actually, this is the last thing I'll say about this. Good God. I've gone on Jorge. Have I been speaking for three hours at this point? I will say this. I have tried to take photographs of me with Susie numerous times, but I have not been able to capture. She's never been close enough for me to capture her with me in a selfie. When she comes back, I'm going to capture a picture of her and. And make sure everybody gets to see it. Okay, that's the end of that. Is everybody breathing? Oh, I've. My whole team is asleep. Okay, guys, wake up now. Everybody up. Okay.

I've heard that we have some unbelievable questions from the community this week. That's. That's what my team has told me, so I'm ready to hear them. And the brilliant Sophia Borzileri is going to read a question. Go ahead.

Hi, Susie. I love your podcast, and I have a question that I was hoping you may have some insight on.

Okay.

I will be starting law school this fall and wanted to know how you would approach building friendships with classmates and forming study groups while competing for grades on a curve. Do you have any advice for this? Thank you.

Advice. Can this podcast be 6 hours? We may not have time for another question from the community, because I have a really big answer for this. Okay. Because I had this experience. I went to Harvard Business School. At Harvard Business School in those days, every semester, 10% of the class was flunked out. Okay. It was called hitting the screen. And everybody's grades popped in in the bottom 10%. If you hit the screen in the bottom 10%, you were gone. You'd come back every semester and 10% of your class would be gone. They'd been flunked out. Okay? So you got there, and people used to sit in class and they'd look around. Okay? Every class was 90 students. And you look around and you try to count off 10 people who were stupider than you, so. Because then that meant that you'd make it and they wouldn't. Okay. And you were looking for somebody to screw up so badly. You were not me. Okay? Because I was. I was. Thought I was in the bottom 10%. And I was like, oh, who's going to go with me? So literally, there was an activity where people would, like, go out for drinks after class, and they would say, okay, who's going to hit the screen? Who's going to protect us? And I was never included in these conversations because at the beginning, everybody thought I'd hit the screen because I had been a crime reporter in Miami. Now, as history would show us, I graduated first in my class, and I did not hit the screen. But it was my terror and complete fear of hitting the screen. That's part of that. Because I. Nobody worked harder, nobody studied harder, nobody dug in deeper. Nobody went and sucked up to professors more than I did, man. Because I was so terrified of hitting the screen. Maybe I overshot a little bit, okay? But I'm happy I did. I learned a lot. And so I would say that you're going into a situation where classes are graded on a curve, and not everybody's gonna get A's. And if somebody gets an A, it may mean that you get the B. And so the question is, how do I make friends in this environment, in a ruthlessly competitive environment? And my answer is that the dirty little secret about getting ahead is you get ahead. You truly do. You get ahead in work and in school and in life. The more you help other people get ahead. I know. It is so counterintuitive. It's like, okay, I gotta hold them back. It's like, okay, there's a race. If I help somebody else run faster than me, how am I gonna win? Well, that's one analogy, but it doesn't fit real life. Real life is about bringing everyone along with you. And actually, if you help other people, you'll learn a lot doing it. You'll become very popular. It's not lost on anybody. If you're helping other people and have an open heart and an open mind, this professor seat in your colleague seat. And frankly, it's just the right thing to do. And then other people will help you. And I will say, at HBS, the Baker Scholars, this was the top 3% of the class or whatever that I was in. And I think about the composition of that group of students. Everybody was a good person actually helping other people. And it's this crazy counterintuitive thing, is that you do not have to beat other people down to get ahead. So my advice to you is make friends with everybody. Help everybody. If people don't understand something that you understand, tell them, and it will all sort itself out. You will not suffer or be punished in the long run by helping other people. And it will make you better at what you're doing, and it will help you understand your own thinking. So don't worry about that curve. That's what I'm saying. Don't worry about that competition. Help everybody, share with everybody, and you will be lifted along with that. And sometimes it takes us our whole life to learn that. For me, at hbs, we were all in study groups. That's how we helped each other. And I was in a study group with a group of people who didn't get into any study groups. I was in with. It was four African American guys and a French guy who had a very, very thick accent. None of us got into study groups. And so we were. The school then forcibly put us into study groups with the other people who didn't get into study groups. Okay? It was literally like Lord of the Flies was. Everybody went and found the other smart people. All the investment bankers got together, all the consultants got together. And then the people who had unconventional backgrounds or were just unconventional because of the way they looked and sounded were left on the threshing room floor. And so they. We were put. So I was put into a study group with four other people, five other people, four other people. And we were all just considered losers. We didn't get into study groups, and we all graduated at the top of the class. We helped each other so much. We never thought, I just want them to be a little bit worse than me so that I am above them. We just thought, let's just. Let's just be like soldiers and carry each other on the. On each other's backs. And that's how it worked. And nobody was happier when we all succeeded than we were for each other. And I'll tell you an interesting thing. In that study group, I mean, it was like a vendetta. I mean, we were, like, ferocious. We were like, they thought we couldn't do this. We've got to prove that we can do it. In those days at Harvard Business School, they would never do this in a million years. Now they published your salary upon graduation. Literally. I mean, can you believe it? Like, they published. There was a list of where you were going and what your starting salary was. I mean, it's rich, isn't it? That's what they did. That's how you won. And. And in that study group, there was a guy in my study group who got the top salary. So I was Baker Scholar. He Got the top salary. That's how people kept score. And we won. You know how we won? By helping each other. So not by holding anybody down, but by helping each other. So that's what I recommend to you. Go in. It's going to feel counterintuitive and. But as soon as you start leaning into it, it's going to feel great, and it's going to prove itself very quickly as a wonderful thing to do and just as a. As a technique for really succeeding. That is my answer to that question. What have we got? Is that you, Eliza? You're going to ask me a question from the community.

Next question is, is there a difference.

Between passion and purpose?

Some days I feel like I have neither.

Oh, yeah. I can feel that way some days, too, that I. I mean, there's just some bad days where you feel neither. Okay, but let's talk about passion and purpose. Okay. Purpose is what you were meant to do and what you're. By saying you were meant to do it, to use the becoming you lexicon. It means that it matches your values, your deeply held beliefs, wants and desires, motivators. It matches your aptitudes, what you're actually good at, and it matches what you're interested in that you'll get paid for. We call those opportunities of interest. Interest. Okay, you could be interested in calligraphy, but you're probably not going to be able to pay the rent. Okay. But somebody's gonna. Somebody has to do wedding invitations. Okay? But so for us at becoming you, your purpose is at the intersection of your values, aptitudes, and opportunities of interest. Again, that last one, meaning what you're interested in, meaning emotionally or intellectually calling you that, you could also be paid for, because unless you're independently wealthy, we all got to pay the rent, right? So passion is just something that just gives you fire in your heart. I'm passionate about, say, for instance, social justice. Okay. I'm passionate about dogs. I'm passionate about dogs. Okay. But passion is quite separate from purpose. It. You know, sometimes they overlap. Sometimes it ends up that you also are incredibly good at your passion, and you can be paid for pursuing it. But I'd say passion is something quite different. And again, there's times where it overlaps. I mean, I have a good friend, Kitty Block. She is the CEO of the Humane Society. I admire her and revere her as a leader. I actually use her brilliance in my class when I teach it in NYU's Washington, D.C. mBA program. Because the Humane Society of International is based in Washington, D.C. kitty is based there. And she comes to my class and we do a live Becoming youg with her because she's a perfect example of somebody whose values, aptitudes and interests, those are her purpose. And so she's a CEO of the Humane Society. She has absolutely the right values. She's absolutely the perfect aptitudes for that. And of course, it's her passion. So there's a case of overlap, but there are plenty of people who have a wild passion, but it's not a match. So because he doesn't listen to this podcast, let's return to my twee Brooklynite son, Marcus, who has a huge passion for a game called the Gathering. Okay? And this is a game. It's. I always think it's like sort of. It's bridge for nerds, okay? It's like a science fictiony game and people adore it. His passion is huge. He. He's had it since he was 10 years old. He still plays it all the time. It's a great game. I mean, I can't play. They've tried to teach me. I have no passion for it, let's put it that way. But it's been his passion. It's not his job, okay? He has nothing to do with it. I mean, there are people who go and they play in tournaments and they work at that company. Cause they can come up with those ideas and so forth. But his passion and his purpose are actually quite different. His purpose is that he and his wife run a beautiful home goods store together called Slope Home. Hey, free advertising for Slope Home. If you live in Brooklyn and. And you need to get a gift for somebody, you can't do better than going to Slope Home. They should listen to this podcast for all the attention I give them. Anyway, it's just. That's his purpose because one of his values is his marriage. And his. One of his deepest values, and probably his deepest value is his marriage. And running Slope Home with his wife allows him to live out his values. And he's super operationally minded. Back when we had Quadio, the music tech company that I've talked about a lot, he was an unbelievable cfo, okay? Because nobody can build spreadsheets like he can. And he has such an operational mind, okay? And he's just very interested in stuff. He's always been, I used to call him when he was growing up, mommy's little consumer. He was fascinated with packaging. He probably should have majored in that in industrial marketing and packaging. And in any case, all of his stuff, his area of transcendence is running that home goods store. His passion, though, I'm telling you, is that game. So I'm gonna suggest that you look for your purpose. I think that that's sort of more passion. You sort of know intuitively I'm gonna tell you, go look for your. At the intersection of your values, your aptitudes and your areas of economic interest. So look, I want to tell you, if you would like to have help with me helping you find that. I always say the book is coming out, it's coming in May, but I am actually thinking of doing a becoming you class that's not at nyu because of the interest, because people are so interested in this process. I'm thinking of doing it in New York. And if you're interested in coming to that class, it would probably be like something like a three day intensive in. In New York, which is where I live. Write an email to hello, Susie Welch.com, we're gauging interest in me doing that. I'd kind of. I. Not kind of. I'd really love to do it because it makes me sad and frustrated when people say, I want to do the process. I really believe in it, but I need you to help me facilitate it. I want to be part of this, and I've only been able to do that at nyu, which I love, and I'm very grateful for how much I get to teach at nyu, but the world is bigger than nyu. So if you're interested in that, let us know because I might do it and we'll announce it and we'll see how how that goes.

Look, it's time for my favorite mistake. I have so many mistakes. The whole show could be my favorite mistakes. But I was thinking about one of my favorite mistakes this week, and I want to talk about me and engineers and engineers in general. If you're an engineer and you're listening to this, just know that from 20,000ft. I really love you and I'm really glad that engine exist on planet Earth because there would be nothing, we wouldn't be having this podcast right now if it wasn't for engineers. I mean, in a way, Jorge, you're an engineer, right? You're a sound engineer. Okay? We love Jorge and we love sound engineers. All of you, okay? But I had the experience of creating an app, a music tech app, as you've heard me talk about. And we brought in a bunch of hired gun engineers. We had 16 of them at one point because we were trying to build this app as fast as we could. Can you Imagine how expensive that was, man alive. It was expensive, but we thought we had something that would be worth it. And I didn't know anything about engineering, and I didn't know how to trust engineers, and I didn't know how to test engineers, and I didn't have anything that made it possible for me to see into the black box of all this engineering that was going on. And suffice it to say, I learned the hard way, the really hard and expensive way, that my engineers were not doing a good job. What happened was we finally put the app up, and it just kept on breaking and breaking and breaking, and it was not well created. And I had invested a huge amount of time and money in building something that was broken. Doa. Dead on arrival. Okay. It was painful at the time. I had to let the engineering team go. We ended up getting developers and we. I ended up learning a lot about how to manage people whose work you can't do yourself. I learned so much about the importance of having somebody managing those people that you trust and who. Who feels like an owner and who is completely invested in you and you hearing the truth and so forth. And I was able. I didn't know why I had made that mistake until very recently when I hired the dev firm to make my tool. Hey, the values bridge, remember? I didn't know when I was going to use that very expensive mistake. I think my team can vouch for this, is that when I was interviewing dev firms, I wasn't going to get an engineer in house to do this. I was going to hire dev firms team. Like, you saw me interviewing those engineers. What was your vibe on me interviewing the engineers? Like, it was like the Suzy you never knew, right?

Because I was like, I had a lot of. I learned so much from that mistake about really getting into the details of their process and the languages they were using. And how did we. How would we know when mistakes were occurring? What was their. You know, I just entered into their black box. And then one of the things that huge mistake taught me was that you cannot let the engineers write your algorithm. They can code your algorithm, but at the end of the day, you write the algorithm. And I sat down and I wrote the algorithm myself. And I would say, you know, not on my bingo card that I'd be writing algorithms at this point in my life, but I learned the hard way that you cannot outsource some things as much as you want to. So I learned so much from that mistake that I've put back into use. It's funny, when I ended up selling Claudio. I think, you know, I said to everybody who would listen, I am never, ever, ever going down the tech route again. I'm never starting a tech company. I'm done with the entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial route. God forbid. I'm never doing another digital product. And here I am doing it again, but so much wiser. Why not? Because I did it right. Because I did it wrong. Okay. And I learned a lot. And I learned it so painfully that I think I put it to good use this time. I'm really psyched about our engineers. We had a great opening meeting. Shout out to our friends at Perpetual. That's the engineering firm we're using. And I think we. I'm going to have a very different experience with engineers this time. And I learned the hard way how to do that. And that's how it goes in life sometimes, okay. That you got to make your mistakes to. To learn the right way to do things. All right, that's this week's mistake.

Time for one last thing. Rapid fire questions. Right. Okay, let's do it.

What fictional character do you think you'd be best friends with in a past life?

Or in my current life.

Or in your current life.

Right. Hold on. I have to think about it. Give me a second. You're not gonna stump me with this because I. The New York Times, over the past two, I guess, two weeks, has been unveiling the 100 Greatest Books of the last hundred years, I guess, or the last 50 years. And every day, they've been revealing 10 more of the books on this list, from 100 down to, you know, today, they. They published the top 10 books. And as I've been looking at these top hundred books I am, my mind has been blown by how many I've read. And all I keep on thinking to myself is, how did I have time to read these books? Like, I read that one, read that one, read that. I mean, I'm. Mind blow. So I'm. I'm somehow managed to be sneaking reading books in along the way. So it's not for lack of reading books because I read a ton of books. I don't read books when I'm writing. So I'm actually not reading right now because I have to keep only my voice in my head when I'm writing a book, as I am right now. That's just sort of my trick of the trade. I don't know if all writers do that, but I just can't have another voice in my head right now. Okay, so the question is, what Fictional character would I be friends with? I'm gonna say I have spoken before on this podcast about how important Jonathan Franzen's book the Corrections was to me. And in fact, I think it's like number seven or number 11 on the new York Times list. I saw it. I thought. Read that. I read that. That. And again, I highly recommend to anybody who's ever been in a family, so that would be all of you. The book the Corrections, because it is about family strife and how we try to re. How we try to correct our family narrative and with our lives. Anyway, the sister in that book, the main character is the narrator, and the sister's name is Denise. She's a chef, and she's really smart and pragmatic, and she's constantly saving the day. And you love her, and I love her, and I would love to know her. And I wish she was a real person. I'd be her friend for sure. So, Denise. So there. You thought you could stump me. So, Denise from the Corrections. But, you know, I'm often falling in love with characters in fiction. That's the whole point of it, isn't it? I mean, that you just. You just enter them and you think, God, I wish this person, you know, who actually. Not in a. Not in a book, but in a TV show. Okay, I don't know who's watching House of Dragons. Anybody here watching House of Dragons? Oh, good, Jorge. Counting on you. You're not watching House of Dragons. I saw the first season, but haven't. Oh, second season. So much better. So much better. It's crazy. I'll start it. Okay. It's crazy. I mean, I shouldn't feel so sad as I feel like when dragons die, it's like I. I so empathize with animals, and I'm like, wait, that dragon is dying? And I'm like, okay, so there. Oh, wait. This is a spoiler alert. Okay, I'm just not gonna say this, but. Because I don't wanna spoil this for anybody, but there's a character that you. Forget it. This is pointless, because if I can't tell you who the character is, I can't tell you how sad I was when that character met an untimely end. Never mind. Okay, but I would just say that from House Dragons, I've been really entered that show and invested in it emotionally. I did have to fast forward through a recent fight scene because, you know, those. Those battle scenes. I always say that. I watched Game of Thrones and I used to just. My kids often say, mom, how could you stand the violence? Because I'm super sensitive to violence, and how could you stand? And I said, you know, I fast forwarded through all the battle scenes, and therefore, watching all eight episodes of Game of Thrones took me exactly an hour and 40 minutes. Because that basically take out the battle scenes and it's over. I mean, I literally cut out every battle scene. It was like, okay, everybody. And then I would go online and I'd read the recap to see who lived. I just couldn't take it. And mainly. Okay, I just didn't want to see all the very well. Graphic violence. Well executed graphic violence. I didn't want to see it. But actually, I used to really freak out about. Because these are all battle scenes, all the horses going down. I know, I know. This is what it is to be an animal person is like, you're worried about the horses in the Game of Thrones battle scenes. Okay. That's what it is. You just learn to live with it, you know? So. All right, any last question of this episode of the pod. What do we got?

Okay. What smell reminds you of home?

What smell? Oh, I could tell you right off the bat, Dirty dog. Okay. Like, when I come in and I smell a putrid dog, a dog that's been in a pond. A dog is filthy. A dog has just got gunk on him or her. I think, oh, home sweet home. And then I scream out, barbara, light a candle. Okay. Because Barb, who's a partner, lives with us. And I just. There is a. I can't use this swear word on my podcast, but maybe I can. There's a Tom Ford candle called. I think it's called Effing Fabulous. Okay. Just put the full word there. And that's what we do to get rid of the dog smell. So I would just say, you know, that's the price you pay for. And loving dogs is that especially big dogs like my dogs, is that they smell constantly. And one of the reasons they smell is that they're in that pond with Susie. Suzy's following along, and they are sort of also jumping in the pond, and she endures them, and I really hope she comes back. I'm going out to the country tonight, as I said, and maybe the dogs will take a dip and smell disgusting, but we'll also see Susie, so it'll be very happy ending. And that is the ending of this podcast. Hey, I'm so glad you were here on the Becoming you podcast. I'm so grateful for those of you listening to this. I. I'm so taken aback that there are so many of you. I'm grateful, grateful, grateful. And I'll be back next week. Have a great week. Until then. Love you very much.